Mediated Interfaces

This book brings together powerful essays by both established and emerging researchers of digital media, corporeality and embodiment. International and interdisciplinary in scope, Mediated Interfaces works through the political, cultural and social ways we can begin to understand how bodies are represented online, how our sense of embodiment is now shaped in conjunction with our digital experiences and how digital media intersects with the politicisation of gendered, raced, sexualised and aged bodies. From naked bodies online to the body of the child as a gaming influencer, this collection covers the broadest range of approaches to thinking through our new digital corporealities. Warfield, Cambre and Abidin have provided us with a thoughtful arrangement of original work that will help us navigate the growing scholarship on bodies and social media. For scholars, students and the public who wish to make sense of new ways in which we can think about bodies and media in the 2020s, this should be the first stop and will provide the best possible roadmap for an increasingly complex scholarly terrain. * Rob Cover, Professor of Digital Communication, RMIT University, Australia *
Mediated Interfaces presents key concepts from some of the most innovative social media researchers working today. With its truly international, interdisciplinary, and multi-platform scope, this curated collection reaffirms the importance of the body as a site of analysis for understanding digital practices. In clear and accessible prose, this volume’s contributors recognize the complexities of embodied technological performances on sites that run the gamut from BaiduBBS to YouTube. As they curate a wide variety of scholarly voices, the editors have created a rich interpretive apparatus with which to question naïve assumptions about how bodies are constituted as essential entities, metaphysical beings, tool users, or media interfaces. Anyone interested in the politics, material conditions, or affective investments of social media should consider this book required reading. * Elizabeth Losh, Gale and Steve Kohlhagen Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies, College of William & Mary, USA *
This edited collection presents a wealth of insights into diverse social histories and digitally-mediated practices. The chapters draw a bow of emerging social practices across different ways of reading the body becoming in social media. The book is at times feisty, conceptual and diverse, offering crunchy nuggets for the contemplative reader. You will not be left empty handed. * Alexia Maddox, Lecturer in Communications, Deakin University, Australia *
Combining the theoretical with the ethnographic, the serious and the playful, the multi-disciplinary and the multi-sited, Mediated Interfaces takes us on an exciting journey into digital lives and affective relations with social media technologies, which are as embodied as they are political. * Adi Kuntsman, Lecturer in Digital Media, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK *
Accessibly written with a playful yet serious tone that allows the thinking through of the multiple kinds of “inter”faces that we encounter in contemporary daily life. The socio-political implications are engaged effectively in this quick overview of how mediated interfaces are “smart objects” are “automated connections between everyday physical objects to the Internet.” This book is a must for anyone researching online social media or contemporary youth and media or most anything to do with media. Kudos to the authors! * Radhika Gajjala, Professor of American Culture Studies, Bowling Green State University, USA *