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Foreign Rights: Forthcoming: Media StudiesGuerrilla News by Adam L. Penenberg My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft by Bonnie Nardi Natural History of Electronics by Jennifer Gabrys Negotiating 9/11 by Laura C. Robinson Play Redux: The Form of Computer Games by David Myers Guerrilla News: How to Succeed as a Journalist Now That the Old Rules Don't ApplyAdam Penenberg Rights: World Many journalists and editors are pessimistic for the future of journalist with the rise of the Internet, but there is great opportunity. In Guerrilla News, Adam Penenberg discusses his experience as a journalist and gives how-to hints and guidelines on how to succeed as a journalist in today's world. He offers suggestions and solutions for web viedo, blogs, and investigative reporting. In addition, Penenberg examines in detail how to come up with story ideas for magazines, websites, and newspapers, including a section on pitching to editors and spinning to publicists. Furthermore, the book looks at the ethics and law of online and guerrilla journalism today. Guerrilla News concludes with a look at the future of the book, from hardcover and paperback to electronic. Penenberg examines the e-Book, print on demand, and other potential business models for book publishing. Adam L. Penenberg is a journalism professor at New York University and assistant director of the Business & Economic Reporting Program. In 1998, while a staff editor at Forbes.com, he garnered national attention for unmasking Stephen Glass as a fabulist, as portrayed in the 2003 film Shattered Glass (Steve Zahn plays Penenberg). His first book, Spooked: Espionage in Corporate America (Perseus Books, 2000), was excerpted in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and his second, Tragic Indifference: One Man’s Battle with the Auto Industry over the Dangers of SUVs (HarperBusiness, 2003), was optioned for the movies by Michael Douglas. A former columnist for Slate and Wired News, Adam is currently a contributing writer for Fast Company magazine. May 2010 My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of WarcraftBonnie Nardi Rights: World My Life as a Night Elf Priest is an ethnographic investigation and analysis of player activity in World of Warcraft (WoW), currently the most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) in the world, with over 11 million active monthly subscribers. The author, Bonnie Nardi, is a well-known ethnographer who has published extensively on activity theory as it relates to technology adoption and use. The book is the culmination of three years of participatory research on WoW play and culture in the United States and China. It is currently organized in three broad sections. The first section will introduce the research methodology and the history, structure and cultural significance of World of Warcraft. The second section provides the theoretical grounding, arguing for the applicability of activity theory and active aesthetic experience theory to studies of gaming and play. The final section will address issues of gender, culture and possibly addiction in play experience. Bonnie Nardi is an anthropologist by training and a professor in the Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focus is the social implications of digital technologies and Internet use from an activity theory perspective. She is author of A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing (MIT, 1993) and co-author of Information Ecologies: Using Technology with Heart (MIT, 1999) and Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design (MIT, 2006). She is also co-editor of the MIT Press Series Acting with Technology. Spring 2010 Natural History of ElectronicsJennifer Gabrys Rights: World This is a study of the materiality of information and its devices; of electronic waste in its physical and electronic incarnations; a cultural and material mapping of the spaces where electronics in the form of both hardware and information accumulate, break down, or are stowed away. The author explores the complex afterlife of electronics in landfills, archives and cultural memory. Other studies have addressed "digital" technology through a focus on its immateriality or virtual qualities. Gabrys attempts to trace both the material and spatial as well as cultural and political infrastructures that enable the emergence and dissolution of these technologies. In the course of her book, she explores five interrelated "spaces" where electronics go to die: from Silicon Valley to Nasdaq, from containers bound for China to museums and archives that preserve obsolete electronics as cultural artifacts, to the landfill as material repository. Jennifer Gabrys is currently teaching in the department of design at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Fall 2010 Negotiating 9/11Laura C. Robinson Rights: World September 11, 2001 marks a pivotal moment in world geopolitics. Just as its reverberations continue to reshape the imperatives of policymaking and statecraft, it also has changed the ways in which ordinary individuals around the world understand themselves as individuals and as members of larger collectivities. In the days after 9/11, individuals all over the world temporarily shift their attention away from issues close to home to the moral and political implications of attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon. The events act as a catalyst in two ways, provoking immediate and strongly worded reactions from the public. First, the terrorist attacks act as a stimulus that pushes people to participate in online discussion spaces in unprecedented numbers. Second, September 11th acts as a stimulus that makes people explicitly state latent beliefs about the social world, their place in it, and their understanding of the United States’ role on the global stage. In the U.S., expressions of grief and shock are mixed with calls to arms and proclamations of national unity. Outside the U.S., however, the voices of those condemning the terrorist attacks are resisted by those who blame the United States for the events of 9/11. In many countries across Europe and South America, denunciations of the U.S. and American foreign policy overshadow denunciations of the attacks and their perpetrators. No matter the thematic focus of their comments, the individuals who offer their opinions make explicit rarely articulated assumptions about states, societies, and politics in the multipolar world of the 21st century. Negotiating 9/11 examines pro- and anti-American views in Brazil, France, and America since September 11th. Robinson addresses several core problematics in global studies of media, culture, and identity, namely: How do local social, political, and cultural environments influence the ways in which individuals and groups use new media in culturally specific ways? In so doing, how do individuals and groups craft national and transnational, as well as context-dependent identities? The work addresses these interrelated questions by examining three discourse fora devoted to the same topic: the meaning and implications of September 11th. Laura C. Robinson is currently conducting research on digital inequality at the University of Southern California, where she received a two-year postdoctoral fellowship. Spring 2010 Play Redux: The Form of Computer GamesDavid Myers Rights: World Play Redux is an ambitious description and critical analysis of the aesthetic pleasures of video game play, drawing on early 20th –century formalist theory and models of literature. It is intended as a provocative corrective to the currently ascendant, if not dominant, cultural and ethnographic approach to game studies and play. Employing a concept of biological naturalism grounded in cognitive theory, Myers argues for a clear delineation between the aesthetics of play and the aesthetics of texts. Play Redux is comprised of twelve chapters with 1-5 developing a comprehensive theory of computer game aesthetic as a semiotic process. Chapters 6 through 8 approach specific computer games in light of narrative structure and potential, debunking claims of the importance of narrative influences on game structure and play. Chapters 9 through 11 address current social play theory through an investigation of the MMORPG City of Heroes. The concluding chapter reiterates the taxonomy of computer game play developed in the earlier chapters and speculates on the future of social media. In the course of this study, Myers asks a number of interesting questions: What are the mechanics of human play as exhibited in computer games? Can these mechanisms be modeled? What is the evolutionary function of cognitive play and is it, on the whole, a good thing? Play Redux should have significant potential for journal review attention and course adoptions here and abroad in communications, new media and film departments. David Myers is Reverend Aloysius B. Goodspeed Distinguished Professor at the School of Mass Communications, Loyola University New Orleans. He is author of The Nature of Computer Games: Play as Semiosis (published in the Digital Formations Series, Peter Lang 2003) and contributor to several collections on game theory, most recently chapters on video game aesthetics and semiotics in Video Game Theory Reader 2 (Routledge 2008) and the Internet in the Encyclopedia of Recreation and Leisure Studies (Scribner 2004). His extensive journal publications include contributions to Play & Culture, Communication Theory, Simulation and Gaming and Semiotica. Spring 2010 When Media Are New: Understanding the Dynamics of New Media Adoption and UseJohn Carey and Martin C. J. Elton Rights: World The world of communication media has undergone massive changes since the mid-1980s. Along with the extraordinary progress in technological capability, it has experienced stunning decreases in costs; a revolutionary opening up of markets (a phenomenon exemplified by but not limited to the rise of the internet); the advent of new business models; and a striking acceleration in the rate of change. These technological, regulatory, and economic changes have attracted the attention of large number of researchers, from industry and academe, and given rise to a substantial body of research and data. Significantly less attention has been paid to the people who use new media—many of whose own rate of adoption and change lags notably behind the technologies themselves. When Media are New addresses this research and publishing gap by investigating the human factors involved in technological change and their implications for current and future media. What kinds of social, cultural, and organizational factors influence whether media are accepted or rejected? How do usage patterns affect the development of technology and of content? Is it possible to draw general principles about the reasons and contexts in which new media succeed or fail? Making use of quantitative and qualitative methods and drawing on work in media history, diffusion theory, media economics, and social psychology, When Media Are New offers an empirically grounded and theoretically sophisticated account of what is and isn't new about user behavior in the current environment. As one of the first book-length studies to offer such a rigorous general account of the relationship between new media and everyday life, it should find a broad audience ranging from media and communication scholars to historians and organizational theorists to industry professionals. John Carey is Professor of Communications and Media Industries at Fordham Business School and Director of Greystone Communications, a media research and planning firm. Martin C.J. Elton is retired from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. Spring 2010 |
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