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The cultural and media studies perspectives on the technology of electronic consumer profiling. In this book Greg Elmer brings the perspectives of cultural and media studies to the subject of consumer profiling and feedback technology in the digital economy. He examines the multiplicity of processes that monitor consumers and automatically collect, store, and cross-reference personal information. When we buy a book at Amazon.com or a kayak from L.L. Bean, our transactions are recorded, stored, and deployed to forecast our future behavior—thus we may receive solicitations to buy another book by the same author or the latest in kayaking gear. Elmer charts this process, explaining the technol...
The legacy of the Bush administration and its "War on Terror" includes a new logic of surveillance, suppressing public dissent and mobilizing both "fear" and "faith." In this accessible book, Elmer and Opel show that this new logic stretches well beyond the realm of airport security and international relations into everyday police techniques, including the use of Tasers, the deployment of "stealth" crowd control, the zoning of protestors and the suppression of public dissent. Drawing on social theories and media analyses, this book reveals the underlying "logic of preemption" whereby threats must be eliminated before they materialize. By addressing the implications of this new logic, Elmer and Opel lay the groundwork for more effective resistance.
This critical reader of original essays places the boom and bust years of the Internet in a broad cultural context. Exploring the world of html, web browsers, cookies, online net guides, portals, and Internet service providers, this text includes the history of the Internet, interesting case studies and discussions on online community, user inequalities, and governance. Within the larger issues of technological infrastructure, government policy, and globalization, Critical Perspectives on the Internet highlights both the limitations and possibilities of everyday Internet use. Does the net function as a space for radical social and political change? For challenging established media? What opportunities lie in the cracks and crevasses of net structure? With its critical agenda for Internet studies, this text is a valuable tool for upper-level courses on the Internet, online communication, computer-mediated communication, communication and information technologies, and media and politics.
Locating Migrating Media details the extent to which media productions, both televisual and cinematic, have sought out new and cheaper shot locations, creative staff, and financing around the world. The book contributes to debates about media globalization, focusing on the local impact of new sites of media production. The book's chapters also question the role that film and television industries and local and regional governments play in broader economic develop and tax incentive schemes. While metaphors of transportation, mobility, fluidity and change continue to serve as key concepts and frames for understanding contemporary media industries, products and processes, the essays in this boo...
From the social media-based 2008 Obama election campaign to the civic protest and political revolutions of the 2011 Arab Spring, the past few years have been marked by a widespread and complex shift in the political landscape, as the rise of participatory platforms- such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and blogs- have multiplied the venues for political communication and activism. This book explores the emergence of a permanent campaign- the need for constant readiness- on networked communication platforms. With in-depth analyses of some of the most well-known participatory media today, this book offers a critical assessment of the constant efforts at managing the plurality of voices that characterize contemporary politics. -- from Publisher description.
There has been a data rush in the past decade brought about by online communication and, in particular, social media (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, among others), which promises a new age of digital enlightenment. But social data is compromised: it is being seized by specific economic interests, it leads to a fundamental shift in the relationship between research and the public good, and it fosters new forms of control and surveillance. Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data explores how we perform critical research within a compromised social data framework. The expert, international lineup of contributors explores the limits and challenges of social data research in order to invent and develop new modes of doing public research. At its core, this collection argues that we are witnessing a fundamental reshaping of the social through social data mining.
In Hollywood's search for cheap, distinctive, and authentic locations, producers and directors are taking their business to foreign soil. Only one of the five 2002 Best Picture nominees was shot in the United States_The Hours, filmed in Hollywood, Florida. Contracting Out Hollywood addresses the American trend of 'runaway productions'_the growing practice of producing American films and television programs on foreign shores. Greg Elmer and Mike Gasher have gathered a group of contributors who seek to explain the phenomenon from historical, political, economic, and cultural perspectives, using case studies, challenges to contemporary screen, media, and globalization theories, and analyses of changing government politics toward cultural industries.
A critical cultural materialist introduction to the study of global entertainment media. In Global Entertainment Media, Tanner Mirrlees undertakes an analysis of the ownership, production, distribution, marketing, exhibition and consumption of global films and television shows, with an eye to political economy and cultural studies. Among other topics, Mirrlees examines: Paradigms of global entertainment media such as cultural imperialism and cultural globalization. The business of entertainment media: the structure of capitalist culture/creative industries (financers, producers, distributors and exhibitors) and trends in the global political economy of entertainment media. The "governance" o...
This revised book presents theoretical results relevant to Edgeworth and saddlepoint expansions to densities and distribution functions. It provides examples of their application in some simple and a few complicated settings, along with numerical, as well as asymptotic, assessments of their accuracy. Variants on these expansions, including much of modern likelihood theory, are discussed and applications to lattice distributions are extensively treated.
On July 2, 1970, tourists in Australia spotted a smashed car, teetering precariously on a cliff edge, overlooking the raging ocean below. It seemed the car would fall into the water at any moment, but the car lingered as did a mystery, revealed when police traced the license plate to the Crawford household. Here, the police discovered the shocking truth: a mother and her three children had been murdered, with the husband and fathernow missingthe main suspect. The quadruple homicide sent a wave of panic through Australia. Where was the husband? And what would make a father kill his own children? There was much speculation but few answers, as the Crawford patriarch remained missing. Forty year...