Three decades of societal and cultural alignment of new media have yielded a host of innovations, trials, and problems, accompanied by versatile popular and academic discourse.

New Media Studies crystallized internationally into an established academic discipline, and this begs the question: where do we stand now? Which new questions are emerging now that new media are being taken for granted, and which riddles are still unsolved? Is contemporary digital culture indeed all about 'you', the participating user, or do we still not really understand the digital machinery and how this constitutes us as 'you'?

The contributors to the present book, all employed in teaching and researching new media and digital culture, assembled their 'digital material' into an anthology, covering issues ranging from desktop metaphors to Web 2.0 ecosystems, from touch screens to blogging and e-learning, from role-playing games and cybergothic music to wireless dreams.

Together the contributions provide a showcase of current research in the field, from what may be called a 'digital-materialist' perspective.

Download Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology

PDF format, 4.2MB, 305Pages.

Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press (October 15, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9089640681
ISBN-13: 978-9089640680

INTRODUCTION
From the virtual to matters of fact and concern

All that is solid melts into air
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 1848
Technology is society made durable
Bruno Latour, 1991

The 1982 Time magazine’s ‘Man of the Year’ election was a special one. For the first time in the history of this traditional annual event, a non-human was celebrated: the computer was declared ‘Machine of the Year 1982’.

The cover displayed a table with a personal computer on it, and a man sitting passively next to it and looking rather puzzled. On the 2006 Time’s election cover once again a computer was shown, now basically a screen reflecting the ‘Person of the Year’: ‘YOU. Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.’

Within 24 years the computer seemed to have changed from an exciting, mysterious machine with unknown capabilities into a transparent mirror, reflecting you, your desires and your activities. Apparently, digital machines embody no unsolved puzzles any more. At the beginning of the 21st century, they are so widely distributed and used that we take them for granted – though we still call them ‘new media’.

Computers, e-mail, the Internet, mobile phones, digital photo albums, and computer games have become common artefacts in our daily lives. Part of the initial spell has worn off, yet new spells have been cast as well, and some of the old spells still haunt the discourse about the so-called new media. ...

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Marianne van den Boomen, Sybille Lammes, Ann-Sophie Lehmann, Joost Raessens, and Mirko Tobias Schäfer are all teaching and researching in the program New Media and Digital Culture at the Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

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