Mediated Perspectives

Exploring mediated time, this book contemplates how far (and in what ways) media and time are intertwined from a diverse set of theoretical and empirical angles. It builds from theoretical discussions concerning the question of mediation and the normative framing of time (especially acceleration) and works its way through questions of time for/of one’s own, resisting temporalities, polychronicity, in-between-time, simultaneity and other time concepts. It further examines specific time frames, imaginations of a media future and the past, questions of online journalism and multitasking or liveness. Bringing together authors from diverse backgrounds, this collection presents a rich combination of milestone articles, new empirical research, enriching theoretical work and interviews with leading researchers to bridge sociology, media studies, and science and technology studies in one of the first book-length publications on the emerging field of media and time.

The rush to the Information Superhighway and the transition to an Information Age have enormous political, ethical, and religious consequences. The essays collected here develop both interdisciplinary and international perspectives on privacy, critical thinking and literacy, democratization, gender, religion, and the very nature of the revolution promised in cyberspace. These essays are essential reading for anyone who wants to better understand and reflect upon these events and issues.

Text-based interaction among humans connected via computer networks, such as takes place via email and in synchronous modes such as “chat”, MUDs and MOOs, has attracted considerable popular and scholarly attention. This collection of 14 articles on text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC), is the first to bring empirical evidence from a variety of disciplinary perspectives to bear on questions raised by the new medium. The first section, linguistic perspectives, addresses the question of how CMC compares with speaking and writing, and describes its unique structural characteristics. Section two, on social and ethical perspectives, explores conflicts between the interests of groups and those of individual users, including issues of online sex and sexism. In the third section, cross-cultural perspectives, the advantages and risks of using CMC to communicate across cultures are examined in three studies involving users in East Asia, Mexico, and students of ethnically diverse backgrounds in remedial writing classes in the United States. The final section deals with the effects of CMC on group interaction: in a women's studies mailing list, a hierarchically-organized workplace, and a public protest on the Internet against corporate interests.

In this utterly original look at our modern "culture of performance," de Zengotita shows how media are creating self-reflective environments, custom made for each of us. From Princess Diana's funeral to the prospect of mass terror, from oral sex in the Oval Office to cowboy politics in distant lands, from high school cliques to marital therapy, from blogs to reality TV to the Weather Channel, Mediated takes us on an original and astonishing tour of every department of our media-saturated society. The implications are personal and far-reaching at the same time. Thomas de Zengotita is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Columbia University. He teaches at the Dalton School and at the Draper Graduate Program at New York University. "Reading Thomas de Zengotita's Mediated is like spending time with a wild, wired friend-the kind who keeps you up late and lures you outside of your comfort zone with a speed rap full of brilliant notions."-O magazine "A fine roar of a lecture about how the American mind is shaped by (too much) media...."-Washington Post "Deceptively colloquial, intellectually dense...This provocative, extreme and compelling work is a must-read for philosophers of every stripe."-Publishers Weekly

Approx.394 pages

The anthology Mediated Perspectives: Media Ownership, Literacy, and Effects focuses on the history of the media from a media ecology perspective. It encourages students to think about the media system, not merely as a source of entertainment, but as a business designed to target viewers and sell products. The book explores topics such as the uses and gratifications of media, the psychological and physiological effects of media exposure, the corporatization of thought, and the impact of digitization. Students will also be introduced to post-positivist perspectives on the media, and ideological, cultural, and worldview perspectives on assessing media literacy. The material shows students that they must be grounded in media history, media literacy, and future thinking in order to think critically in today's media-sphere. For a generation rushing wholeheartedly to embrace the media in all its forms, Mediated Perspectives provides a fresh, startling point of view. Most importantly, it asks readers to actively engage in questioning their own assumptions and media participation. Mediated Perspectives is an excellent choice for introductory courses in mass media and media communications.

Recent years have seen a rise in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the mind. However, relatively little emphasis has been placed on attention, its functions, and phenomenology. As a result, there are a multitude of definitions and explanatory frameworks that describe what attention is, what it does, and how it works. This volume proposes that one way to discuss attention is by utilizing an integrative multidisciplinary framework that takes into consideration aspects of attention as a means of accessing the world and as a mediator of experience. It brings together contributions from cognitive science, philosophy, and psychology in order to shed light on these aspects of attention. By including both theoretical and empirical approaches to attention, this volume will provide (1) an innovative framework for examining attention as something that mediates experience and (2) new perspectives on foundational and defi nitional issues of what attention is and how it contributes to our ability to access the world. By drawing together different disciplines, this volume broadens the concept of attention. It opens up a new way of looking at attention as an active process through which the world is disclosed for us.

Exploring mediation and related practices of conflict regulation, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach that includes historical, legal, anthropological and international perspectives. Divided into three sections, the volume observes historical and current relations between mediation and the criminal justice system and provides anthropological perspectives and case studies to explore mediation and arbitration in international arenas. In this regard, the book provides an innovative perspective on mediation and new insights into conflict regulation.

"Why is it that so many disputes that were formerly addressed through adjudication are now resolved through mediation? The dramatic increase over the last 15 years in the use of alternative dispute resolution practices has been explored through a number of lenses. New Directions in Mediation provides valuable new insights into the process of mediation - by examining it from a communication perspective The contributors provide theoretical viewpoints in mediation, reveal new ways to understand the structure of the intervention process, illustrate how specific communicative acts shape the realities of mediators and disputants and influence the outcomes, suggest critical contextual factors that should be considered in order to guide mediation more effectively, and discuss with practitioners how these ideas can be translated into practice."--Back cover.

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is one of the most exciting areas of study in the communication discipline today. Computer technology is rapidly changing the way we communicate, allowing us to simultaneously be both connected and mobile. This connected mobility changes not only our communication ability but our relational expectations as well. Participating in CMC through texting, tweeting, Snapchat, email, FaceTime, social media, or video-conferencing is unavoidable in the 21st century. Computer-Mediated Communication: Approaches and Perspectives describes five approaches and multiple perspectives on the influences of this technologically-mediated communication on interpersonal and social relationships. The five approaches examine the constraints, experience, language, opportunities, and implications of CMC. The book develops these approaches through the perspectives of media richness, naturalness, affordances, domestication, presence, social presence, propinquity, social information processing, hyperpersonal relationships, social identity model of deindividuation effects, virtual identities, virtual networks and teams, virtual communities, the Proteus effect, actor networks, and media niches. The book develops each perspective through a description, illustration, critique, and analysis of usefulness. Each chapter contains a computer-mediated communication ethics challenge, discussion questions, glossary of terms, and references for further reading. As such, Computer-Mediated Communication is an excellent textbook for courses in computer or technologically mediated communication.