Taking a sociological approach to the study of mass media, Mediated Society explores how the media affects individuals and society. Within this unique framework, the authors analyze media and mass communication as a social rather than as a technological construct while addressing issues suchas democracy, citizenship, class, gender, and cultural diversity. Drawing attention to the way in which media frames everyday experiences and events, the text examines media and communication in urban, national, and global settings, as well as the power and structure of dominant mass media. With awide range of Canadian and international examples, along with two real-life case studies and a wealth of pedagogical features throughout, this innovative, engaging text encourages students to consider how social identities, norms, and values are mediated by various forms of masscommunication.

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

Deals with computer mediated communication

The Das Kapital of the 20th century,Society of the Spectacle is an essential text, and the main theoretical work of the Situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's, in particular the May 1968 uprisings in France, up to the present day, with global capitalism seemingly staggering around in it’s Zombie end-phase, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. This ‘Red and Black’ translation from 1977 is Introduced by Notting Hill armchair insurrectionary Tom Vague with a galloping time line and pop-situ verve, and given a more analytical over view by young upstart thinker Sam Cooper.

Social theory needs to be completely rethought in a world of digital media and social media platforms driven by data processes. Fifty years after Berger and Luckmann published their classic text The Social Construction of Reality, two leading sociologists of media, Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, revisit the question of how social theory can understand the processes through which an everyday world is constructed in and through media. Drawing on Schütz, Elias and many other social and media theorists, they ask: what are the implications of digital medias profound involvement in those processes? Is the result a social world that is stable and liveable, or one that is increasingly unstable and unliveable?

How do the dead live among us today? Approaching death from the perspective of media and communication studies, anthropology, and sociology, this book explains how the all-encompassing presence of mediated death profoundly transforms contemporary society. It explores rituals of mourning and the livestreaming of death in hybrid media, as well as contemporary media-driven practices of immortalization. Sumiala draws on examples ranging from the iconic deaths of Margaret Thatcher and David Bowie to those of ordinary people ritualized on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. In addition, this book examines digital mourning of global events including the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the Coronavirus pandemic. Mediated Death is a must-read for scholars and students of communication studies, as well as general readers interested in exploring the meaning of mediated death in contemporary society.​

Focuses on how the computer has transformed the economy into an information processing and intelligence system. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Daniel Suarez’s New York Times bestselling debut high-tech thriller is “so frightening even the government has taken note” (Entertainment Weekly). Daemons: computer programs that silently run in the background, waiting for a specific event or time to execute. They power almost every service. They make our networked world possible. But they also make it vulnerable... When the obituary of legendary computer game architect Matthew Sobol appears online, a previously dormant daemon activates, initiating a chain of events that begins to unravel our interconnected world. This daemon reads news headlines, recruits human followers, and orders assassinations. With Sobol’s secrets buried with him, and as new layers of his daemon are unleashed, it’s up to Detective Peter Sebeck to stop a self-replicating virtual killer before it achieves its ultimate purpose—one that goes far beyond anything Sebeck could have imagined...

Drawing on case studies from the global South, this book explores the politics of mediated citizenship in which citizens are represented to the state through third party intermediaries. The studies show that mediation is both widely practiced and multi-directional and that it has an important role to play in deepening democracy in the global South.

Today’s students have a world of knowledge at their fingertips, and no longer need textbooks filled with names and dates crammed into a single volume. The Mediated World takes as its starting point the understanding that readers want a compelling story, a good read, an intelligent analysis, and a new way of looking at the media revolutions around us. It is designed as a life line to help students understand and interpret the sea of media washing over us all. In this text, David Mindich writes for students who want to understand how we communicate to one another, how we process our world, and how the media shapes us. His engaging and narrative style focuses on concepts and real-world contexts--he avoids a dry recitation of facts--that helps students understand their own personal relationship with media and gives them the tools to push back against the media forces. One of the primary goals of The Mediated World is to empower readers by giving them a thorough understanding of the media; and by teaching them how to counter the force of the media and at the same time use this force for their own ends. Readers of this book come to recognize that they have the potential to be not only active consumers of media but producers of it on a scale never seen before. Visit www.themediatedworld.com to learn more about this book.