The contributors to this book focus on collage and appropriation art, exploring the legal ramifications of such practices in an age when private companies can own culture using copyright and trademark law.

Minds Alive explores the enduring role and intrinsic value of libraries, archives, and public institutions in the digital age. Featuring international contributors, this volume delves into libraries and archives as institutions and institutional partners, the professional responsibilities of librarians and archivists, and the ways in which librarians and archivists continue to respond to the networked age, digital culture, and digitization. The endless possibilities and robust importance of libraries and archives are at the heart of this optimistic collection. Topics include transformations in the networked digital age; Indigenous issues and challenges in custodianship, ownership, and access; the importance of the harmonization of memory institutions today; and the overarching significance of libraries and archives in the public sphere. Libraries and archives – at once public institutions providing both communal and private havens of discovery – are being repurposed and transformed in intercultural contexts. Only by keeping pace with users’ changing needs can they continue to provide the richest resources for an informed citizenry.

The act of creation requires us to remix existing cultural content and yet recent sweeping changes to copyright laws have criminalized the creative act as a violation of corporate rights in a commodified world. Copyright was originally designed to protect publishers, not authors, and has now gained a stranglehold on our ability to transport, read, write, teach and publish digital materials. Contrasting Western models with issues of piracy as practiced in Asia, Digital Prohibition explores the concept of authorship as a capitalist institution and posits the Marxist idea of the multitude (à la Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, and Paulo Virno) as a new collaborative model for creation in the digital age. Looking at how digital culture has transformed unitary authorship from its book-bound parameters into a collective and dispersed endeavor, Dr. Guertin examines process-based forms as diverse as blogs, Facebook, Twitter, performance art, immersive environments, smart mobs, hacktivism, tactical media, machinima, generative computer games (like Spore and The Sims) and augmented reality.

An extraordinarily vivid rainbow arced over the morning horizon, its ends pressed down into fields of sodden maize. It surrounded us; it dwarfed us; it mesmerised us. It seemed that this particular rainbow just would not fade. We packed our vehicle and left the village and, as the bus carefully dipped and splashed its way through deep red puddles of African mud, I stared quietly out of the window. How did the miraculous events of last night actually happen? My repeated boyhood dream had, quite literally and specifically, been played out before my eyes, with 3,000 people looking on. Why now? Why here? Yet again I was forced to reflect on the overwhelming faithfulness and spectacular promises of God and how, despite my limited abilities, my questionable confidence and the sheer harmlessness and normality of my life, He had steered me to so many amazing places, introduced me to such extraordinary people, and done such magnificent things for me. Whatever the boundaries, borders and limits I had set up for myself, God had pushed me through them all. My story leads you through my nervous but rescued childhood. It opens a door into the intensive community lifestyle that I lived in my twenties and thirties. And it tussles with the pain, betrayal and disasters that I encountered during my forties. And the rest is geography. I invite you to journey with me on the relentless, unusual and often extreme global adventures of my fifties and sixties. It's a story of people, of places and of relationships; a true and radical tale of love and passion, of vulnerability, determination and betrayal, of rescue and grace, hope and faithfulness.

Since the 1930s, the Walt Disney Company has produced characters, images, and stories that have captivated audiences around the world. How can we understand the appeal of Disney products? What is it about the Disney phenomenon that attracts so many children, as well as adults? In this updated second edition, with new examples provided throughout, Janet Wasko examines the processes by which the Disney company – one of the largest media and entertainment corporations in the world – continues to manufacture the fantasies that enthrall millions. She analyses the historical expansion of the Disney empire into the twenty-first century, examines the content of Disney’s classic and more recent films, cartoons and TV programs and discusses how they are produced, considering how some of the same techniques have been applied to the Disney theme parks. She also discusses the reception (and sometimes, reinterpretation) of Disney products by different kinds of audiences. By looking at the Disney phenomenon from a variety of perspectives, she provides an updated and comprehensive overview of one of the most significant media and cultural institutions of our time. This important book by a leading scholar of the entertainment industries will be of great interest to students in media and cultural studies, as well as a broader readership of Disney fans.

It makes us jump. It makes us scream. It haunts our nightmares. So why do we watch horror? Why do we play it? What could possibly appealing about a genre that tries to terrify us? Why would we subject ourselves to shriek-inducing shocks, or spend dozens of hours watching a television show about grotesque flesh-eating monsters? Monstrous Forms offers a theory of horror that works through the genre across a broad range of contemporary moving-image media: film, television, video games, YouTube, gifs, streaming, virtual reality. This book analyzes our experience of and engagement with horror by focusing on its form, paying special attention to the common ground, the styles and forms that move between mediums. It looks at the ways that moving-image horror addresses its audiences, the ways that it elicits, or demands, responses from its viewers, players, browsers. Camera movement (or "camera" movement), jump scares, offscreen monsters-horror innovates and perfects styles that directly provoke and stimulate the bodies in front of the screen. Analyzing films including Paranormal Activity, It Follows, and Get Out, video games including Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Layers of Fear, and Until Dawn, and TV shows including The Walking Dead and American Horror Story, Monstrous Forms argues for understanding horror through its sensational address, and dissects the forms that make that address so effective.

An accessible introduction to understanding the current media environment and the culture it contains, this book provides an indispensable guide to dynamic media literacy in the digital environment. Katherine G. Fry draws from philosophies of technology and communication, from media ecology, critical cultural theory, and critical pedagogy to explain the dimensions of media environments. Fry introduces an essential dynamic media environment model that can be used as a framework for understanding global social challenges. The model extends media literacy education and practice by de-centering media messages, instead explaining media as environments – as cultures created by and within our dominant form of communication. Exploring progressive education philosophies that advocate inclusion, independence, empathy, and critical thinking toward problem-solving in a rapidly changing world, this book includes media literacy examples, global case studies, exercises, and learning tools to facilitate learning the full scope of the current media environment. This book explores how the digital communication environment operates on many dimensions so that we, as citizens, as players within the shifting digital environment, can act to shape it. Essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication studies, media literacy, and media education, as well as other disciplines where media is used as a lens to examine issues within society.

Any and all songs are capable of being remixed. But not all remixes are treated equally. Rock This Way examines transformative musical works—cover songs, remixes, mash-ups, parodies, and soundalike songs—to discover what contemporary American culture sees as legitimate when it comes to making music that builds upon other songs. Through examples of how popular discussion talked about such songs between 2009 and 2018, Mel Stanfill uses a combination of discourse analysis and digital humanities methods to interrogate our broader understanding of transformative works and where they converge at the legal, economic, and cultural ownership levels. Rock This Way provides a new way of thinking about what it means to re-create and borrow music, how the racial identity of both the reusing artist and the reused artist matters, and the ways in which the law polices artists and their works. Ultimately, Stanfill demonstrates that the extent to which a work is seen as having new expression or meaning is contingent upon notions of creativity, legitimacy, and law, all of which are shaped by white supremacy.

In the hypermediated world of Tamil Nadu, Francis Cody studies how “news events” are made. Not merely the act of representing events with words or images, a “news event” is the reciprocal relationship between the events being reported in the news and the event of the news coverage itself. In The News Event, Francis Cody focuses on how imaginaries of popular sovereignty have been remade through the production and experience of such events. Political sovereignty is thoroughly mediated by the production of news, and subjects invested in the idea of democracy are remarkably reflexive about the role of publicly circulating images and texts in the very constitution of their subjectivity. The law comes to stand as both a limit and positive condition in this process of event making, where acts of legal and extralegal repression of publication can also become the stuff of news about news makers. When the subjects of news inhabit multiple participant roles in the unfolding of public events, when the very technologies of recording and circulating events themselves become news, the act of representing a political event becomes difficult to disentangle from that of participating in it. This, Cody argues, is the crisis of contemporary news making: the news can no longer claim exteriority to the world on which it reports.

Finding expression in comic books, television series and successful blockbuster films, the superhero has become part of everyday life. Exploring the superhero genre, its storytelling practices, its hero-types and its relationship with fans, this anthology fills a gap in research about the comic book superhero of the last 20 years.