Digital Media and Society

/ dms /

Welcome to the homepage of the Digital Media and Society series! This site has been created to support and supplement this series of cutting edge books from Polity on new technologies. It also aims to provide a new space online where those with an interest in the relationship between these new technologies and society can share views, resources and queries. We hope not only that you will find the information here helpful and stimulating, but that you will bookmark this site and return to it frequently, as both a contributor to the site and a consumer of it.

About the Digital Media and Society series

It is not hard to observe that new technologies are fundamentally altering the ways in which we communicate. Today we text, blog, shuffle, download, search and code in ways that even five years ago would have been unthinkable. But does listening to music on an MP3 player rather than a CD player, or a walkman, really show us that society is in a state of change? Does the fact that more of us read news online and from a wider range of sources rather than from our single daily newspaper mean that we engage differently with politics? Does the way we conduct our online friendships on MySpace or Facebook differ much from the relationships we maintain through face to face contact?

These are the kind of questions which the Digital Media and Society series explores. Eschewing overly deterministic perspectives, each volume takes a particular theme or phenomenon and considers the complex interplay of technologies and the ways in which they are used, in their social and cultural context. Taken as a whole, the series gives a rounded overview of the issues around contemporary digital media.

A note for teachers: the series will also provide invaluable resources for those who want to integrate study of digital technology into their curriculum. All of the volumes have been designed to be accessible for students from undergraduate level upwards and are clearly written and packed with examples. Further resources and support are available on this website.

Author Biographies

	Stuart Allan Stuart Allan is Professor of Journalism at Bournemouth University and co-author of Reporting Digital War. He has published widely in journalism studies and has particular interests in online news, citizen journalism, journalism history and young people’s use of digital media. He also edits the book series ‘Issues in Cultural and Media Studies’ and serves on a variety of editorial boards.
	Mike Allen Mike Allen is writing a book for the series on Film and New Digital Technologies. Formerly Research Officer at the BFI, he is currently part of the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media and Birkbeck College. His research interests include the history of media technologies, British and American Cinema, and Digital Culture.
	Panagiota Alevizou Panagiota Alevizou is a research fellow at the Department of Media and Communications at the LSE where she also teaches courses on new media and knowledge systems, political communication, and theories and methods surrounding media and communications research. Her research addresses the relationship between media, knowledge and culture and has a particular interest in learning technologies, open access knowledge systems and mediated forms of public engagement. She is writing a book for the series entitled The Web of Knowledge, looking at encyclopaedias in the digital age.
	Nancy Baym Nancy K. Baym is an award-winning teacher and Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. A pioneer in internet studies, her research on online community and online relationships has been published in more than two dozen articles and books. She is a co-founder and past-president of The Association of Internet Researchers and serves on the editorial boards of several premiere journals in Communication and New Media. She is currently writing a series volume on Personal Connections in the Digital Age.
	Mark Deuze Mark Deuze is the author of Media Work. He works at Leiden University, The Netherlands, and Indiana University’s Department of Telecommunications in Bloomington, USA. His research interests deal with the various ways in which society is implicated in media, focusing on the cultural history of online and convergent media production, and how these processes relate to media performance. Mark’s weblog on new media, work and society is at: deuze.blogspot.com.
	Jonathan Donner Jonathan Donner is a Researcher in the Technology for Emerging Markets Group at Microsoft Research India. Some of his recent research appears in Information Technologies and International Development, The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and the Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies. He is the co-author of Mobile Communication.
	Charles Ess Charles Ess is the author of Digital Media Ethics. He has received awards for teaching excellence and scholarship, and published extensively in areas as varied as comparative (East-West) philosophy, applied ethics, history of philosophy, and Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). Ess is currently Distinguished Research Professor at Drury University, and the President of the Association of Internet Researchers.
	Alex Halavais Alex Halavais, author of Search Engine Society, is a social architect, interested in ways of helping form a culture of creativity, freedom and justice. He is an assistant professor at Quinnipiac University, where he teaches in a masters program in interactive communications. Halavais has published extensively on the role of computing in social change.
	Robert Hassan Robert Hassan is an ARC (Australian Research Council) Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He has published widely on the social, economic and political effects of the information technology revolution, and in particular on social theories of time and speed. He is the author of The Information Society.
	Matt Jackson Matt Jackson teaches copyright, communications law and policy, and broadcast/cable programming at Penn State University. His research focuses on how copyright law shapes communication networks and free speech. Prof. Jackson is the former chair of the Communication Law and Policy division of the International Communication Association and was a recent Research Fellow at the Centre for Media and Communications Law at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He is currently working on a volume on Copyright in the Digital Age for the series.
	Tim Jordan Tim Jordan is a Reader in Sociology at the Open University and the author of the series volume on Hacking. He has published widely in this area, as well as on social movements, Pokemon, the culture and politics of the Internet and social theory. He is a founder and until recently an editor of the journal Social Movement Studies.
	Leah Lievrouw Leah A. Lievrouw is a Professor in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. Her research and writing interests focus on the relationship between media and information technologies and social change, particularly with respect to social differentiation, oppositional social and cultural movements, and intellectual freedom in pervasively mediated social settings. From 2001-2005 she was the co-editor of the journal New Media & Society. In 2009 Polity will publish her new book, Alternative and Activist New Media.
	Rich Ling Rich Ling is a sociologist at Telenor’s research institute near Oslo, Norway and a professor at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark. He has published a number of books in the area of mobile telephony and social change, including his co-authored volume for Polity, Mobile Communication.
	Donald Matheson Donald Matheson is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. His research interests lie in journalism studies, with a particular emphasis on discourse analysis of journalists' writing practices. This interest has taken him towards researching journalism in new media, as well as historical and ethical aspects of newswriting. He is the co-author of Reporting Digital War.
	Zizi Papacharissi Zizi Papacharissi is Professor in the Department of Communication at UIC and has published widely on the social and political consequences of online media. Her forthcoming book in the series, A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age, discusses how online media redefine our understanding of public and private in late-modern democracies, thus outlining new parameters for civic engagement in a digital age.
	Jill Walker-Rettberg Jill Walker Rettberg, author of Blogging, is an Associate Professor at the University of Bergen, where she researches the changing ways in which we tell stories online. She started her research blog, jill/txt, in 2000, where she writes about blogs, electronic literature, participatory narratives and life in academia.