Electronic Elsewheres

Media, Technology, and the Experience of Social Space

2009

Chris Berry, Soyoung Kim, and Lynn Spigel, editors

Considers how different world populations experience a sense of place through media

Media do not simply portray places that already exist; they actually produce them. In exploring how world populations experience “place” through media technologies, the essays included here examine how media construct the meanings of home, community, work, nation, and citizenship.

Contributors: Asu Aksoy, Istanbul Bilgi U; Charlotte Brunsdon, U of Warwick; Ratiba Hadj-Moussa, York U (Toronto); Tamar Liebes-Plesnar, Hebrew U; David Morley, Goldsmiths, U of London; Lisa Nakamura, U of Illinois; Arvind Rajgopal, New York U; Kevin Robins, Goldsmiths, U of London; Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern U; Marita Sturken, New York U; and Shunya Yoshimi, U of Tokyo.

A first-rate collection of essays by accomplished scholars on an important topic in media studies, this well thought-out anthology of original and high-quality scholarship will make a real contribution to the field and will be widely discussed and cited for a long time.

William Boddy, author of New Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States

Media do not simply portray places that already exist; they actually produce them. In exploring how world populations experience “place” through media technologies, the essays included here examine how media construct the meanings of home, community, work, nation, and citizenship.

Tracing how media reconfigure the boundaries between public and private—and global and local—to create “electronic elsewheres,” the essays investigate such spaces and identities as the avatars that women are creating on Web sites, analyze the role of satellite television in transforming Algerian neighborhoods, inquire into the roles of radio and television in Israel and India, and take a skeptical look at the purported novelty of the “new media home.”

Contributors: Asu Aksoy, Istanbul Bilgi U; Charlotte Brunsdon, U of Warwick; Ratiba Hadj-Moussa, York U (Toronto); Tamar Liebes-Plesnar, Hebrew U; David Morley, Goldsmiths, U of London; Lisa Nakamura, U of Illinois; Arvind Rajgopal, New York U; Kevin Robins, Goldsmiths, U of London; Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern U; Marita Sturken, New York U; and Shunya Yoshimi, U of Tokyo.

Chris Berry is professor of film and television studies at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Soyoung Kim is professor of cinema studies at the Korean National University of Arts.

Lynn Spigel is professor and Frances E. Willard Chair of Screen Cultures at Northwestern University.

A first-rate collection of essays by accomplished scholars on an important topic in media studies, this well thought-out anthology of original and high-quality scholarship will make a real contribution to the field and will be widely discussed and cited for a long time.

William Boddy, author of New Media and Popular Imagination: Launching Radio, Television, and Digital Media in the United States

The anthology Electronic Elsewheres provides a multicultural view of the sometimes surprisingly different ways in which people adjust to new media, not simply including them in their private lives, but at times allowing them to shape their communities and philosophies.

Rhizomes

Berry, Kim, and Spigel offer an excellent overview of the confluence of sociology, anthropology, media studies, and politics and provide, in just a few pages, a framework and an extensive review of the literature as well as chapter summaries.

Choice