Publicly Sited

There is now widespread awareness of, suspicion about, and even opposition to 'algorithms'. As widespread as the multiplicity of situations and domains in which these mysterious entities seem to be making more and more decisions: around welfare payments; university places; travel routes; and police patrol routes. Algorithms are also pervasive in media and communications. They build you customised...

One of the more celebrated aspects of contemporary media is that it seems so much more participatory. In principle, at least, anyone can for example establish a Twitter or a YouTube account, and share their experiences or views with minimal censorious intervention. Some have explained this apparently more participatory media culture with reference to the capacities of technologies. After all, peop...

Media technologies today seem to be everywhere. Assisting us in – or invading – each and every corner of our daily existence. We have already discussed how this ubiquity is embedded into a huge range of physical infrastructures; environments where media technologies surround us. And yet, we also increasingly carry media around with us, in our pockets, hands, ears, across our eyes, around our wrist...

We have already discussed the importance of paying attention to how media technologies are powerful when they are ordinary and relatively invisible. When they work like ‘appliances’ in daily life. This was the key message of McLuhan’s ‘medium theory’ as well as theories of media domestication. These perspectives are limited, however, in that they tend to imagine media technologies individually: th...

Worries about media technologies often stem from their association with change, change that may be perceived as positive or negative. Even though we tend know very well that social and cultural transformations are complex, we also often seem prepared to think of individual media as bringing change. To believe that there was a situation before this or that media, and then another situation after. T...

It is often said that media technologies provide us with a ‘window on the world’ beyond our own experience. A window not only connecting us to a distant world, beyond our immediate reach, but also to one which we can join into, and share simultaneously. One term for describing how media afford this window on the world is ‘liveness’. The most obvious example is live news coverage: journalism that i...

By now, you will have noticed we are not spending much if any time trying to understand media technologies in isolation. Instead, we have been and will keep putting media technologies into the settings on which they depend as well as help shape. One prominent academic concept for scholars seeking to understand media technologies in such settings is that of ‘domestication’. This refers to how media...

The terms media and communications are often offered as a couplet, or even used interchangeably. But communication is a broad idea with a very long history, and the arrival of media technologies are usually seen to make possible a special form of communication, in which physical co-presence was unnecessary. The printing press, for example, is often argued to have made nations, democracies and bure...

Technological talk is everywhere nowadays. All manner of novel developments, good or ill, are associated with the supposed impact of technology. But when we invoke the term ‘technology’, whether in relation to media or in general, just what do we mean anyway? Do technologies drive human history? Or are technologies just tools, extending deeper social, economic, political or cultural structures? In...