In mass communication, digital media is any communication media that operates in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital content can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, and preserved on a digital electronic device, including digital data storage media and digital broadcasting. Digital is defined as any data represented by a series of digits, and media refers to methods of broadcasting or communicating this information. Together, digital media refers to mediums of digitized information broadcast through a screen and/or a speaker. This also includes text, audio, video, and graphics that are transmitted over the internet for viewing or listening to on the internet.
Sherry Turkle is an American sociologist. She is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She obtained a BA in social studies and later a PhD in sociology and personality psychology at Harvard University. She now focuses her research on psychoanalysis and human-technology interaction. She has written several books focusing on the psychology of human relationships with technology, especially in the realm of how people relate to computational objects. Her memoir 'Empathy Diaries' received excellent critical reviews.
Technological convergence is the tendency for technologies that were originally unrelated to become more closely integrated and even unified as they develop and advance. For example, watches, telephones, television, computers, and social media platforms began as separate and mostly unrelated technologies, but have converged in many ways into an interrelated telecommunication, media, and technology industry.
Network society is an expression coined in 1991 related to the social, political, economic and cultural changes caused by the spread of networked, digital information and communications technologies. The intellectual origins of the idea can be traced back to the work of early social theorists such as Georg Simmel who analyzed the effect of modernization and industrial capitalism on complex patterns of affiliation, organization, production and experience.
New media are communication technologies that enable or enhance interaction between users as well as interaction between users and content. In the middle of the 1990s, the phrase "new media" became widely used as part of a sales pitch for the influx of interactive CD-ROMs for entertainment and education. The new media technologies, sometimes known as Web 2.0, include a wide range of web-related communication tools such as blogs, wikis, online social networking, virtual worlds, and other social media platforms.
Digitality is used to mean the condition of living in a digital culture, derived from Nicholas Negroponte's book Being Digital in analogy with modernity and post-modernity.
Rick Prelinger is an American archivist, writer, and filmmaker. A professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Prelinger is best known as the founder of the Prelinger Archives, a collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years' operation.
Mobile media has been defined as: "a personal, interactive, internet-enabled and user-controlled portable platform that provides for the exchange of and sharing of personal and non-personal information among users who are inter-connected." The notion of making media mobile can be traced back to the “first time someone thought to write on a tablet that could be lifted and hauled – rather than on a cave wall, a cliff face, a monument that usually was stuck in place, more or less forever”. In his book Cellphone, Paul Levinson refers to mobile media as “the media-in-motion business.” Since their incarnation, mobile phones as a means of communication have been a focus of great fascination as well as debate. In the book, Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone, Gerard Goggin notes how the ability of portable voice communication to provide ceaseless contact complicates the relationship between the public and private spheres of society. Lee Humphreys' explains in her book that now, "more people in the world today have a mobile phone than have an Internet connection".
Technoculture is a neologism that is not in standard dictionaries but that has some popularity in academia, popularized by editors Constance Penley and Andrew Ross in a book of essays bearing that title. It refers to the interactions between, and politics of, technology and culture.
Tiffany Shlain is an American filmmaker, artist, and author. Described by the public radio program On Being as "an internet pioneer", Shlain is the co-founder of the Webby Awards and the founder of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
Transmedia storytelling is the technique of telling a single story or story experience across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies.
Participatory culture, an opposing concept to consumer culture, is a culture in which private individuals do not act as consumers only, but also as contributors or producers (prosumers). The term is most often applied to the production or creation of some type of published media.
Andrew Keen is a British-American entrepreneur and author. He is particularly known for his view that the current Internet culture and the Web 2.0 trend may be debasing culture, an opinion he shares with Jaron Lanier and Nicholas G. Carr among others. Keen is especially concerned about the way that the current Internet culture undermines the authority of learned experts and the work of professionals.
The sociology of the Internet involves the application of sociological or social psychological theory and method to the Internet as a source of information and communication. The overlapping field of digital sociology focuses on understanding the use of digital media as part of everyday life, and how these various technologies contribute to patterns of human behavior, social relationships, and concepts of the self. Sociologists are concerned with the social implications of the technology; new social networks, virtual communities and ways of interaction that have arisen, as well as issues related to cyber crime.
Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy is Lawrence Lessig's fifth book. The book was made available for free download and remixing under the CC BY-NC Creative Commons license via Bloomsbury Academic. It is still available via the Internet Archive. It details a hypothesis about the societal effect of the Internet, and how this will affect production and consumption of popular culture to a "remix culture".
Astra Taylor is a Canadian-American documentary filmmaker, writer, activist, and musician. She is a fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation for her work on challenging predatory practices around debt.
Cyborg anthropology is a discipline that studies the interaction between humanity and technology from an anthropological perspective. The discipline offers novel insights on new technological advances and their effect on culture and society.
Democratization of technology refers to the process by which access to technology rapidly continues to become more accessible to more people, especially from a select group of people to the average public. New technologies and improved user experiences have empowered those outside of the technical industry to access and use technological products and services. At an increasing scale, consumers have greater access to use and purchase technologically sophisticated products, as well as to participate meaningfully in the development of these products. Industry innovation and user demand have been associated with more affordable, user-friendly products. This is an ongoing process, beginning with the development of mass production and increasing dramatically as digitization became commonplace.
In media studies and marketing, spreadability is the wide distribution and circulation of information on media platforms.
Lilie Chouliaraki is Chair in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE). Chouliaraki’s main area of research is the mediation of human vulnerability and suffering. Her publications have pioneered an interdisciplinary research field in Media and Communications Ethics, focusing on three areas of research:
