I’m happy to announce a new special section of the International Journal of Communication, co-edited by Dylan Mulvin and me. The section was Dylan’s idea — part pun, part taking a metaphor seriously. Read it here.
The International Journal of Communication Publishes a new Special Section
on Temperature and Media Studies
The 21st century will be the century of temperature. As global temperatures
rise, polar ice melts, and drought becomes a permanent way of life,
temperature has become the single greatest challenge to human life on the
planet.
Temperature is also a media problem in many ways: from the heat generated by
new media–whether in our hands or in giant server farms; to the
technologies used to measure, represent, and understand temperature; to the
contribution of new media systems themselves to the problem of global
warming. But this is not a new phenomenon. For centuries, media and
mediation have been at the center of experiments in and beliefs about
temperature and its relation to culture, gender, language, and life. In
this special section, we take the 50th anniversary of Marshall McLuhan’s
Understanding Media literally to ask “What are hot and cold media?”
“Media, Hot and Cold” (guest-edited by Jonathan Sterne and Dylan Mulvin)
is a special section of the IJoC, that tackles questions of temperature in
media studies. Just as the intersection of media and temperature is hundreds
of years old, this special section shows that work on this intersection is
already happening. “Media, Hot and Cold” brings these existing research
threads together as a contribution to what promises–and needs–to be a
growing area of study.
Contributors
– Alice Christensen, Princeton University, USA
– Wolfgang Ernst, Humboldt University, Germany
– Brenton J. Malin, University of Pittsburgh, USA
– Jessica Mudry, Ryerson University, USA
– Dylan Mulvin, McGill University, Canada
– Lisa Parks, University of California Santa Barbara, USA
– Rafico Ruiz, McGill University, Canada
– Nicole Starosielski, New York University, USA
– Jonathan Sterne, McGill University, Canada
– Marita Sturken, New York University, USA
Read this special section that published October 30, 2014 at
http://ijoc.org.
Larry Gross
Editor
Arlene Luck
Managing Editor
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