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(Dis)Orientation appears to be a phenomenon that is connected to media in numerous respects: today, finding your way in the world often means finding your way with the help of as well as within media, which in turn creates new virtual realms of (dis)orientation. This book deals with recent media technologies and structures (navigation devices, databases, transmediality) and unconventional narrative patterns (narrative complexity, plot twists, non-linearity), using the ambivalent concept of (dis)orientation as a shared focus to analyse various phenomena of contemporary media, thereby raising overarching questions about current mediascapes.

This book offers a compelling perspective on the striking similarity of art and commerce in contemporary culture. Combining the history and theory of art with theories of contemporary culture and marketing, Maria A. Slowinska chooses three angles (space, object/experience, persona) to bridge present and past, aesthetic appearance and theoretical discourse, and traditional divisions between art and commerce. Beyond both pessimistic and celebratory rhetorics, Art/Commerce illuminates contemporary phenomena in which the aestheticization of commerce and the commercialization of aesthetics converge.

Besides products and services multinational corporations also sell myths, values and immaterial goods. Such meta-goods (e.g. prestige, beauty, strength) are major selling points in the context of successful marketing and advertising. Fashion adverts draw on deeply rooted human values, ideals and desires such as values and symbols of social recognition, beautification and rejuvenation. Although the reference to such meta-goods is obvious to some consumers, their rootedness in philosophical theories of human nature is less apparent, even for the marketers and advertisers themselves. This book is of special interest for researchers and students in the fields of Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Marketing, Advertising, Fashion, Cultural Critique, Philosophy, Sociology, Anthropology and Psychology, and for anyone interested in the ways in which fashion operates.

Grinding California provides the first academic analysis of the subculture of skate punk at book-length. It establishes highly critical evaluations of the discourses that influenced early skateboarding and punk cultures. Based on an examination of songs, flyers, magazines, and videos, Konstantin Butz revisits American popular cultures of the 1980s and approaches them from a variety of theoretical and methodological angles. He introduces contemplations of the rebellious potential that can be located within skate punk's material and corporeal contestations of the site-specific locale of suburban Southern California. Theoretical recourses to thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jean Baudrillard and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht are topped off with excerpts from interviews with some of the most influential protagonists of the 1980s skate punk scene.

The book analyzes the multifarious exchange of algorithmic technologies and concepts between the military and the media industry from the early 1990s until now. Unlike most related scholarly work which focuses on digital games, it drafts a model of programmable media which is grounded in a close-reading of the key technologies, most notably the paradigm of object-oriented programming, and reconsiders technical disciplines from a humanities perspective. This model is then applied to analyze the effects of algorithmic logic on the military-civilian continuum, including economic practices, patterns of media usage and military decision-making.

War correspondents are prominent actors in the media world. They took hold in the cultural imaginary soon after their profession had been created in the mid-19th century. With a particular focus on Britain, this study investigates the representation of war correspondents from Victorian times to the present, in memoirs, novels and films. Such representations react to prevailing notions that exist about war reporters and participate in their further construction. With its cultural approach, this book complements studies of war correspondents in media and communication studies, history and ethnology.