I’m thrilled to announce that our anthology, Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by myself and Pablo Boczkowski and Kirsten Foot, is now officially available from MIT Press. Contributors include Geoffrey Bowker, Finn Brunton, Gabriella Coleman, Gregory Downey, Steven Jackson, Christopher Kelty, Leah Lievrouw, Sonia Livingstone, Ignacio Siles, Jonathan Sterne, Lucy Suchman, and Fred Turner. One essay from the collection already debuted on this blog. Now we’ve secured permission to share the introduction with you. A blurb:

In recent years, scholarship around media technologies has finally shed the presumption that technologies are separate from and powerfully determining of social life, seeing them instead as produced by and embedded in distinct social, cultural, and political practices – and as socially significant because of that. This has been helped along by a productive intersection between work in science and technology studies (STS) interested in information technologies as complex sociomaterial phenomena, and work in communication and media studies attuned to the symbolic and public dimensions of these tools.

In this volume, scholars from both fields come together to provide some conceptual paths forward for future scholarship. Two sets of essays and commentaries comprise this collection: the first addresses the relationship between materiality and mediation, considering such topics as the lived realities of network infrastructure. The second highlights media technologies as fragile and malleable, held together through the minute, unobserved work of many, including efforts to keep these technologies alive.

Please feel free to circulate this introduction to others, and write back to us with your thoughts, criticisms, and ideas. We hope this volume helps anchor the exciting conversations we see happening in the field, and serves a launchpad for future scholarship.

ToC and Chapter 1 – Introduction (Media Technologies)