In Search of Media

Edited by Clemens Apprich, Timon Beyes, Mercedes Bunz, and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun

Our present, characterized by machine-learning processes, technological infrastructures, and emerging data worlds, urges us to think about how media are shaping the conditions under which we live, socialize, communicate, organize, and learn. Searching for media as preexisting conditions of our everyday lives requires us to question the parameters, the limits, the times, the spaces of media today. How do media form our current situation? And how does the situation make use of them?

This book series looks at these questions by examining the often hidden “terms of media” under which users operate. Rather than producing a set of explanatory keywords to describe media practices, the aim is to understand the conditions under which media are produced, and the ways in which media impact and change those conditions. Clearly, recent technical developments have led to the idea of an always-available knowledge. At the same time, this has transformed the very nature of knowledge production itself, including the assumption that more data must lead to more knowledge. Beyond the mere accumulation of data and knowledge, disciplines—from sociology to economics, from the arts to the humanities—are increasingly in search of media as a way to add context and reinvigorate their methods and objects of study. Exploring the situation of digital media and technology, this series asks: What are the conditions of media knowledge today?

To answer this question, each book features interventions by several authors whose approaches to a concept or term diverge and converge in surprising ways. By bringing together scholars from different intellectual fields and academic regions, this series aims to advance media and technology theory by provoking new descriptions, prescriptions, and hypotheses—to rethink and reimagine what media can and must do today.

In Search of Media is a joint collaboration between meson press and the University of Minnesota Press.