Collaborative Media: Production, Consumption, and Design Interventions

by Jonas Lowgren, Bo Reimer

Overview

A thorough analysis of contemporary digital media practices, showing how people increasingly not only consume but also produce and even design media.

With many new forms of digital media–including such popular social media as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr—the people formerly known as the audience no longer only consume but also produce and even design media. Jonas Löwgren and Bo Reimer term this phenomenon collaborative media, and in this book they investigate the qualities and characteristics of these forms of media in terms of what they enable people to do. They do so through an interdisciplinary research approach that combines the social sciences and humanities traditions of empirical and theoretical work with practice-based, design-oriented interventions.

Löwgren and Reimer offer analysis and a series of illuminating case studies—examples of projects in collaborative media that range from small multidisciplinary research experiments to commercial projects used by millions of people. Löwgren and Reimer discuss the case studies at three levels of analysis: society and the role of collaborative media in societal change; institutions and the relationship of collaborative media with established media structures; and tribes, the nurturing of small communities within a large technical infrastructure. They conclude by advocating an interventionist turn within social analysis and media design.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262318457
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	11/15/2013
Series:	The MIT Press
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	5 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jonas Löwgren is Professor of Interaction Design at Malmö University. He is the coauthor of Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology (MIT Press).

Bo Reimer is a Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Malmö University. He is the coauthor of The Politics of Postmodernity.

What People are Saying About This

Jussi Parikka

Collaborative Media is fundamentally a book about how we design, satirize, reappropriate and invent over again. It demonstrates why we should not focus so much on the user in the singular, but in the plural. The book is necessary and warmly recommended scholarly intervention if you want to understand design and collaborative media — but also collaborative media research.

From the Publisher

The MIT Press

The MIT Press

The MIT Press

Editorial Reviews

My final conclusion is that this is, overall, a very wonderful book and a must read. There is a lot of wisdom in 150 pages.—Consumption Markets & Culture—

This book is an important contribution to the field, illustrated by a diverse set of case studies that bridge traditional disciplinary boundaries between design research, human–computer interaction, and media studies in ways that prioritize the doing of design... Collaborative Media will prove to be useful to researchers, and practitioners in any of the areas described, particularly the ones motivated by the deployment of design research in real-world contexts.

—Design Issues—

Löwgren and Reimer thoroughly analyse a complex set of issues related to this cultural shift, enriching the existing academic and public debates with new evidence from original case studies and a detailed theoretical discussion of what constitutes collaborative media in the 21st century. I salute the authors for this achievement and highly recommend reading this book.

—LSE Review of Books—

This book comes at a perfect time for faculty members bridging the gap between their academic practice of media studies and the interest of the students to get out and produce—to no longer be passive viewers subjected to a silver bullet media.

—Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly—

From the Publisher

Löwgren and Reimer thoroughly analyse a complex set of issues related to this cultural shift, enriching the existing academic and public debates with new evidence from original case studies and a detailed theoretical discussion of what constitutes collaborative media in the 21st century. I salute the authors for this achievement and highly recommend reading this book.

LSE Review of Books