Materialist Media Theory: An Introduction, Paperback

Our technologies rely on an ever-expanding infrastructure of wires, routers, servers, and hard drives-a proliferation of devices that reshape human interaction and experience prior to conscious knowledge. Understanding these technologies requires an approach that foregrounds media as an agent that collaborates in the production of the world beyond content or representation. Materialist Media Theory provides an accessible, synthetic account of the cutting edge of the theoretical humanities, examining a range of approaches to media's physical, infrastructural role in shaping culture, space, time, cognition, and life itself.

More than a mere introduction, Materialist Media Theory provides a critical intervention into matter and media, of interest to students and researchers in media studies, communication, cultural studies, visual culture, and beyond. Media determine our reality, and any politics of media must begin by foregrounding the media's materiality.

Grant Bollmer is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at North Carolina State University, USA, where he teaches in the Department of Communication and the PhD Program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media, and an Honorary Associate of the Department of Media and Communications at The University of Sydney, Australia. He is the author of the books Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archaeology of Connection (2016) and Theorizing Digital Cultures (2018).