Actionable Media : Digital Communication Beyond the Desktop - John Tinnell

Actionable Media

Digital Communication Beyond the Desktop

By: John Tinnell

Paperback | 15 November 2017

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In 1991, Mark Weiser and his team at Xerox PARC declared they were reinventing computers for the twenty-first century. The computer would become integrated into the fabric of everyday life; it would shift to the background rather than being itself an object of focus. The resulting rise of ubiquitous computing (smartphones, smartglasses, smart cities) have since thoroughly colonized our digital landscape. In Actionable Media, John Tinnell contends that there is an unsung rhetorical dimension to Weiser's legacy, which stretches far beyond recent iProducts. Taking up Weiser's motto, "Start from the arts and humanities," Tinnell develops a theoretical framework for understanding nascent initiatives--the Internet of things, wearable interfaces, augmented reality--in terms of their intellectual history, their relationship to earlier communication technologies, and their potential to become vibrant platforms for public culture and critical media production.

It is clear that an ever-widening array of everyday spaces now double as venues for multimedia authorship. Writers, activists, and students, in cities and towns everywhere, are digitally augmenting physical environments. Audio walks embed narratives around local parks for pedestrians to encounter during a stroll; online forums are woven into urban infrastructure and suburban plazas to invigorate community politics. This new wave of digital communication, which Tinnell terms "actionable media," is presented through case studies of exemplar projects by leading artists, designers, and research-creation teams. Chapters alter notions of ubiquitous computing through concepts drawn from Bernard Stiegler, Gregory Ulmer, and Hannah Arendt; from comparative media analyses with writing systems such as cuneiform, urban signage, and GUI software; and from relevant stylistic insights gleaned from the open air arts practices of Augusto Boal, Claude Monet, and Janet Cardiff. Actionable Media
challenges familiar claims about the combination of physical and digital spaces, beckoning contemporary media studies toward an alternative substrate of historical precursors, emerging forms, design philosophies, and rhetorical principles.
Industry Reviews
"By linking rhetoric and ubiquitous computing, Tinnell offers a fascinating view into new forms of writing, meaning-making, and spatial practice as we move into a new era of ubiquitous computing. Tinnell's writing style is approachable, sophisticated, well-researched, and thoroughly entertaining." --Jason Farman, Associate Professor and Director, Design Cultures & Creativity Program, University of Maryland, College Park "John Tinnell's Actionable Media is part of the next generation of required reading at the intersection of rhetoric and media studies. His book cuts across a wide swath of past and present forms of post-desktop computing to give us the tools we desperately need not just to understand the products of digital culture but to intervene in and reimagine our contemporary, digitally-mediated world. At this point in time, what could be more important than making our media actionable?" --Lori Emerson, Associate Professor and Director of the Media Archaeology Lab, University of Colorado at Boulder

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Published: 15th November 2017

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