THE MEDIUM PICTURE
(forthcoming, UGA Press)
The ever-evolving ways that we interact with each other, our world, and our selves through technology is a topic as worn as the devices we clutch and carry everyday. How did we get here?
Drawing from the disciplines of media ecology and media archaeology, as well as bringing fresh perspectives from subcultures of music and skateboarding, The Medium Picture illuminates aspects of technological mediation that have been overlooked along the way. With a Foreword by Andrew McLuhan, it shows how immersion in unmoored technologies of connectivity finds us in a world of pure media and redefines who we are, how we are, and what we will be.
The Medium Picture is forthcoming in the fall of 2025 from the University of Georgia Press.
Advance Praise:
“Exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.” — William Gibson
“Like a skateboarder repurposing the utilitarian textures of the urban terrain for sport, Roy Christopher reclaims the content and technologies of the media environment as a landscape to be navigated and explored. The Medium Picture is both a highly personal yet revelatory chronicle of a decades-long encounter with mediated popular culture.”
— Douglas Rushkoff
“A synthesis of theory and thesis, research and personal recollection, The Medium Picture is a work of rangy intelligence and wandering curiosity. Thought-provoking and a pleasure to read.” — Charles Yu
“Immersed in the contemporary digital culture he grew up with as a teenager, Roy Christopher is old enough to recall vinyl, punk, and zines — social media before TikTok and smartphones. The Medium Picture deftly illuminates the connections between post-punk music critique, the increasing virtualization of culture, the history of formal media theory, the liminal zones of analog vs digital, pop vs high culture, capitalism vs anarchy. It’s the kind of book that makes you stop and think and scribble in the margins.” — Howard Rheingold
“Through music, generational habits, pre- and post-internet cultures, and a multitude of ‘cognitive entanglements’, this book flows with grace across different scales of mediation and affect.” — Jussi Parikka
“Brilliant, pathbreaking, palpable insights… Worthy of McLuhan.” — Paul Levinson
“This book looks wonderful!” — Laurie Anderson
Table of Contents:
Foreword by Andrew McLuhan
Preface
I. SEPARATION: Forking Paths.
1. Err Apparent
2. Audible Arrangements
3. Algorithm Nation
II. THRESHOLD: Walls, Windows, Doors.
4. Time of the Signs
5. The Surface Industry
6. A Message in a Bottleneck
III. CROSSING: The Human Patina.
7. Disguise the Limit
8. Location is Everywhere
9. Suture Self
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