Now Available: Winter 2012 issue of Mediascape: UCLA's Journal of Cinema and Media Studies
February 24, 2012 - 10:30pm
"Space" is a nebulous concept, but the very difficulty in pinning down how a spatial discussion of media should proceed is why Mediascape thought this would be an appropriate discussion to tease out in our non-traditional format. With media today relegated less and less to traditional modes of exhibition, the space in which one views or even makes a film, TV show, or video game is changing rapidly. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly impossible to find a space in our daily lives that is not dictated or saturated by some kind of media technology. While some might argue that our society is becoming "hypermediated," there is a need, as Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin remind us, to see how older media forms persist and continue to reinvigorate themselves for new audiences. The ways in which we view, consume, play, and analyze media, moreover, will continue to change in reaction to the evolution and interaction of all media forms.
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…you may be reading on a laptop, iPad, Kindle, smartphone, or even an antique desktop PC. In the next decade, print of all forms will increasingly become relegated to the realm of digital text, so how will we as consumers, scholars, players, readers, and citizens respond? Will the space in which we consume our books and media matter less or more because of the new mobility with which we find ourselves? These essays, which deal with space through film, television, video games, and installation spaces, and through a range of critical theories and methodologies, provide, if not answers, some ideas for debate. At the very least, this issue offers some ways to look at these old and new spaces critically, but also with curiosity and hope. -- Bryan Hikari Hartzheim and Katy Ralko, Co-Editors-in-Chief (Excerpted from "in This Issue")
Table of Contents
Features
- Disneyomatics: Media, Branding, and Urban Space in Post-Katrina New Orleans
Helen Morgan Parmett
- War Games at Home, Home Games at War: Geography and Military First-Person Shooting Games
Diana M. Pozo
Reviews
- "Between Heaven and Here":Inner-City Apartheid and Socio-Spatial marginalization in The Wire
Iona Literat
- The Driving Forces and Scope of The Mapping of Taiwan
Jerome Keating
Columns
- Negotiating Utopia and Dystopia: Space and Architecture in Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009)
Annie Dell'Aria
Meta
- Urban Metaphysics: Creating Game Layers on Top of the World
Nettrice R. Gaskins
- Video Games: The State of the Field. A Discussion with Steve Mamber, Peter Lunenfeld, and Eddo Stern (March 28, 2011)
Moderated by David O'Grady
