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The rise of independent cinema in Southeast Asia, following the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers there, is among the most significant recent developments in global cinema. The advent of affordable and easy access to digital technology has empowered startling new voices from a part of the world rarely heard or seen in international film circles. The appearance of fresh, sharply alternative, and often very personal voices has had a tremendous impact on local film production. This book documents these developments as a genuine outcome of the democratization and liberalization of film production. Contributions from respected scholars, interviews with filmmakers, personal accounts and primary sources by important directors and screenwriters collectively provide readers with a lively account of dynamic film developments in Southeast Asia. Interviewees include Lav Diaz, Amir Muhammad, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Eric Khoo, Nia Dinata and others.

Many pioneering works of electronic literature are now largely inaccessible because of changes in hardware, software, and platforms. The virtual disappearance of these works--created on floppy disks, in Apple’s defunct HyperCard, and on other early systems and platforms--not only puts important electronic literary work out of reach but also signals the fragility of most works of culture in the digital age. In response, Dene Grigar and Stuart Moulthrop have been working to document and preserve electronic literature, work that has culminated in the Pathfinders project and its series of “Traversals”--video and audio recordings of demonstrations performed on historically appropriate platforms, with participation and commentary by the authors of the works. In Traversals, Moulthrop and Grigar mine this material to examine four influential early works: Judy Malloy’s Uncle Roger (1986), John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse (1993), Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) and Bill Bly’s We Descend (1997), offering “deep readings” that consider the works as both literary artifacts and computational constructs. For each work, Moulthrop and Grigar explore the interplay between the text’s material circumstances and the patterns of meaning it engages and creates, paying attention both to specificities of media and purposes of expression.

Streaming: Movies, Media and Instant Access is distinctive and commercially viable because it examines the most crucial area in moving image studies today; the way that the image is captured, disseminated, and consumed by contemporary audiences, and the manner in which this process, or series of processes, is constantly being revised. Readers will gain from the book a better understanding of the enormous shift that this switch to digital will make in the habits of viewers, who can now see films on everything from cell phones to conventional theatre screens. Streaming: Movies, Media and Instant Access will chart the ways in which the Hollywood model of embracing digital production is spreading around the world, while still maintaining an almost monolithic grip on the international market. Streaming: Movies, Media and Instant Access will thus focus on Hollywood production, as the model that still informs international film production in both a genre and star-based model, but show how this model is now spreading throughout the planet. In addition, Streaming: Movies, Media and Instant Access will examine how the new digital world impacts how we access music, books, and also how digital culture, through surveillance devices and facial recognition systems, documents every facet of our everyday life.

Digital communication technologies have thrust the calculus of global political power into a period of unprecedented complexity. In every aspect of international affairs, digitally enabled actors are changing the way the world works, and disrupting the institutions that once held a monopoly on power. No area is immune: Humanitarianism, War, Diplomacy, Finance, Activism, or Journalism. In each, the government departments, international organizations and corporations who for a century were in charge, are being challenged by a new breed of international actor. Online, networked and decentralized, these new actors are innovating, for both good and ill, in the austere world of foreign policy. This book will bring these actors to light, explore their methods and tools, and demonstrate how they represent a new form of power. What is it that makes for successful digital international action? What are the tools being used by the actors increasingly controlling international affairs? How does their rise change the way we understand and act in the world? What are the negative consequences of a radically decentralized international system? And how can governments and corporations act to promote positive behaviour in a world of disruptive innovation? Disruptive Power explores the frontier of international affairs, profiles a wide range of emerging actors, and provides a road map for navigating a networked digital world. A world enabled by information technology, and led by disruptive innovators.

Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine is an analysis of the ways that segregated landscapes have shaped digital cartography in Jerusalem and the West Bank since 1967. Extending work on how technology is socially constructed, it investigates the ways that knowledge is geographically produced. Technoscientific practices are situated in landscapes that are at once both social and material, and this influences the content of digital technology in sometimes unpredictable ways. Therefore it is necessary to reflexively engage with materiality and space in order to enable more diverse forms of knowledge. Maps are an iconic symbol of modernity, and they have been central to debates over the future of Palestine and Israel. This has only intensified as Geographic Information Science (GIS) mapmaking has led to increasingly minute forms of surveillance and control. Intended to display objective facts, maps inspire extensive discussions. However, the framing of these discussions cannot be divorced from the participants’ asymmetrical mobilities within the very terrains that they seek to portray. Therefore it is essential to investigate how Palestinian, Israeli, and international cartographers are unevenly affected by the segregated landscapes which their technologies have helped to create. Mapping Israel, Mapping Palestine addresses these important issues by bringing together the disciplines of critical geography, postcolonial theory, and science and technology studies (STS). It presents an analysis of the maps and mapmaking practices that result when diverse cartographers chart the same landscapes that so condition their movement. It investigates the myriad ways that the segregated landscapes of the Israeli occupation shape knowledge about the occupation.

The digital economy has great potential, but it also entails risks. The notion of personal property and ownership is under threat because of the shift to digital distribution and ubiquitous embedded software. This book makes a case for the importance of ownership in the digital age. It argues that the rights associated with ownership serve critical functions of promoting cultural preservation and innovation as well as protecting consumer autonomy. Technological developments and the aggressive efforts of IP rights holders, however, are gradually eroding the concept of ownership. There has been a disconcerting trend of courts bypassing the default rules of property law; the rights acquired by consumers through purchase are defined instead by license agreements drafted by IP rights holders or retailers. In addition to license agreements, IP rights holders also employ technological methods such as Digital Rights Management (DRM) to restrict consumer use and protect their intellectual property. The matter is made worse by online retailers’ insufficient disclosure, which frequently uses words like “buy” or “own” to offer false promises of ownership. The loss of personal property rights has serious consequence not just for individual consumers; an important institutional actor – the public library – is also struggling to deal with the shift to digital collections and the corresponding restrictions imposed by IP rights holders. In response to these threats to ownership, the book explores legal as well as technological solutions, and presents a powerful argument for informed consumer choice in the digital marketplace.

Brands are introduced into the lives of consumers from an early age. Even before they start school, they can recognise brand names and ask for brands by name. The meaning of brands to children can vary dramatically with age. As with other aspects of consumer socialisation, children's initial orientation towards brands occurs at a superficial level because their level of cognitive development does not allow them to understand deeper-seated symbolic meanings of brands. This book examines these processes and how they evolve over the different stages of childhood. It considers specific models of cognitive development and how they inform what we know about the way children engage with brands. It also examines the way brands have adopted new promotional platforms in the digital era and in consequence the ways in which they have taken on new forms that often disguise their true purpose. While children can begin the understand the nature and purpose of advertising from well before their teen years, when advertising is less overt and more subtle – as it often is in the promotional techniques used by brands in online social media and virtual environments – this can impede a child's ability to recognise what is going on. This book examines these phenomena and considers their implications for the future regulation of brand promotions.

Chinese-speaking popular cultures have never been so queer as in this digital, globalist age. In response to the proliferation of queer representations, productions, fantasies, and desires, especially as manifested online, this book explores extended, diversified, and transculturally informed fan communities and practices based in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan that have cultivated various forms of queerness. To right an imbalance in the scholarly literature on queer East Asia, this volume is weighted toward an exploration of queer elements of mainland Chinese fandoms that have been less often written about than more visible cultural elements in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Case studies drawn from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the flows among them include: the Chinese online Hetalia fandom; Chinese fans’ queer gossip on the American L-Word actress Katherine Moennig; Dongfang Bubai iterations; the HOCC fandom; cross-border fans of Li Yuchun; and Japaneseness in Taiwanese BL fantasies; among others.

Based upon a year’s ethnographic fieldwork with 27 members of an ordinary London class, this book offers an original, readable and engaging study of the lives of one class of 13 to 14-year-olds in a contemporary London neighbourhood. Telling the story of their lives at home, in school, hanging out with friends and online, it shows how the lives of young people today are shaped by the pressures of individualization and how schools, families and the young people themselves attempt to negotiate the meaning of education in a digitally connected yet fiercely competitive world. The book examines young people’s concrete experiences of growing up in early twenty-first century Britain, asking: what matters to them, what vision of the future do they think their parents and teachers are preparing them for, and how are they facing the opportunities or challenges that lie ahead? While media, public and policy discourses express hopes and fears about the potential of digital media networks, the book shows how young people, along with their parents and teachers, are more invested in maintaining their separate spheres of interest. Thus they exercise their agency more to disconnect than to connect with others or across activities or places. The Class’s intersecting portraits of 27 children provide new insight into a host of academic, policy and practitioner/educator debates about what it means to grow up in contemporary society and what roles family, school, community and media now play in the lives of young people.

Since the dawn of Hip Hop graffiti writing in the late ‘60s, graffiti writers have inscribed their tag names on cityscapes across the globe to claim public space and mark their presence. In the absence of knowing the writer’s identity, the onlooker’s imagination defaults to the gendered, classed, and racialized conventions framing a public act that requires bodily strength and a willingness to take legal, social, and physical risks. Graffiti subculture is thus imagined as a “boys club” and consequently the graffiti grrlz fade from the social imagination. Utilizing a queer feminist perspective, this book is a transnational ethnography that tells an alternative story about Hip Hop graffiti subculture from the vantage point of over 100 women who write graffiti in 23 countries. Grounded in 15 years of research, each chapter examines a different site and process of transformation. Under the radar of feminist movement, they’ve remodeled Hip Hop masculinity, created an affective digital network, challenged androcentric graffiti history and reshaped subcultural memory, sustained all-grrl community, and strategically deployed femininity to transform their subcultural precarity. By performing feminism across the diaspora, graffiti grrlz have elevated their subcultural status and resisted hetero/sexist patriarchal oppression.