"This chapter offers some historical and conceptual orientation to readers of the Oxford Handbook of Entertainment Theory. Departing from a brief review of ancient roots and 20th century pioneer works, we elaborate on the state and challenges of contemporary entertainment theory and research. This includes the need to develop a more explicit understanding of interrelationships among similar terms and concepts (e.g., presence and transportation), the need to reflect more explicitly on epistemological foundations of entertaiment theories (e.g., neo-behaviorism), and the need to reach back to past, even historical reasoning in communication that may be just as informative as the consideration of recent theoretical innovations from neigboring fields such as social psychology. Finally, we offer some reflections on programmatic perspectives for future entertainment theory, which should try to harmonize views from the social sciences and critical thinking, span cultural differences in entertainment processes, and keep track of the rapid technological progress of entertainment media"--

Our most basic relationship with the world is one of technological mediation. Nowadays our available tools are digital, and increasingly what counts in economic, social, and cultural life is what can be digitally stored, distributed, replayed, augmented, and switched. Yet the digital remains very much materially configured, and though it now permeates nearly all human life it has not eclipsed all older technologies. This Handbook is grounded in an understanding that our technologically mediated condition is a condition of organization. It maps and theorizes the largely unchartered territory of media, technology, and organization studies. Written by scholars of organization and theorists of media and technology, the chapters focus on specific, and specifically mediating, objects that shape the practices, processes, and effects of organization. It is in this spirit that each chapter focuses on a specific technological object, such as the Battery, Clock, High Heels, Container, or Smartphone, asking the question, how does this object or process organize? In staying with the object the chapters remain committed to the everyday, empirical world, rather than being confined to established disciplinary concerns and theoretical developments. As the first sustained and systematic interrogation of the relation between technologies, media, and organization, this Handbook consolidates, deepens, and further develops the empirics and concepts required to make sense of the material forces of organization.

Despite changes in the media landscape, film remains a vital force in contemporary culture, as do our ideas of what "a movie" or "the cinematic" are. Indeed, we might say that the category of film now only exists in theory. Whereas film-theoretical discussion at the turn of the 21st century was preoccupied, understandably, by digital technology's permeation of virtually all aspects of the film object, this volume moves the conversation away from a focus on film's materiality towards timely questions concerning the ethics, politics, and even aesthetics of thinking about the medium of cinema. To put it another way, this collection narrows in on the subject of film, not with a nostalgic sensibility, but with the recognition that what constitutes a film is historically contingent, in dialogue with the vicissitudes of entertainment, art, and empire. The volume is divided into six sections: Meta-Theory; Film Theory's Project of Emancipation; Apparatus and Perception; Audiovisuality; How Close is Close Reading?; and The Turn to Experience.

The Oxford Handbook of Media Psychology explores facets of human behaviour, thoughts, and feelings experienced in the context of media use and creation.

The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning provides fascinating insights into the ways in which social media, musical participation, and musical learning are increasingly entwined.

This handbook examines film and new media in the light of their convergence. It draws on leading scholars in the field to discuss traditional areas of history and theory of film and digital media. Its focus, however, is on the cycle of technologically driven arts. Film was born of a number of experiments in reproducing motion, all of which culminated in the nineteenth-century projection of short films. The creation of digital media resulted from experiments in alternative forms of representation in the early 1960s. John Whitney began creating avant-garde films from digital graphics around 1960 (and some of his ideas and methods were incorporated by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey). By the early 1990s, commercial filmmakers began to employ digital effects in their work. By the late nineties, digital arts had come fully into their own, both in the form of stand-alone or interactive artworks and films created with and for the computer. At the same time, digital effects had completely overtaken optical printing and matte painting in film. From special effects to creating "realistic" backgrounds and crowds, the digital is infiltrating all aspects of filmmaking. The infiltration is about to become a takeover, as celluloid is replaced by high definition digital recording and projection processes. Many aspects of film will change as this latest convergence takes place. Already, cultural response to film has changed as viewers begin to teach themselves about film through supplementary material on DVDs and to make their own films on home computers. But this handbook is not a technical history or manual. Quite the contrary, it is a scholarly work discussing the aesthetics, economics, and cultural results of these changes and convergences. The book balances traditional scholarship and analysis with essays addressing technological change and the concurrent changes in cultural responses to these changes, responses already acknowledged by the profession.

With engaging new contributions from the major figures in the fields of the media and public opinion The Oxford Handbook of American Public Opinion and the Media is a key point of reference for anyone working in American politics today.

Since its development shaped by the turmoil of the World Wars and suspicion of new technologies such as film and radio, political communication has become a hybrid field largely devoted to connecting the dots among political rhetoric, politicians and leaders, voters' opinions, and media exposure to better understand how any one aspect can affect the others. In The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication Kate Kenski and Kathleen Hall Jamieson bring together leading scholars, including founders of the field of political communication Elihu Katz, Jay Blumler, Doris Graber, Max McCombs, and Thomas Paterson,to review the major findings about subjects ranging from the effects of political advertising and debates and understandings and misunderstandings of agenda setting, framing, and cultivation to the changing contours of social media use in politics and the functions of the press in a democratic system. The essays in this volume reveal that political communication is a hybrid field with complex ancestry, permeable boundaries, and interests that overlap with those of related fields such as political sociology, public opinion, rhetoric, neuroscience, and the new hybrid on the quad, media psychology. This comprehensive review of the political communication literature is an indispensible reference for scholars and students interested in the study of how, why, when, and with what effect humans make sense of symbolic exchanges about sharing and shared power. The sixty-two chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Political Communication contain an overview of past scholarship while providing critical reflection of its relevance in a changing media landscape and offering agendas for future research and innovation.

Digital media are normal. But this was not always true. For a long time, lay discourse, academic exhortations, pop culture narratives, and advocacy groups constructed new Information and communications technologies (ICTs) as exceptional. Whether they were believed to be revolutionary, dangerous, rife with opportunity, or other-worldly, these tools and technologies were framed as extraordinary. But digital media are now mundane, thoroughly embedded - and often unquestioned - in everyday life. Digital ICTs are enmeshed in health and wellness, work and organizations, elections, capital flows, intimate relationships, social movements, and even our own identities. And although the study of these technologies has always been interdisciplinary - at the crossroads of computer science, cultural studies, science and technology studies, and communications - never has a sociological perspective been more valuable. Sociology has always excelled at helping us re-see the normal. The Oxford Handbook of Digital Media Sociology is a perfect point of entry for those curious about the state of sociological research on digital media. Each chapter reviews the sociological research that has been done thus far and points towards unanswered questions. The 34 chapters in the Handbook are arranged in six sections which look at digital media as they relate to: theory, social institutions, everyday life, community and identity, social inequalities, and politics & power. More than ever, the contributors to this volume help make it a centralizing resource, pulling together the various strands of sociological research focused on digital media. In addition to providing a distinctly sociological center for those scholars looking to find their way in the subfield, the volume offers top sociological research that provides an overview of digital media to explain our quickly changing world to a broader public. Readers will find it accessible enough for use in class, and thorough enough for seasoned professionals interested in a concise update in their areas of interest.

This collection surveys the contemporary landscape of audiovisual media. Contributors from image and sound studies explore the history and the future of moving-image media across a range of formats including blockbuster films, video games, music videos, social media, experimental film, video art, pornography, theater, and electronic music.