@article{morain_frith_cummings_berube_2011, title={Review Essay: Understanding Digital Media and Society}, volume={61}, ISSN={["0021-9916"]}, DOI={10.1111/j.1460-2466.2011.01560.x}, abstractNote={Bookstore shelves are filled with works about the digital media revolution, the authors of which claim to have an inside and nuanced understanding of one or more digital media artifacts, such as Facebook or Twitter. The recent proliferation of literature on emerging technologies and changing social behavior makes it difficult to find well-researched and engaging arguments that are relevant to digital media scholars. Fortunately, Polity's Digital Media and Society Series has consistently published one of the strongest collections devoted to digital media studies. The Digital Media and Society Series includes 12 books on diverse topics ranging from the challenges facing the music industry to the explosion of mobile communication. We have chosen to focus on 3 of the 12 books in this review to provide a snapshot of the research you can expect from Polity; each book in the series deserves its own thorough review and we recommend all 12 books in the series for their own respective audiences and purposes. The three we chose capture the breadth and variety of the series as a whole, including a detailed discussion of late capitalist society (The Information Society), an excellent examination of the organizing technology of the Information Age (Search Engine Society), and an analysis of a specific digital media community (YouTube).}, number={3}, journal={JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION}, author={Morain, Matthew and Frith, Jordan and Cummings, Christopher and Berube, David M.}, year={2011}, month={Jun}, pages={E12–E14} }
 @article{frith_morain_cummings_berube_2011, title={The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains}, volume={61}, ISSN={["0021-9916"]}, DOI={10.1111/j.1460-2466.2010.01535.x}, abstractNote={McLuhan (2003) argued that we cannot fully understand a medium until we have moved on to a new dominant medium. McLuhan may have been partially correct, but it seems overly defeatist to relegate medium studies to the field of history, and despite its contemporaneity, many scholars have actively criticized our current dominant medium: the Internet. Although some academics have certainly taken a utopian stance to the Internet—most notably early theorists such as Negroponte (1996) and Lèvy (1997)—others have criticized the growth of the Internet from diverse disciplinary perspectives. The popular press, however, has seen much more of the Wired-inspired techno-utopian writing than any kind of cogent criticism on how life is being reshaped by a near complete reliance on the Internet. It is within this context that Nicholas Carr and Jaron Lanier set out to establish a necessary corrective to the techno-utopian strands that run through the popular literature on the Internet. The two authors come from different backgrounds—Carr is a New York Times best-selling journalist and Lanier is a founding father of virtual reality and an influential tech guru—and use different support for their arguments, but both books can be read together as a criticism of the blind and indiscriminate embrace of the Internet by the public at large. They remind the reader that technological adoption has consequences, and we all need to consider whether the consequences are worth it. For that, they should be commended. However, both books also suffer from major weaknesses that mar their intended effectiveness. We will start with a brief description of Carr's The Shallows and then move on to Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget.}, number={1}, journal={JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION}, author={Frith, Jordan and Morain, Matt and Cummings, Chris and Berube, David}, year={2011}, month={Feb}, pages={E9–E12} }