Libros

Understanding Cultural Taste updates and critiques established theoretical and empirical accounts of cultural taste. It takes account of the role of cultural industries and cultural policies in shaping cultural tastes and of the contemporary technologies through which cultural goods are produced, circulated and consumed. It weaves together a story of taste as bound up with sensation, skill and sensibility. Taking a historical and theoretical perspective which complicates an understanding of taste as either a matter of personal preference or a simple weapon in social struggles, the book argues that taste remains a significant and complex concept in the sociology of culture, media and cultural studies, cultural policy studies and in their applied sub-disciplines. Such disciplines have come to appreciate and accept the relation between taste and individual and group identities but have been less attentive to other social and political dimensions of this important component of cultural life.

Digital Creativity examines the impact of technology on the creative practitioner, how it influences, and sometimes determines, the way they work and what they produce. It questions the claims to creativity of the technology industry, and at the same time argues for seeing computing as a craft practice. Artists and craftspeople have always been drawn to new technologies for inspiration, and the book seeks to contextualize the frenzy of claims about the impact of digital technology against the reality of what it is to be creative. The different motivations for creativity are tested, making much-needed distinctions between the practices of the arts and the models of innovation in engineering and elsewhere in the technology industries. Finally, the book warns of the problems ahead if technology comes to dominate creative practice, either by defining it or imitating it. Ultimately, artists must engage with it if it is to retain a human form and scale.

Power, Media, Culture is embedded in an analytical perspective that is needed today more than ever in order to understand the functioning of our complex cultural and media systems. It is destined to become a reference work for those interested in delving into the debates arising from the performance of traditional and new media, cultural and communication policy-making, and sociocultural practices in the new digital landscape. This book is a timely and useful roadmap for understanding the relationship of communication and culture with power in the current phase of globalized capitalism, whose main driver lies in the communication sector.