Libros

How do people access movies today? What are the most popular and
powerful channels for media distribution on a global scale? How are
film industries changing in the face of media convergence and
digitisation?

To answer questions such as these, argues Ramon Lobato, we must shift
our gaze away from the legal film business and toward cinema's shadow
economies. All around the world, films are bought from roadside
stalls, local markets, and grocery stores; they are illegally
downloaded and streamed; they are watched in makeshift video clubs, on
street corners, and in restaurants, shops and bars. International film
culture in its actually-existing forms is a messy affair, and it
relies to a great extent on black and grey media markets. Examining
the industrial dynamics of these subterranean film networks across a
number of different sites – from Los Angeles to Lagos, Melbourne to
Mexico City – this book shows how they constitute a central rather
than marginal part of audiovisual culture and commerce.

Combining film industry analysis with cultural theory, Shadow
Economies of Cinema opens up a new area of inquiry for cinema studies,
putting industry research into dialogue with wider debates about
economic informality and commodity circulation. Written in an
accessible style, this book offers an original 'bottom-up' perspective
on the global cinema industry for researchers and students in film
studies, cultural studies, and media and communications.

RAMON LOBATO is Research Fellow at the Swinburne Institute for Social
Research, Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.

Mobile phones are no longer what they used to be. Not only can users connect to the Internet anywhere and anytime, they can also use their devices to map their precise geographic coordinates – and access location-specific information like restaurant reviews, historical information, and locations of other people nearby. The proliferation of location-aware mobile technologies calls for a new understanding of how we define public spaces, how we deal with locational privacy, and how networks of power are developed today.
In Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces, Adriana de Souza e Silva and Jordan Frith examine these social and spatial changes by framing the development of location-aware technology within the context of other mobile and portable technologies such as the book, the Walkman, the iPod, and the mobile phone. These technologies work as interfaces to public spaces – that is, as symbolic systems that not only filter information but also reshape communication relationships and the environment in which social interaction takes place. Yet rather than detaching people from their surroundings, the authors suggest that location-aware technologies may ultimately strengthen our connections to locations.

TOC:
Section I: Mobile Interfaces in Public Spaces
1. Interfaces to public spaces
2. The public and the private
3. From voice to location
Section II: Location-awareness in the contemporary city
4. Locational privacy
5. Power in location awareness
6. The presentation of location

About the Authors:
Adriana de Souza e Silva is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on how mobile and locative interfaces shape interactions with public spaces and create new forms of sociability. She is the co-editor of Digital Cityscapes: Merging Digital and Urban Playspaces, and co-author of Net-Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World,

Jordan Frith is a doctoral candidate in North Carolina State University's Communication, Rhetoric and Digital Media program. His main research interests are locative media and space, particularly how locative media may influence interactions in urban spaces. He has recently been published in the journals Mobilities and Communication, Culture, and Critique.　

rom the television interstitials that appear between programmes to the brief clips and videos that proliferate on YouTube, contemporary screen culture is populated by short-forms that make claims for our attention. Ephemeral Media provides a unique focus on these fleeting but increasingly ubiquitous texts. Through case studies in television and web entertainment, this original book looks at the production of media at the edges, within the junctions, and that surrounds the output of networks and studios. Analysing promos and idents, emergent forms of online TV and web drama, and the burgeoning world of worker- and user-generated content, this new collection examines screen forms that circulate 'between', 'beyond' and 'below' the TV programmes and films traditionally privileged within screen studies.

With essays by leading international scholars in television, film and new media studies, as well as interviews with key industry figures, Ephemeral Media explores the practices, strategies and textual forms helping producers (and viewers) negotiate a fast-paced mediascape. Examining dynamics of brevity and evanescence in television and new media, Ephemeral Media provides a new perspective on the transitory, and transitional, nature of screen culture in the early twenty-first century.

Contributors: Mark Brownrigg, John T. Caldwell, Rosamund Davies, Max Dawson, Jon Dovey, John Ellis, Elizabeth Evans, Paul Grainge, Victoria Jaye, J.P. Kelly, Barbara Klinger, Charlie Mawer, Peter Meech, William Uricchio.