Beyond new media : discourse and critique in a polymediated age / edited by Art Herbig, Andrew F. Herrmann, and Adam W. Tyma.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Beyond New Media: Discourse and Critique in a Polymediated Age examines a host of differing positions on media in order to explore how those positions can inform one another and build a basis for future engagements with media theory, research, and practice. Herbig, Herrmann, and Tyma have brought together a number of media scholars with differing paradigmatic backgrounds to debate the relative applicability of existing theories and in doing so develop a new approach: polymediation. Each contributor's disciplinary background is diverse, spanning interpersonal communication, media studies, organizational communication, instructional design, rhetoric, mass communication, gender studies, popular culture studies, informatics, and persuasion. Although each of these scholars brings with them a unique perspective on media's role in people's lives, what binds them together is the belief that meaningful discourse about media must be an ongoing conversation that is open to critique and revision in a rapidly changing mediated culture. By studying media in a polymediated way, Beyond New Media addresses more completely our complex relationship to media(tion) in our everyday lives.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

This edited collection is the third in the "Studies in New Media" series (begun in 2012). Herbig (Indiana Univ.-Purdue Univ.), Herrmann (East Tennessee State Univ.), and Tyma (Univ. of Nebraska, Omaha) offer eight essays that focus on and forward polymedia, a concept introduced by Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller. The editors begin by defining polymedia (a noun that also has verb, adjective, and adverb forms) as a means of moving past convergence. The breadth of the term allows the editors to bring together essays from many disciplines, including rhetoric, phenomenology, feminist studies, and media studies. However, this breadth also leaves the term diffuse and difficult to pin down. The collection is limited by the repetition of voices: Tyma, Herbig, and Herrmann each provide one chapter, and Hermann coauthors a second. Adding other voices to the conversation would have served the collection better. That said, the editors offer the collection as an opening salvo in a conversation around polymedia, and they suggest that the conversation be continued on social media resources (e.g., Twitter). Summing Up: Optional. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. --Stephanie Ellen Vie, University of Central Florida