Sara Pesce - The Politics of Ephemeral Digital Media: Permanence and Obsolescence in Paratexts

In the age of complex TV, of social networking and massive consumption of transmedia narratives, myriad short-lived phenomena surround films and TV programs raising questions about the endurance of a fictional world and other mediatized discourse over a long arc of time. The life of media products can change direction depending on the variability of paratextual materials and activities such as online commentaries and forums, promos and trailers, disposable merchandise and gadgets, grassroots video production, archives, and gaming. This book examines the tension between permanence and obsolescence in the production and experience of media by-products, analyzing the affections and meanings they convey and uncovering the machineries of their persistence or disposal. Paratexts, which have long been considered only ancillary to a central text, interfere instead with textual politics by influencing the viewers fidelity (or infidelity) to a product and affecting a fictional worlds life expectancy. Scholars in the fields of film studies, media studies, memory and cultural studies are here called to observe these by-products temporalities (their short form and/or long temporal extension, their nostalgic politics or future projections) and assess their increasing influence on our use of the past and present, on our temporal experience, and, consequently, on our social and political self-positioning through the media.

Sara Pesce teaches Film History and Performance Studies at the University of Bologna. She has published works on the historical roots of Hollywood, cultural memory, and performance. Among the subjects of her books are Hollywood Jewish founders (Dietro lo schermo, 2005), World War II memory in Italian film (Memoria e Immaginario, 2008), and Laurence Olivier (Laurence Olivier nei film, 2012).

Paolo Noto is Lecturer in film history at the University of Bologna. He is one of the editors in chief of Lavventura. Internation Journal of Italian Film and Media Landscapes and the secretary of the open access journal SERIES (series.unibo.it). He has authored two books, dedicated to the Italian neorealism (Il cinema neorealista, with Francesco Pitassio, 2010) and to the application of genre theory to the Italian post-war cinema (Dal bozzetto ai generi, 2011).

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

3 Racing Cyberculture
Minoritarian Art and Cultural Politics on the Internet
Christopher L. McGahan

4 Decoding Liberation
The Promise of Free and Open Source Software
Samir Chopra and Scott D. Dexter

6 Virtual English
Queer Internets and Digital Creolization
Jillana B. Enteen

8 Creating Second Lives
Community, Identity and Spatiality as Constructions of the Virtual
Edited by Astrid Ensslin and Eben Muse

10 Wordplay and the Discourse of Video Games
Analyzing Words, Design, and Play
Christopher A. Paul

12 Mobile Media Practices, Presence and Politics
The Challenge of Being Seamlessly Mobile
Edited by Kathleen M. Cumiskey and Larissa Hjorth

13 The Public Space of Social Media
Connected Cultures of the Network Society
Thrse F. Tierney

14 Researching Virtual Worlds
Methodologies for Studying Emergent Practices
Edited by Ursula Plesner & Louise Phillips

16 Social Media, Social Genres
Making Sense of the Ordinary
Stine Lomborg

17 The Culture of Digital Fighting Games
Performances and Practice
Todd Harper

20 Place and Politics in Latin American Digital Culture
Location and Latin American Net Art
Claire Taylor

24 Theories of the Mobile Internet
Materialities and Imaginaries
Edited by Andrew Herman, Jan Hadlaw, and Thom Swiss

25 The Ubiquitous Internet
User and Industry Perspectives
Edited by Anja Bechmann and Stine Lomborg

26 The Promiscuity of Network Culture
Queer Theory and Digital Media
Robert Payne

27 Global Media, Biopolitics, and Affect
Politicizing Bodily Vulnerability
Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage

28 Digital Audiobooks
New Media, Users, and Experiences
Iben Have and Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen

33 Feminism, Labour and Digital Media
The Digital Housewife
Kylie Jarrett

34 The Politics of Ephemeral Digital Media
Permanence and Obsolescence in Paratexts
Edited by Sara Pesce and Paolo Noto

First published 2016
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