Stephen Monteiro (editor) - The Screen Media Reader: Culture, Theory, Practice

The Screen
Media Reader

The ideain fact, the needfor this collection arose when I developed a seminar on contemporary screen culture. I am grateful to the intrepid students in that course, whose response to the subject and its scattered literature informed my choices for the structure and contents of this book. The project has benefitted from the advice and support of several people, some of whose work appears in these pages. I am particularly indebted to Nicholas Mirzoeff and Murray Forman, both of whom have edited field-defining readers, for their valuable guidance in the earliest stages. I have also benefitted from the remarkable support of my editor at Bloomsbury, Katie Gallof, whose enthusiasm and support has never flagged, and editorial assistants Susan Krogulski, Michelle Chen, and Mary Al-Sayed. The readers for the press offered wise counsel, which I have done my best to heed in the final manuscript. I am grateful to all the authors, publishers, and organizations granting permission to publish the works presented here. I am particularly appreciative of those who were willing to do so at little or no expense. My family always has been a positive influence on my work. Manisha Iyer and Dhruv Iyer Monteiro have taught me much that I might otherwise never have learned about these magic windows and their diverse applications. The deepest roots of this book reach into my childhood and the many hours I spent around screens, long before I had any thought of studying them. The solid-state TV console, the drive-in, the handheld electronic games, the video arcade, the home slideshows, and the multiplex all cast their shadows here. Mindful of that, I am indebted to those guiding figures from my youthsome of them now gonewho did not equate screen time with wasted time.