Books in the Studies in New Media series

This book shows how traditional notions of the processes and products of creative adaptation are evolving online. It provides a vocabulary to analyze, discuss, and theorize about the implications of online forms of adaptation and highlights the potential and possible ethical quandaries of adaptation online.

Games Girls Play examines the role that video games play in girls' lives, including how games structure girls' leisure time, how playing video games constitutes different performances of femininity, and what influences girls to play or not play video games. Through interviews, focus groups, and qualitative content analyses, this book analyzes girls' involvement with video games. It also examines different contexts in which discourses of girls and video games occur, including girl-oriented video games, activist efforts to change the video game industry, and informal education programs that teach girls video game design.

Today, consumers of video games spend over $22.4 billion each year; using more complex and multi-layered strategies, game developers attempt to extend the profitability of their products from a simple one-time sale, to continuous engagement with the consumer. The Evolution and Social Impact of Video Game Economics examines paradigmatic changes in the economic structure of the video game industry from a media effects and game design perspective. This book explores how game developers have changed how they engage players in order to facilitate continuous financial transactions. Contributors look from the advent of microtransactions and downloadable content (DLCs) to the impact of planned obsolescence, impulse buying, and emotional control. This collection takes a broad view of the game dynamics and market forces that drive the video game industry, and features international contributors from Asia, Europe, and Australia.

This book examines how the video game industry's economic strategies have changed over the past decade (2006-2016) from a media effects and game design perspective. It also features discussions and analyses on the social impact of these changes and how consumers have reacted to evolving marketing and design strategies.

This collection posits thought-provoking analyses of sociocultural issues about human communication impacted by the omnipresence of social media. Contributors connect social media to gender, class, and race inequities, women's health, cyberbullying, sexting, and transgender issues both in the United States and in some developing countries.

Blogging: How Our Private Thoughts Went Public examines self-representational writing from its historical roots in personal diaries to its current form in personal blogs. Widely available on the Internet, personal blogs are the latest form of an ever more public writing style of self-reflection. Utilizing Hannah Arendt's philosophy of public, private, and social, this book delves deeper into the question of public versus private and provides an entrance for Arendt's work into today's mediated world. Arendt's understanding of public, private, and social allows us to better understand the need for boundaries and for both public and private spaces in our lives. Interpersonal communication theories, including boundary management theory and parasocial framework theory, help to better understand how people navigate public and private boundaries in communication. These theories provide a philosophical view of our overshared and overmediated world, and, specifically, how it affects our communication styles and practices.

This volume addresses the influence of new media on instruction, higher education, and pedagogy. It specifically examines the practical and theoretical implications of new media and the influence of new media on higher education.

This collection examines romantic relationship development via computer mediated communication. The contributors demonstrate how technology can impact perceptions of love and romance.

Communicating User Experience illustrates how the use of Local Strategies Research (LSR) methodologies enables designers to understand the cultural implications for user actions and practices in and through digital media.

The Twenty-First-Century Media Industry examines the role that new media technologies are having on the traditional media industry from a media management perspective. It provides an intriguing examination of how traditional media industries are adapting to new media technologies and evolving in the twenty-first century.

This volume addresses the influence of new media on instruction, higher education, and pedagogy. It specifically examines the practical and theoretical implications of new media and the influence of new media on higher education.

This collection examines romantic relationship development via computer mediated communication. The contributors demonstrate how technology can impact perceptions of love and romance.

Bringing together rhetorical, media studies, organizational communication, ethnographic, pop culture, mass communication, gender studies, and educational technology backgrounds to bear on polymediation, the authors interrogate the language by which we talk about the contemporary media landscape and the impact of the media on people's lives.

Globalization's Impact on Cultural Identity Formation: Queer Diasporic Males in Cyberspace examines diasporic, queer, cultural identity formations in an era of globalization by utilizing cyber-ethnography as a critical, cultural, and qualitative method. Atay presents cyber-ethnography as a method to make sense of complex, globally infused, and cultural experiences, examines how one creates and recreates cultural identity through lived and mediated realities, and analyzes how one uses mediated forms, such as web pages, chat rooms, blogs, and webcams, to understand and negotiate personal identity. Atay utilizes critical research methods, such as cyber-ethnography, to investigate different aspects of cultural identities as presented on these venues. This book aims to show the interconnected nature of cultural identity segments by highlighting some of the powerful cultural and social forces that mold our identities in this ever more global world.

Navigating New Media Networks examines the changes introduced into society through the increasing use of communication technology. The development of a networked society has allowed individuals to acquire the social resources and support needed to thrive in the modern world, but it has also placed great pressure on the individual to conduct the communication work needed to form and maintain relationships. McEwan explores this issue by delving into topics like identity, privacy, communication competence, online communities, online social support, mediated relational maintenance, and mobile communication. This work will be of interest to scholars of sociology, psychology, and communication.

Communicating User Experience illustrates how the use of Local Strategies Research (LSR) methodologies enables designers to understand the cultural implications for user actions and practices in and through digital media.

Bringing together rhetorical, media studies, organizational communication, ethnographic, pop culture, mass communication, gender studies, and educational technology backgrounds to bear on polymediation, the authors interrogate the language by which we talk about the contemporary media landscape and the impact of the media on people's lives.

The Twenty-First-Century Media Industry examines the role that new media technologies are having on the traditional media industry from a media management perspective. It provides an intriguing examination of how traditional media industries are adapting to new media technologies and evolving in the twenty-first century.