Bücher der Reihe Geographies of Media

Winner of the prestigious Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology 2024. This book explores recreational uses of consumer drones from the lenses of media ecology, mobile communication, mobilities research, and science and technology studies. In this provocative ethnography, Julia M. Hildebrand discusses camera drones as mobile media for meaningful play. She thus widens perspectives onto the flying camera as foremost unmanned aircraft, spying tool, or dangerous toy towards a more comprehensive understanding of its potentials. How should we situate drone practices in recreational spaces? What ways of seeing, moving, and being do hobby drones open up? Across chapters about drone geography, communication, mobility, visuality, and human-machine relations, Aerial Play introduces novel frameworks for drone affordances, such as communication on the fly, disembodied mobilities, auratic vertical play, and drone-mindedness. In the mobile companionship with her own drone, Hildebrand contributes an innovative ¿auto-technographic¿ method for the self-reflective study of media and mobility. Ultimately, her grounded and aerial fieldwork illuminates new technological, mobile, visual, and social relations in everyday spaces.

Recent years have witnessed a backlash against major global platforms, evidenced by burgeoning literatures on platform capitalism, the platform society, platform surveillance and platform governance, as well as regulatory attention towards the market power of platforms in their dominance of global data infrastructure.

This book is the first installment of a trilogy that explores the spatial dimensions of music. Music has generated substantial interest among geographers, but other academic disciplines have also developed related spatial perspectives on music. This trilogy brings together multiple approaches, each book investigating a bundle of interrelated themes. New Geographies of Music 1: Urban Policies, Live Music, and Careers in a Changing Industry starts with an introduction that explores contemporary approaches to the study of popular music. The following chapters address a range of issues, including the role of live music in urban development, how knowledge about local music ecosystems circulates among cities, urban networks of music production, how musical practices in local scenes are affected by core-periphery relations, and how musicians rely on touring in order to earn a living. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the relationship between space and music.

This book fills a gap in sociological theory surrounding how we engage with digital maps like Google Maps, Bing Maps, and OpenStreetMap (OSM). It explains how they feature in everyday life and with what social consequences. To do so, the book walks through examples of how digital maps shape social practices, from choosing which home to buy (landed capital acquisition), through to selecting routes between places. The book first provides a socio-technical background to digital maps and their development as progeny of the Internet and web rather than direct successors to paper-based ones. It then charts the evolution of theory about map use from its origin in academic cartography to contemporary thought, introducing concepts from systems-based communication models, semiotics, cognitive-behaviorism, critical cartography, and critical data and platform studies. With background concepts in place, the book moves on to develop a particular framework for analysing digital media use. Combining digital sociology and practice theory, the book works through empirical examples to cumulatively develop a new sociological theory on the social consequences of digital maps. The book argues that we defer to digital maps knowledgeably as rough guides, adopting a Bayesian logic - albeit with an awareness of their potential for error. As a result, decisions over choice of place and route - the mobility of people and things in space - become anchored within people¿s deferral to digital maps. By extension, so do senses of place, sense of security, and the performance of social positions.

Songs from Sweden shows how Swedish songwriters and producers are the creative forces behind much of today's international pop music. While Swedish writer-producers developed early global recognition for making commercially successful pop music, new Swedish writer-producers have continuously emerged during the last two decades.