Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

New Media: A Critical Introduction is a comprehensive introduction to the culture, history, technologies and theories of new media. Written especially for students, the book considers the ways in which 'new media' really are new, assesses the claims that a media and technological revolution is underway and formulates new ways for media studies to respond to new technologies.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• New Media: A Critical Introduction
• Introduction
• 1 New Media and New Technologies
• 1.1 What are new media?
• 1.2 The characteristics of new media: some defining concepts
• 1.3 Change and continuity
• 1.4 What kind of history?
• 1.5 Who was dissatisfied with old media?
• 1.6 New media: determining or determined?
• Bibliography
• 2 New Media and Visual Culture
• 2.1 New Technologies and Issues for Visual Culture
• 2.2 Visual Culture
• 2.3 Visuality
• 2.4 Could there be a distinct digital visual culture?
• 2.5 New image technologies
• 2.6 Immersive virtual reality
• 2.7 VR as a medium of art: a quantum leap forward?
• 2.8 Digital cinema
• Bibliography
• 3 Network Users and Economics
• 3.0 Introduction
• 3.1 Networks: communities, audiences and users
• 3.2 What is the internet?
• 3.3 Networks and identity
• 3.4 Learning to live in the interface
• 3.5 Networks and communities
• 3.6 Visionary communities
• 3.7 Defining community online
• 3.8 Networks as public spheres
• 3.9 The net as postmodern public sphere
• 3.10 Critique of the net as public sphere
• 3.11 The post-web internet
• 3.12 Remediation and economics
• 3.13 Towards theorising web users
• 3.14 Raymond Williams fixes base and superstructure
• 3.15 Media studies and political economy
• 3.16 The social form of new media
• 3.17 New media and post-industrial economies
• 3.18 The development of the new economy
• 3.19 Technological agency, economics and politics: inventions and developments
• 3.20 Technological agency, economics and politics: globalisation and telecommunications
• 3.21 The digital divide
• 3.22 Uneven globalisation
• 3.23 Investment in new media: intention and use
• 3.24 Intellectual property rights, determined and determining
• 3.25 Information as commodity
• 3.26 Fragmentation and convergence
• 3.27 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• 4 New Media in Everyday Life
• 4.1 Everyday life in cyberspace
• 4.2 The domestic shaping of new media
• 4.3 New media, identity and the everyday (very important indeed
• Should be articulated stronger)
• 4.4 Gameplay
• Bibliography
• 5 Cyberculture: Technology, Nature and Culture
• 5.1 Cyberculture and cybermetics
• 5.2 Revisiting determinism: physicalism, humanism and technology
• 5.3 Biological technologies: the history of automata
• 5.4 Theories of cyberculture (too abstract)
• Bibliography
• Glossary
• Index