Life After New Media―Mediation As a Vital Process

In Life after New Media, Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska make acase for a significant shift in our understanding of new media. They argue that we should movebeyond our fascination with objects--computers, smart phones, iPods, Kindles--to an examination ofthe interlocking technical, social, and biological processes of mediation. Doing so, they say,reveals that life itself can be understood as mediated--subject to the same processes ofreproduction, transformation, flattening, and patenting undergone by other media forms.

By Kember and Zylinska's account, the dispersal of media and technology into ourbiological and social lives intensifies our entanglement with nonhuman entities.Mediation--all-encompassing and indivisible--becomes for them a key trope for understanding ourbeing in the technological world. Drawing on the work of Bergson and Derrida while displaying arigorous playfulness toward philosophy, Kember and Zylinska examine the multiple flows of mediation.Importantly, they also consider the ethical necessity of making a "cut" to any mediaprocesses in order to contain them. Considering topics that range from media-enacted cosmic eventsto the intelligent home, they propose a new way of "doing" media studies that issimultaneously critical and creative, and that performs an encounter between theory and practice.