New Book Series From The MIT Press

We’re happy to announce that Distribution Matters will now be a book series from the MIT Press. The full announcement follows.

Distribution Matters

A new series from The MIT Press

Distribution Matters explores how media content, ideas, and information move through the world — and to what effect.

[PDF for printing | TXT for emailing]

Distribution networks — from postal services to social media platforms — affect in essential ways who has access to cultural resources, and on what terms. The Distribution Matters book series explores the impact of strategies, business models, and infrastructures for distribution across the media industries, including screen, print, broadcast, and digital media. It seeks to publish cutting-edge, critical scholarship that offers new ways to understand the movement of media through time and space.

The series is open to media scholars within a range of humanities and social science fields, including media studies, communication history, anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, internet studies, and cultural studies. We welcome proposals from scholars whose work explores how access to cultural resources is variously enabled, constrained, choreographed, and contested in and through distribution. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

● the histories of media distribution networks, their path dependencies, and social consequences
● distribution dynamics within particular sectors, such as games, video, publishing, and advertising
● logics of digital distribution (platformization, aggregation, recommendation, filtering, blocking, etc.)
● governance and regulation of distribution networks
● theoretical debates about circulation, networks, mobility, virality, and other issues
● everyday working practices and cultures of distribution
● informal distribution and piracy

For further information, please contact the editors:

Dr Joshua Braun (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Dr Ramon Lobato (RMIT University, Australia)

If you are writing a proposal for a book, please refer to the the proposal guidelines from The MIT Press. Proposals should adhere roughly to the format given, though we would welcome the inclusion of an additional subsection discussing why your book would be a good fit for the Distribution Matters series.

Event Audio: Benjamin Pearson, “Development Distribution? EU Aid, Film Distribution, and the Global South”

This is the fourth and final podcast installment featuring archival audio from the preconference event. Due to technical difficulties with the A/V system we weren’t able to record all of the day’s panels, but for posterity we’re dropping the presentations that were captured into this podcast feed. Sadly, the battery-operated microphones died out after the “Spreading the News” panel featured in the last installment. 

One of the mics, however, miraculously reanimated itself for a few minutes in the afternoon—long enough to capture exactly one presentation. It comes from Benjamin Pearson, who discussed a paper titled, “Development Distribution? EU Aid, Film Distribution, and the Global South.”

This episode’s theme music is “What’s Easy,” cc by nc sa 3.0 Learning Music Monthly

You can subscribe to this podcast via iTunes, Google Play, or RSS.

Event Audio: Spreading the News: Journalism and Digital Distribution

This is the third of four podcast installments featuring archival audio from the preconference event. Due to technical difficulties with the A/V system we weren’t able to record all of the day’s panels, but for posterity we’re dropping the presentations that were captured into this podcast feed.

This installment comes from the panel titled, “Spreading the News: Journalism and Digital Distribution” which was moderated by Josh Braun and features presentations by—in order of appearance—Lucas Graves, Jessica Kunert, Mikko Villi, Harsh Taneja, Angela Xiao Wu, Pablo Boczkowski, and Raven Maragh.

This episode’s theme music is “We’re Almost There,” cc by nc 4.0 Free Music Archive user Lee Rosevere

You can subscribe to this podcast via iTunes, Google Play, or RSS.

Event Audio: Infrastructure and Policy Histories Panel

This is the second of four podcast installments featuring archival audio from the preconference event. Due to technical difficulties with the A/V system we weren’t able to record all of the day’s panels, but for posterity we’re dropping the presentations that were captured into this podcast feed.

This installment comes from the “Infrastructure and Policy Histories” panel, which was moderated by Amanda Lotz and features presentations by—in order of appearance—W. D. Phillips, Rick Popp, Ishita Tiwary, Nikki Usher, Matthew Crain, and Jack Jamieson.

This episode’s theme music is “Clap Your Hands,” cc by nc 4.0 Free Music Archive user Scott Holmes

You can subscribe to this podcast via iTunes, Google Play, or RSS.

Event Audio: Introductory Panel

This is the first of four podcast installments featuring archival audio from the preconference event. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to capture audio of all of the day’s presentations. If you were there in San Diego, you’ll recall that the A/V system experienced a slow and painful death as the batteries in each of the wireless mics gave out. And while the venue was intimate enough that this didn’t much matter for the live presentations, it does mean that not everything was captured for posterity.

This first installment is the audio from the introductory panel, featuring (in order) Amanda Lotz, Josh Braun, and Ramon Lobato. Joe Turow also presented on this panel, but he stepped away from the microphone to present, so unfortunately his discussion of distribution and power role theory wasn’t captured.

This episode’s theme music is “Strong When She Doesn’t Want To Be,” cc by nc sa 3.0 John Wood

You can subscribe to this podcast via iTunes, Google Play, or RSS.