Description
Book SynopsisIn
Media Hot and Cold Nicole Starosielski examines the cultural dimensions of temperature to theorize the ways heat and cold can be used as a means of communication, subjugation, and control. Diving into the history of thermal media, from infrared cameras to thermostats to torture sweatboxes, Starosielski explores the many meanings and messages of temperature. During the twentieth century, heat and cold were broadcast through mass thermal media. Today, digital thermal media such as bodily air conditioners offer personalized forms of thermal communication and comfort. Although these new media promise to help mitigate the uneven effects of climate change, Starosielski shows how they can operate as a form of biopower by determining who has the ability to control their own thermal environment. In this way, thermal media can enact thermal violence in ways that reinforce racialized, colonial, gendered, and sexualized hierarchies. By outlining how the control of temperature reveals pow
Trade Review“Nicole Starosielski awakens our senses from their thermal slumber. Hot and cool, warm and cold are not only metaphors; they shape worlds. I finished this book with the caloric throb of the universe humming in my ears. Starosielski's media analysis is wonderfully both elemental and critical: temperature reveals both ontology and injustice.
Media Hot and Cold invites us to a noncoercive rearrangement of affect.” -- John Durham Peters, Yale University
“In this dynamic and intellectually dazzling book, Nicole Starosielski grapples with complex technical principles of communication while framing them as historically and culturally conditioned and as politically and economically motivated. Starosielski's reconsideration of foundational communication models—looking beyond sender-receiver toward a more ambient and atmospheric sensibility—is necessary in an age when ubiquitous, continuous computing is fundamentally altering the atmosphere that hosts its signals.
Media Hot and Cold is a model of innovative and masterful interdisciplinarity.” -- Shannon Mattern, author of * A City is not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences *
"The intense media focus on climate change makes this meditation on the cultural significance of temperature coolly topical." -- Andrew Robinson * Nature *
“Apart from media studies students and scholars, anyone interested in temperature and how it is managed, controlled, manipulated, and distributed will find
Media Hot and Cold an incredible story of how temperatures determine lived experience. In this final call to arms, Starosielski polemicizes a future for media studies attendant to its world-building and world-sustaining capacities.” -- Samir Bhowmik * Film Quarterly *
"To walk into the world of Nicole Starosielski’s
Media Hot and Cold is to see familiar shapes with new intensities." -- Kyle Stine * ISLE *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Preface: Of Temperature xiii
Introduction: Media Hot and Cold 1
Part I
1. Thermostat: The Thermal Subjects of Broadcast Temperature 31
2. Coldsploitation: The Thermal Attractions of Cool Air 72
3. Sweatbox: The Thermal Violence of Weaponized Heat 109
Part II
4. Heat Ray: The Thermal Circuits of Radiant Media 135
5. Infrared Camera: The Thermal Vision of Heat Images 166
6. Computer: The Coldward Course of Media 191
Conclusion: Media after the Melt 219
Notes 225
Bibliography 255
Index 273
