Produced as part of the Art and Virtual Environment Project conducted at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Banff, Canada from 1991 to 1994.

Highlights key research currently being undertaken within the field of telepresence, providing the most detailed account of the field to date, advancing our understanding of a fundamental property of all media - the illusion of presence; the sense of “being there” inside a virtual environment, with actual or virtual others. This collection has been put together by leading international scholars from America, Europe, and Asia. Together, they describe the state-of-the-art in presence theory, research and technology design for an advanced academic audience. Immersed in Media provides research that can help designers optimize presence for users of advanced media technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, collaborative social media, robotics, and artificial intelligence and lead us to better understand human cognition, emotion and behaviour.

A revelatory and timely look at how technology boosts our cognitive abilities—making us smarter, more productive, and more creative than ever It’s undeniable—technology is changing the way we think. But is it for the better? Amid a chorus of doomsayers, Clive Thompson delivers a resounding “yes.” In Smarter Than You Think, Thompson shows that every technological innovation—from the written word to the printing press to the telegraph—has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But, as in the past, we adapt—learning to use the new and retaining what is good of the old. Smarter Than You Think embraces and extols this transformation, presenting an exciting vision of the present and the future.

"Over the next few decades, immersive media could fundamentally change the ways humans engage in entertainment, communication, and social interaction. The current volume takes a step towards understanding this potential paradigm shift, combining insights from pioneers of the field of ‘presence’ with bright young scholars who bring a new perspective." —Jeremy Bailenson, Stanford University, USA "This book provides an indispensable contribution to scholars in communication studies, computer science and psychology interested in the modes of being present in different media, and offers a careful historical and theoretical framework to the state-of-the-art research."—Anna Spagnolli, University of Padova, Italy "Bracken and Skalski have assembled a collection of works from the world’s foremost authorities on telepresence, a topic that has gone understudied for years. Someone has finally assembled a comprehensive volume on the subject. This book is a must not only for those interested in telepresence, but for mass communication scholars of all kinds."—Kenneth A. Lachan, University of Massachusetts, Boston, USA Immersed in Media highlights the increasing significance of telepresence in the media field. With contributions representing diverse disciplines, this volume delves into the topic through considerations of popular media types and their effects on users. Chapters in the work explain how the experience of presence can be affected by media technologies, including television, video games, film, and the Internet. They also discuss how presence experience mediates or moderates commonly studied media effects, such as enjoyment, persuasion, and aggression. These discussions are accompanied by overviews of the current state of presence research and its future. Ultimately, this work establishes the crucial role of telepresence in gaining a complete understanding of the uses and effects of popular media technologies.

How the simulation and visualization technologies so pervasive in science, engineering, and design have changed our way of seeing the world. Over the past twenty years, the technologies of simulation and visualization have changed our ways of looking at the world. In Simulation and Its Discontents, Sherry Turkle examines the now dominant medium of our working lives and finds that simulation has become its own sensibility. We hear it in Turkle's description of architecture students who no longer design with a pencil, of science and engineering students who admit that computer models seem more “real” than experiments in physical laboratories. Echoing architect Louis Kahn's famous question, “What does a brick want?”, Turkle asks, “What does simulation want?” Simulations want, even demand, immersion, and the benefits are clear. Architects create buildings unimaginable before virtual design; scientists determine the structure of molecules by manipulating them in virtual space; physicians practice anatomy on digitized humans. But immersed in simulation, we are vulnerable. There are losses as well as gains. Older scientists describe a younger generation as “drunk with code.” Young scientists, engineers, and designers, full citizens of the virtual, scramble to capture their mentors' tacit knowledge of buildings and bodies. From both sides of a generational divide, there is anxiety that in simulation, something important is slipping away. Turkle's examination of simulation over the past twenty years is followed by four in-depth investigations of contemporary simulation culture: space exploration, oceanography, architecture, and biology.

Media literacy is often focused on evaluating the message rather than reflecting on the medium. Bringing together postphenomenology, media ecology, posthumanism, and complexity theory, Richard Lewis’s book offers a method for such a reflection and shows how our everyday media environments constitute us as (post)human subjects: one that is becoming and constitutes through relations – also with our media technologies. An original interdisciplinary effort – including for example the term 'intrasubjective mediation' – and a must-read book for everyone interested in how we become with and through technologies. Prof Mark Coeckelbergh, University of Vienna Technology, Media Literacy, and the Human Subject is a clearly and concisely written book that employs a fruitful transdisciplinary approach. It at once offers an excellent grounding in the literature, whilst simultaneously developing a useful tool for students to reflect deeply and critically upon their own engagement with media. Thoroughly recommended. Alexander Thomas, University of East London What does it mean to be media literate in today’s world? How are we transformed by the many media infrastructures around us? We are immersed in a world mediated by information and communication technologies (ICTs). From hardware like smartphones, smartwatches, and home assistants to software like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat, our lives have become a complex, interconnected network of relations. Scholarship on media literacy has tended to focus on developing the skills to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media messages without considering or weighing the impact of the technological medium—how it enables and constrains both messages and media users. Additionally, there is often little attention paid to the broader context of interrelations which affect our engagement with media technologies. This book addresses these issues by providing a transdisciplinary method that allows for both practical and theoretical analyses of media investigations. Informed by postphenomenology, media ecology, philosophical posthumanism, and complexity theory the author proposes both a framework and a pragmatic instrument for understanding the multiplicity of relations that all contribute to how we affect—and are affected by—our relations with media technology. The author argues persuasively that the increased awareness provided by this posthuman approach affords us a greater chance for reclaiming some of our agency and provides a sound foundation upon which we can then judge our media relations. This book will be an indispensable tool for educators in media literacy and media studies, as well as academics in philosophy of technology, media and communication studies, and the post-humanities.

Scholars across the humanities, social sciences, and information sciences are grappling with how best to study virtual environments, use computational tools in their research, and engage audiences with their results. Classic work in science and technology studies (STS) has played a central role in how these fields analyze digital technologies, but many of its key examples do not speak to today’s computational realities. This groundbreaking collection brings together a world-class group of contributors to refresh the canon for contemporary digital scholarship. In twenty-five pioneering and incisive essays, this unique digital field guide offers innovative new approaches to digital scholarship, the design of digital tools and objects, and the deployment of critically grounded technologies for analysis and discovery. Contributors cover a broad range of topics, including software development, hackathons, digitized objects, diversity in the tech sector, and distributed scientific collaborations. They discuss methodological considerations of social networks and data analysis, design projects that can translate STS concepts into durable scientific work, and much more. Featuring a concise introduction by Janet Vertesi and David Ribes and accompanied by an interactive microsite, this book provides new perspectives on digital scholarship that will shape the agenda for tomorrow’s generation of STS researchers and practitioners.