Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Lisa Parks is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a coeditor of Planet TV: A Global Television Reader.
“<i>Cultures in Orbit</i> is a stunning achievement. Lisa Parks weaves a fascinating tale of the culture of the satellite, one that changes how we think about media and globalization. Parks’s compelling and original account demonstrates how profoundly the televisual imagination has shaped culture and knowledge production in the global age. Deftly combining cultural theory with extensive research across archives and disciplines, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in the geopolitical processes of media and the politics of technological change.”-Anna McCarthy, author of <i>Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space</i> “<i>Cultures in Orbit</i> is a welcome contribution to the study of converging media technologies that draws on too often distinct ideas in cultural studies, visual studies, technology studies, media studies, and studies in globalization. Lisa Parks offers a deft and nuanced analysis of satellite-television interdependency in diverse geopolitical sites, demonstrating with admirable lucidity how each constellation of imaging/viewing practices arises from a specific combination of technological, commercial, military, aesthetic, and cultural forces. This book illuminates the materiality of technology and its crucial role(s) in mediating the images and events we call Earth.”-Jody Berland, editor of <i>TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies</i>
Roaming across the disciplines of media studies, geography, and science and technology studies, Parks examines uses of satellites by broadcasters, military officials, archaeologists, and astronomers. She looks at Our World, a live intercontinental television program that reached five hundred million viewers in 1967, and Imparja tv, an Aboriginal satellite tv network in Australia. Turning to satellites’ remote-sensing capabilities, she explores the U.S. military’s production of satellite images of the war in Bosnia as well as archaeologists’ use of satellites in the excavation of Cleopatra’s palace in Alexandria, Egypt. Parks’s reflections on how Western fantasies of control are implicated in the Hubble telescope’s views of outer space point to a broader concern: that while satellite uses promise a “global village,” they also cut and divide the planet in ways that extend the hegemony of the post-industrial West. In focusing on such contradictions, Parks highlights how satellites cross paths with cultural politics and social struggles.
Introduction 1
1. Satellite Spectacular: Our World and the Fantasy of Global Presence 21
2. Satellite Footprints: Imparja TV and Postcolonial Flaws in Australia 47
3. Satellite Witnessing: Views and Coverage of the War in Bosnia 77
4. Satellite Archaeology: Remote Sensing Cleopatra in Egypt 109
5. Satellite Panoramas: Astronomical Observation and Remote Control 139
Conclusion 167
Notes 185
Bibliography 213
Index 233
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Lisa Parks is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a coeditor of Planet TV: A Global Television Reader.