MediaTropes is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary eJournal devoted to the study of media and mediation. Responding to the challenges of our changing and increasingly interconnected world, this eJournal addresses questions, problems, and issues at the intersection of culture and technology, broadly construed.
Taking inspiration from the legacy of Marshall McLuhan, MediaTropes provides a forum for interdisciplinary approaches to media as communication. McLuhan’s adage, “the medium is the message,” suggests that media communicate messages. Studies of media therefore concentrate on the medium itself as a kind of language with its own conventions for generating meaning, a language that draws on fields of reference that extend outward into many different dimensions of culture.
The trope captures this cultural life of media and meaning. Tropes are rhetorical figures, turns of phrase, or manners of speaking. All media are tropic; they are communicative practices that indicate movement and transformation. The metaphor, for instance, is literally a “carrying across,” and this figure encourages us to examine not just what metaphors and media say, literally, but above all, what they do.
MediaTropes invites the submission of scholarly articles, new critical approaches, multimedia works, and book reviews addressing the wide range of work that the study of media has inspired. We are especially interested in original work in the following areas:
• Art, technology, and media aesthetics
• Biotechnology and bioinformatics
• Communication studies, communications arts
• Connectivity
• Convergence of libraries, archives, museums, and universities
• Cosmopolitanism and globalism
• Critical Theory
• Cultural Studies
• Cyberspace and cybercultures
• Digitality and the virtual
• Feminist, postcolonial, and cosmopolitan approaches
• Ethical approaches to information and media
• Literacies and post-literate cultures
• Media ecology
• Network theory
• New media technologies
• Orality and literacy studies
• Posthumanism
• Rhetorics, semiotics, and linguistic theories
• Technoculture
• Television, Internet, and technopopular cultures
• The social, political, and historical valences of media
• Visual and material cultures
Acknowledgements
Launching a new eJournal has required extensive work. Without the participation of a number of friends and colleagues, this issue would not have gone to press. We owe a debt of gratitude to Andrew Crystall, Jason Nolan, Richard Pope, and Mark Federman, who were involved in the early days of conceptualizing the journal. Carolyn Guertin was a driving force in the founding of MediaTropes, laid the early ground by assisting with the establishment of the advisory board, and provided assistance with proofreading. We thank Agnes Kruchio, who consulted at meetings since the journal's inception and also provided proofreading assistance. David Eaton Gillis created the journal design; we intend to work with the OJS software to realize his design. Our thanks as well to Erinn Brush, who translated the design to OJS specifications.
ISSN 1913-6005