The ever-evolving ways that we interact with each other, our world, and our selves through technology is a topic as worn as the devices we clutch and carry everyday. How did we get here? Drawing from the disciplines of media ecology and media archaeology, as well as bringing fresh perspectives from subcultures of music and skateboarding, The Medium Picture illuminates aspects of technological mediation that have been overlooked along the way. With a Foreword by Andrew McLuhan, it shows how immersion in unmoored technologies of connectivity finds us in a world of pure media and redefines who we are, how we are, and what we will be.
The Medium Picture is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press.
ADVANCE PRAISE:
“Very much looking forward to reading new Christopher, exactly the sort of contemporary cultural analysis to yield unnerving flashes of the future.”
William Gibson
“Like a skateboarder repurposing the utilitarian textures of the urban terrain for sport, Roy Christopher reclaims the content and technologies of the media environment as a landscape to be navigated and explored. The Medium Picture is both a highly personal yet revelatory chronicle of a decades-long encounter with mediated popular culture.”
Douglas Rushkoff
“A synthesis of theory and thesis, research and personal recollection, The Medium Picture is a work of rangy intelligence and wandering curiosity. Thought-provoking and a pleasure to read.”
Charles Yu
“Immersed in the contemporary digital culture he grew up with as a teenager, Roy Christopher is old enough to recall vinyl, punk, and zines — social media before TikTok and smartphones. The Medium Picture deftly illuminates the connections between post-punk music critique, the increasing virtualization of culture, the history of formal media theory, the liminal zones of analog vs digital, pop vs high culture, capitalism vs anarchy. It’s the kind of book that makes you stop and think and scribble in the margins.”
Howard Rheingold
“Imagine if Walter Benjamin had made it out of Spain, finally arrived in America, and got a BMX bike while listening to hip-hop. Roy Christopher is not only telling us how culture works, and why we love it, but also what we can do with it.”
Etienne Turpin
“Brilliant, pathbreaking, palpable insights… Worthy of McLuhan.”
Paul Levinson
“If the medium is the message, then today’s mediascape is a constant digital missive, reminding us that we are trapped together in a seven-level underworld metaverse mall. Who better to help guide us through this neo-Dantesque pixel inferno than Roy Christopher—one part Virgil, one part Debord, and at least one part his mischievous and brilliant self.”
Dominic Pettman
“Through music, generational habits, pre- and post-internet cultures, and a multitude of ‘cognitive entanglements’, this book flows with grace across different scales of mediation and affect.”
Jussi Parikka
“This book looks wonderful!”
Laurie Anderson
![[photo by Nick Thomsen]](https://www.themediumpicture.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Roy-Christopher-headshot-2020-240x300.jpg)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
“I marshal the middle between Mathers and McLuhan.”
Roy Christopher is an aging BMX and skateboarding zine kid. That’s where he learned to turn events and interviews into pages with staples. He has since written about music, media, and culture for everything from books and blogs to national magazines and academic journals. His previous books include Dead Precedents (Repeater Books, 2019), Boogie Down Predictions (Strange Attractor Press, 2022), and Escape Philosophy (punctum books, 2022), among others. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and currently teaches in the School of Communication at the University of North Florida.