Phase Media

Reviews / Votes

Challenges conventional thinking and offers an interesting framework for evaluating the importance of smart objects with a view towards the future. * European Journal of Communication * James Ash's Phase Media offers a new way to conceptualize how smart objects are becoming part of and active in our lives, environments and the processes of change that characterize the contemporary world. Providing a welcome alternative to network and new materialist approaches, Ash invites us to consider how smart objects themselves are implicated and active in constituting everyday worlds and change processes. In doing so it provokes new theoretical imaginaries of what smart objects are, how they might impact on our lives, and the implications of this for ethical technological futures. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how smart technologies are emerging as part of our contemporary and near future worlds. * Sarah Pink, Distinguished Professor of Design and Media Ethnography, RMIT University, Australia * With Ash's Phase Media, the fallibility of the autonomous system comes sharply into view. A compelling account of the perturbations of apparently 'smart' devices. * Louise Amoore, Professor of Political Geography, Durham University, UK * Phase Media avoids the common misrecognition of critical academic thinking as an act of judgment or condemnation. It is 'critical' instead in its clarity, patient explanation, examples, helpful signposting and above all, inquisitiveness. * The AAG Review of Books *