"The thought-provoking and wide-ranging essays in this excellent new collection insist that we take both 'media' and 'globalization' as complex, dynamic, and inextricably related categories. Furthermore, they validate the editors' insistence that the field of media studies is most profitably organized around understanding changing and unpredictable relationships among media forms and the tangled web of institutions, practices, and processes that constitute 'the media' at the beginning of the twenty-first century."-Robert C. Allen, coeditor of The Television Studies Reader

"The editors have assembled a truly provocative collection of essays. This is cutting-edge scholarship at its best."-Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania

Rhetoric about media technology tends to fall into two extreme categories: unequivocal celebration or blanket condemnation. This is particularly true in debate over the clash of values when first world media infiltrate third world audiences.

Bringing together the best new work on contemporary media practices, technologies, and policies, the essayists in Global Currents argue that neither of these extreme views accurately represents the role of media technology today. New ways of thinking about film, television, music, and the Internet demonstrate that it is not only media technologies that affect the cultures into which they are introduced-it is just as likely that the receiving culture will change the media.

Topics covered in the volume include copyright law and surveillance technology, cyberactivism in the African Diaspora, transnational monopolies and local television industries, the marketing and consumption of "global music," "click politics" and the war on Afghanistan, the techno-politics of distance education, artificial intelligence and global legal institutions, and traveling and "squatting" in digital space. Balanced between major theoretical positions and original field research, the selections address the political and cultural meanings that surround and configure new technologies.

Tasha G. Oren is an assistant professor of film and media studies in the department of English at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She is the author of Demon in the Box: Jews, Arabs, Politics, and Culture in the Making of Israeli Television and coeditor of Asian American Popular Culture. Patrice Petro is a professor of film and media studies and director of the Center for International Education at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She is the author of Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History and coeditor of Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age.