These readings are suggestions, some based on my own assessment and some on recommendations from others. The categories are highly subjective and based on keywords relevant to my own research, and both categorisations and titles will be subject to changes as this work progresses.
Ecology and environment
Gabrys, Jennifer. Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011.
Grossman, Elizabeth. High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health. Washington: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2006.
Hu, Tung-Hui. A Prehistory of the Cloud. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016.
Kane, Carolyn. ‘The Toxic Sublime: Landscape Photography and Data Visualization’. Theory, Culture & Society 35, no. 3 (1 May 2018): 121–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276417745671.
Mattern, Shannon. ‘Maintenance and Care’. Places Journal, November 2018. https://placesjournal.org/article/maintenance-and-care
Maxwell, Richard, and Toby Miller. Greening the Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Maxwell, Richard, Jon Raundalen, and Nina Lager Vestberg, eds. Media and the Ecological Crisis. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Morley, Janine, Kelly Widdicks, and Mike Hazas. ‘Digitalisation, Energy and Data Demand: The Impact of Internet Traffic on Overall and Peak Electricity Consumption’. Energy Research & Social Science 38 (1 April 2018): 128–37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2018.01.018.
Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
Peters, John Durham. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Purbrick, Louise. ‘Nitrate Ruins: The Photography of Mining in the Atacama Desert, Chile’. Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 26, no. 2 (3 April 2017): 253–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2017.1313205.
Shukin, Nicole. Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times. U of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Starosielski, Nicole and Janet Walker, eds. Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment. New York Routledge, 2016.
Infrastructures
Dourish, Paul. The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017.
Parks, Lisa, and Nicole Starosielski, eds. Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.
Starosielski, Nicole. The Undersea Network. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.
Materialisms, old and new
Coole, Diana. ‘Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism: Thinking with New Materialisms in the Political Sciences’. Millennium 41, no. 3 (1 June 2013): 451–69. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829813481006.
———. ‘Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities’. Political Studies 53, no. 1 (1 March 2005): 124–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2005.00520.x.
Maxwell, Richard, ed. The Routledge Companion to Labor and Media. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Scholz, Trebor, ed. Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory. New York: Routledge, 2013.
Technologies of self and society
Broussard, Meredith. Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018.
Bucher, Taina. If…Then: Algorithmic Power and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Dourish, Paul, and Genevieve Bell. Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2011.
Eubanks, Virginia. Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St Martin’s Press, 2017.
Franklin, Seb. Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic. The MIT Press, 2015.
Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018.
Glass, Erin. ‘Software of the Oppressed: Reprogramming the Invisible Discipline’. CUNY, 2018. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2889/.
Hargittai, Eszter and Christian Sandvig, eds. Digital Research Confidential: The Secrets of Studying Behavior Online. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015.
Hicks, Marie. Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018.
Hoffmann, Anna Lauren. ‘Data Violence and How Bad Engineering Choices Can Damage Society’. Medium. Accessed 2 May 2018. https://medium.com/s/story/data-violence-and-how-bad-engineering-choices-can-damage-society-39e44150e1d4.
Irani, Lilly. ‘Difference and Dependence among Digital Workers: The Case of Amazon Mechanical Turk’. South Atlantic Quarterly 114, no. 1 (January 2015): 225–34. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2831665.
Johnston, Sean F. ‘Technological Parables and Iconic Illustrations: American Technocracy and the Rhetoric of the Technological Fix’. History and Technology 33, no. 2 (3 April 2017): 196–219. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2017.1336851.
Nakamura, Lisa. ‘“I WILL DO EVERYthing That Am Asked”: Scambaiting, Digital Show-Space, and the Racial Violence of Social Media’. Journal of Visual Culture 13, no. 3 (2014): 257–274. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412914546845.
––––––. Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press, 2018.
Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011.
Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Anti-Social Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
———. The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011.