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Who is the human in media philosophy? Although media philosophers have argued since the twentieth century that media are fundamental to being human, this question has not been explicitly asked and answered in the field. Armond R. Towns demonstrates that humanity in media philosophy has implicitly referred to a social Darwinian understanding of the human as a Western, white, male, capitalist figure. Building on concepts from Black studies and cultural studies, Towns develops an insightful critique of this dominant conception of the human in media philosophy and introduces a foundation for Black media philosophy. Delving into the narratives of the Underground Railroad, the politics of the Black Panther Party, and the digitization of Michael Brown's killing, On Black Media Philosophy deftly illustrates that media are not only important for Western Humanity but central to alternative Black epistemologies and other ways of being human

It is beyond any doubt that media have an enormous impact on our media-culture societies. Media in?uence our perception and our knowledge, our memory as well as our emotions. They create public spheres and public opinions and give rise to media realities. Media shape our socialisation and our communality. They transform economy, politics, science, religion and law. "What we know about our society, even about our world we are living in, we know via the mass media." (Luhmann 1996:9; my translation) Accordingly, "the media" have become a paramount subject of interdisciplinary discourses in the last decades all over the world. All these developments have become topics of scienti?c analyses as well as parts of media programmes. Since decades, various academic disciplines focused on an other-observation ("Fremdbeobachtung") of the media from an external state, whereas the media increasingly tend to observe themselves as well as one another in order to transform this self-observation into parts of their respective programmes. The other-observation is carried out either by scholars of communication- and/or media theory or by philosophers; but whereas the former are organised in academic disciplines, no established discipline entitled "media philosophy" exists until today. Instead, the various approaches to philosophical analyses of media are heterogeneous and lack a solid theoretical basis as well as a disciplinary organisation. Some scholars even hold the view that media are not even within the province of philosophers. Some people deeply regret this deadlock regarding not only topics and discourses but also future jobs and positions for scholars of a discipline "media philosophy" to come. Others welcome this stalemate which gives room to creative solutions of thematic as well as of organisational matters. Let us have a short look at some of the foreseeable options. One of the actual media philosophical approaches concentrates its efforts on a reformulation of traditional philosophical topics in the framework of media ef?ciencies. The list of such topics is rather long and covers nearly all famous crucial subjects of philosophical discourses, reaching from reality, truth, culture, society, education or politics to time, space, emotion, subject or entertainment. This kind of rethinking or reformulating philosophical topics concentrates upon the question how—in the co-evolution of media systems and society—our daily experiences as well as our theoretical modellings of these topics have changed on the historical way from writing to the Internet.

Whitehead's simple idea—the world as medium— is the concern of this chapter. The idea of the world as medium gives a different, in many ways more effective way of grasping the situation that produces many dystopian media events and of the politics that this involves. Luckily, however, it is an idea that is not restricted to dystopian instances such as the worms withwhich I have begun. There are many more positive examples of the contemporary realignment of media with the world as medium. Contemporary media and world are often finding what seem to be strange continuities and overlaps. Direct, exploitable and constantly inventive continuities between media and world are now the rule, not the exception. Indeed, the overlap sometimes seems almost total. Yet I will suggest that what looks strange in such assemblages has always been the case. As Whitehead points out, the continuities are there because the entire world has always been a medium. At the same time, it is true that there are significant differences in the way that contemporary media capitalize on this. First, they possess more technical power to work within the entire world as medium. Second, they are premised on a kind of self-awareness of this media-world overlap. They increasingly diagram media/world relations in acceptance of world as medium and media as world.

Against Transmission introduces the technical history and phenomenology of media, a field of study that explains the characteristics of contemporary life by looking to the technical properties of machines. By studying the engineering of signal processing, the book interrogates how the understanding of media-as-machine exposes us to a particular phenomenological relationship to the world, asking: what can the hardware of machines that segment information into very small elements tell us about experiences of time, memory and history?This book offers both a detailed and radical investigation of the technical architecture of media such as television, computers, cameras, and cinematography. It achieves this through in-depth archive research into the history of the development of media technology, combined with innovative readings of key concepts from philosophers of media such as Harold A. Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler, Siegfried Zielinski and Wolfgang Ernst. Teaming philosophical inquiry with thorough technical and historical analysis, in a broad range of international case studies, from early experimental cinema and television to contemporary media art and innovative hardware developments, Barker shows how the technical discoveries made in these contexts have engineered the experiences of time in contemporary media culture

Abstract
Studies of media and ecology are often reduced to questions of representation: understanding the cultural mediation of nature means looking to screen based content. However, given recent work in materialist media studies from Doug Kahn, Lisa Parks and Eugene Thacker in particular, a new possibility comes into view. We now know that before nature is mediated through culture, it is often passed through layers of technology. With that in mind, this paper offers a radical rethinking of the technological mediation of the ecological. Through a study of the technical apparatus as an active system of knowledge, two different sections of the paper will illustrate the 'tool-kit' that makes possible a technical study of ecology. The first looks to historical developments of hardware such as the telegraph, radio, and satellites to pinpoint examples where media technology has been used to pick up signals from the natural world. Framed by the philosophy of Peter Sloterdijk, it explores the way nature has been given form through its transduction into communication systems. The second section of this paper, addressing ecology on a different register, looks past the surface of digital media to the manner in which ecologies are mediated via computer code. In this section, by conducting a reverse-engineering of the software based eco-media videogame Mountain (O'Reilly, 2014), we encounter the ecological structure of code systems which could be applied to other data visualisation systems. These two methods of analysis suggest the possibilities of a technologically focused study of eco-media: in coming to grips with both global and internal ecologies through what Sloterdijk terms 'air conditioning' systems - the material processes that provide the atmosphere of everyday life - we investigate the possibilities for innovative, post-human, approaches to a natural world entwined with media and technology.