Media Hot and Cold

“Nicole Starosielski awakens our senses from their thermal slumber. Hot and cool, warm and cold are not only metaphors; they shape worlds. I finished this book with the caloric throb of the universe humming in my ears. Starosielski's media analysis is wonderfully both elemental and critical: temperature reveals both ontology and injustice. Media Hot and Cold invites us to a noncoercive rearrangement of affect.” - John Durham Peters, Yale University

“In this dynamic and intellectually dazzling book, Nicole Starosielski grapples with complex technical principles of communication while framing them as historically and culturally conditioned and as politically and economically motivated. Starosielski's reconsideration of foundational communication models—looking beyond sender-receiver toward a more ambient and atmospheric sensibility—is necessary in an age when ubiquitous, continuous computing is fundamentally altering the atmosphere that hosts its signals. Media Hot and Cold is a model of innovative and masterful interdisciplinarity.” - Shannon Mattern, author of A City is not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences

"The intense media focus on climate change makes this meditation on the cultural significance of temperature coolly topical." - Andrew Robinson, Nature

“Apart from media studies students and scholars, anyone interested in temperature and how it is managed, controlled, manipulated, and distributed will find Media Hot and Cold an incredible story of how temperatures determine lived experience. In this final call to arms, Starosielski polemicizes a future for media studies attendant to its world-building and world-sustaining capacities.” - Samir Bhowmik, Film Quarterly

"To walk into the world of Nicole Starosielski’s Media Hot and Cold is to see familiar shapes with new intensities." - Kyle Stine, ISLE