Conclusion

Abstract

In the mid 1980s, the authors (at the time children) were playing PacMan and Asteroids on their first family computers. By 1990, we were sending our first e-mails as college students and worshipping the cut-and-paste function. In the mid-1990s we purchased our own PCs, Macs, and mobile phones. In late 2006, one of the authors opened a Facebook account and used screen shots in lectures to show undergraduates just what this new website could do. By 2009, everyone seemed to be social networking. In those 30 years, the authors have continued to consume electronics (numerous TVs, DVD players, PVRs, PCs, laptops, video game consoles, mobile phones, digital cameras, MP3 players, tablets). This book has unashamedly and clearly expressed our Anglo-American experiences as audiences, users, and consumers of media discourses, forms, and practices through the many media production and delivery technologies we have acquired. Many of the electronics we have used to access media content are now discarded into what has been termed a museum ‘of failed and outdated technologies’ of media ‘that have a built-in tendency toward their own termination’ (Gabrys 2011, 15). Yet we have never hated our electronics: their tangibility, shininess, touchability, solidity and thereness have guaranteed our desire for them. They may have become smaller (because we need to be with them on the move) but our desire for them as they call out to us in the dark (vibrating, beeping, and glowing) belies the reality that we will soon dump them (in both senses of the term).