It gives us great pleasure to announce the winner of this year’s book award: Jason Farman for his book Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. In addition, the committee selected for honorable mention Thomas Streeter’s The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet.
The book award committee had this to say of Prof. Farman’s book:
The committee was particularly impressed with Farman’s ability to bring into focus the centrality of place and lived time to the current and future analysis of connectivity and mediated communication. The book provided a nice combination of forward-thinking, theoretical yet empirically solid work grounded in a strong historical understanding of new media that opens up avenues for new research and new theory. “Mobile Interface Theory” also makes us look at the unfolding present and accept the changes foretold within. It has the potential to inform new scholarship, re-set directions, and remind us that, now, the Internet is not somewhere else, but right here, in our pockets, our minds, our places.
Thanks go to the committee members–Steve Jones, Sonia Livingstone, and Matthew Allen–for taking on a hefty amount of analytical reading in a short period of time. Thanks also to everyone who submitted their books for consideration. The award is intended to encourage excellence in internet research, and it is heartening to see so much good work being done.
Prof. Farman will be presenting a paper at IR13.0, and we hope you will join us in congratulating him on the honor.
