The Affective Turn has lost its former innocence and euphoria. Affect Studies and its adjacent disciplines have now to prove that they can cope with the return of the affective real that technology, economy, and politics entail. Two seemingly contradictory developments serve as starting points for this volume. First, technological innovations such as affective computing, mood tracking, sentiment analysis, and social robotics all share a focus on the recognition and modulation of human affectivity. Affect gets measured, calculated, controlled. Secondly, recent developments in politics, social media usage, and right-wing journalism have contributed to a conspicuous rise of hate speech, cybermobbing, public ...

Preferable Futures delves into the question of possible, probable, and desirable futures amidst the pressures of climate change and digitalization. Through a diverse range of perspectives, the book explores ways to negotiate and create desirable futures using the concept of transformation design in theory and practice, economic business simulations, and recent humanistic theories. This thought-provoking read challenges us to imagine and (re)shape a future we cannot predict and find ways to make a difference right now.

Is software dead? Services like Google, Dropbox, Adobe Creative Cloud, or Social Media apps are all-pervasive in our digital media landscape. This marks the (re)emergence of the service paradigm that challenges traditional business and license models as well as modes of media creation and use. The short essays in this edited collection discuss how services shift the notion of software, the cultural technique of programming, conditions of labor as well as the ecology and politics of data and how they influence dispositifs of knowledge.