{"product_id":"license-to-spill-isbn-9780262551588","title":"License to Spill","description":"\u003cb\u003eHow everyday wetness—from finger smudges, sweat, and spilled drinks to showering and swimming—collides with consumers’ media devices designed to stay dry.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eLicense to Spill \u003c\/i\u003einvestigates the everyday moments, activities, and spaces where media technologies and liquids collide—from disastrous spilled drinks that corrode laptops and drops in the toilet that drown smartphones to the greasy finger smudges and sweat droplets that sully screens and glitch smartwatches. Putting historical and present-day case studies in conversation, Rachel Plotnick considers how people’s experiences with media devices inevitably encounter wetness and yet consumers—not the companies who make the devices—take the blame when leaks, spillages, and overflows occur.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlong with thinking about preventive measures and device caretaking, \u003ci\u003eLicense to Spill\u003c\/i\u003e examines how water-resistant and waterproofed technologies, through their design and marketing, imagine the brawniest and hardiest of users meant to “punish” and “abuse” their “tough” devices, granting them unfettered permission to get wet. Examining a long history of “torture testing” and hyperbolic claims of imperviousness, the book demonstrates how protective designs relate to broader cultural ideas about media use as sporty, luxurious, excessive, or messy. This context is especially relevant given that the market for water-resistant bags, cases, coatings, and seals has flourished over the past decade, with new rhetoric about wetness as “natural” and digital technologies as ever-present. The book pushes us to attend to both the ideals and problems that arise when designing “resilient” devices, ranging from the “right to repair” movement and lawsuits over ingress protection (IP) ratings to obsolescence culture and work-from-home activities in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.Introduction\u003cbr\u003e1. Leaky Telephones\u003cbr\u003e2. Waterlogged Wristwatches\u003cbr\u003e3. Submerged Cameras\u003cbr\u003e4. Smudged and Splashed Sounds\u003cbr\u003e5. Poured-On PCs\u003cbr\u003e6. Contained Computers\u003cbr\u003e7. Soaked Mobile Phones\u003cbr\u003eConclusion\u003cbr\u003eNotes\u003cbr\u003eReferences\u003cbr\u003eIndex“An engaging, fascinating, and profoundly creative work, \u003ci\u003eLicense to Spill\u003c\/i\u003e should be read by anyone interested in modern digital markets, prosthesis, posthumanism, and gendered histories of technology.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eTechnology and Culture\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“\u003ci\u003eLicense to Spill \u003c\/i\u003eis a sophisticated, original, and absorbing history that traverses a century of attempts to acclimatize media in a messy and leaky world.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Nicole Starosielski, Professor, University of California, Berkeley; author of \u003ci\u003eMedia Hot and Cold\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Rachel Plotnick, our premier cultural historian of technological mishap and subversion, won’t let us forget that we—like our machines—are soggy bodies. Hugely fun and illuminating.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—John Durham Peters, Yale University\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Introducing a much-needed theory of media and hygiene, \u003ci\u003eLicense to Spill\u003c\/i\u003e re-politicizes the design, use, and production of the technologies we desperately try, and fail, to protect.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Neta Alexander, Assistant Professor of Film and Media, Yale University \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This is \u003ci\u003enot\u003c\/i\u003e another dry book about media. \u003ci\u003eLicense to Spill\u003c\/i\u003e is a complex and layered investigation of why language and materiality are so tightly entangled and how we need to understand both in order to design better.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Jussi Parikka, Aarhus University; coauthor of \u003ci\u003eLiving Surfaces\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eRachel Plotnick is a historian and cultural theorist whose research and teaching focus on information, communication, and media technologies in everyday life. She is the author of \u003ci\u003ePower Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing\u003c\/i\u003e (MIT Press).","brand":"The MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304291389669,"sku":"NP9780262551588","price":70.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780262551588.jpg?v=1767731405","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/license-to-spill-isbn-9780262551588","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}