Nick Jones, "Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface" (Edinburgh UP, 2023)

New Books in Science, Technology, and Society

The Graphic User Interface, or GUI, is the adhesive centre of today’s screen entertainment web. From films and television to apps and videogames, it holds together a multitude of media and shapes the way they are accessed, organised, created, consumed, and manipulated. However, it does not do so without leaving viscous traces, and Gooey Media: Screen Entertainment and the Graphic User Interface (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) by Dr. Nick Jones examines this residue and its consequences, revealing how the GUI exerts a powerful influence on contemporary media.

Focusing on aesthetics and adopting a media agnostic approach, Dr. Jones explores cinema, streaming platforms, television, user-generated content, videogames, apps, virtual reality, VFX, design software, and more in order to show how they cross-pollinate with one another and with our desktop interfaces. The result is a new approach for analysing convergent media in the digital era.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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