For all its usefulness and currency, the word "media" conceals as much as it reveals. The transition from one medium to another, even within the same device – mobile phones are a perfect example as they move easily from sound to text and back again – is fraught with complication. Even within what passes for a single medium, such as weblogs, the need to manage the coupling and uncoupling of conversation partners has created a demand for levels of internal mediation, whether through the proliferation of aliases or through technical means, like “friends” lists on livejournal. With digital video recording, fan groups and Bittorrent, podcasts and satellite radio, the boundaries between broadcast and boutique, between transmission and storage, become less and less meaningful as television sets, computer networks and portable hard drives “mediate” one another. Many of the most interesting developments in contemporary culture center on the spaces between media and the fissures within media. While contemporary critics decry the ever-increasing concentration of media ownership (and while we join them in their concern), media cultures, whether in or around media, continue to morph and change in often unpredictable directions.

This issue of Bad Subjects is devoted to those in-between spaces where different media meet, where they define their edges, where the passage from inside to outside is routed through portals that preserve or shatter what is transmitted, whether it be private thoughts or streams of numeric data. Send us your accounts of emerging media forms and cultures, your technological revelations or provocations, your autobiographical reflections on passing through media portals or struggling with formats, your anxieties about blogging in the workplace, and your plans to remediate the world. As always, we are particularly interested in the political dimensions of emergent media culture, and we are dedicated to publishing accessible prose for a large, nonspecialist audience. For examples of the kind of writing we publish, please visit our website at http://bad.eserver.org.

Send essays of no longer than 2000-3000 words to Jonathan Sterne and Charlie Bertsch via the email address intermedia@sterneworks.org. Queries are also welcome. The deadline for submissions is 1 September 2005.