"Eager to assist, organize, and structure our lifestream logistics, new corporate actors offer communicative freedoms based on commercial user-as-product philosophies of expression. But we now design our own interfaces to face our others, our algorithmic others. Our collective reflection on nature a
...
s machinic assemblage has yielded functional foods and the financialization of agriculture. But networked selves already develop other ecologies, reclaiming social machines as technologies of the common, unearthing the conflicts covered in disaster-driven environmentalities whose horizon is delimited by energy security and resource efficiency. Both helped and hindered by the ontological resonances of the common, these ecologies remain fragile, not yet structured by a politics of rights, animated by an interest in the autonomy of things. As nature continues to seep across the curriculum, research and education struggle to keep track of the corrosion of their institutional frameworks. Powered by a cartographic vision unconstrained by the statist political imagination, the study of supply chains has already become a paradigmatic form of transdisciplinarity, moving across the boundaries of life and labor, tracking every speck of dust on the scratch-free screens of our mobile economies as a reminder of the complexities of mutual constitution. The question of depletion is the question of the institution, of what it means when subjects and objects join in a refusal of roles in the great games of reification. No accident, perhaps, that philosophies of play are back, not quite a renaissance of aesthetic experience, but an affirmation of the openness of objective and subjective constitution. Of these and other knowledges so created, there can no longer be an encyclopedia; a glossary, perhaps. This is its initial iteration, its entries conjoined by a logic of connotation and constellation." (Page 5)
more
"The Social Media Reader is the first collection to address the collective transformation with pieces on social media, peer production, copyright politics, and other aspects of contemporary internet culture from all the major thinkers in the field.Culling a broad range and incorporating different st
...
yles of scholarship from foundational pieces and published articles to unpublished pieces, journalistic accounts, personal narratives from blogs, and whitepapers, The Social Media Reader promises to be an essential text, with contributions from Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky, Tim O'Reilly, Chris Anderson, Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, and Fred von Loehmann, to name a few. It covers a wide-ranging topical terrain, much like the internet itself, with particular emphasis on collaboration and sharing, the politics of social media and social networking, Free Culture and copyright politics, and labor and ownership. Theorizing new models of collaboration, identity, commerce, copyright, ownership, and labor, these essays outline possibilities for cultural democracy that arise when the formerly passive audience becomes active cultural creators, while warning of the dystopian potential of new forms of surveillance and control." (Publisher description)
more
"Ce livre présente un répertoire de vingt-six concepts qui décrivent de manière synthetique les enjeux théoriques et critiques autour de la création hypermédiatique, plus spécifiquement les oeuvres artistiques et littéraires conçues pour une diffusion sur Internet. Il accompagne une exposi
...
tion virtuelle du même nom, produite et diffusée par le Laboratoire NT2 de l'UQAM." (Introduction)
more
"From Facebook to the iPhone, from YouTube to Wikipedia, from Grand Auto Theft to Second Life, this book explores media's important issues and debates. It covers topics such as digital television, digital cinema, game culture, digital democracy, the World Wide Web, digital news, online social networ
...
king, music & multimedia and virtual communities." (Publisher description)
more
"This book is about the many ways in which mobile phones are being appropriated by Africans and how they are transforming and are being transformed by society in Africa. A case study from Karthoum (Sudan) shows, how mobile phones are reshaping relationships in a Muslim society, where they enable wom
...
en to organize their lives more independently. In Cameroon, the mobile allows traditional healers to assist sick people who are originally from their area but are now far away, sometimes even in Europe or the USA. Another study from Burkina Faso highlights the growing importance of text messaging - as contrary to the overstated orality both of African societies and of the mobile phone. The nine chapters in this volume all show aspects of an emerging mobile culture, be it the linkage between the rural and the urban in Burkina Faso, the youth in Ghana or traders in Tanzania. In all of these, the authors observe a reshaping of social and economic hierarchies in society. Based on the illustrative case studies and its multi-dimensional approach this book is highly recommended reading." (CAMECO Update 3-2009)
more
"In order to promote and bolster linguistic and cultural diversity in cyberspace, the most underprivileged languages need help to gain access to it. If it is possible to do this with a small, oral, unwritten, endangered language, there is all the more reason why this should be possible with all poor
...
ly endowed languages which are in somewhat better circumstances. The first stage consists in undertaking the necessary studies in order to develop the linguistic resources that are indispensable: a list of phonemes, an alphabet, a spelling system, a grammar, a dictionary and a collection of texts. The second stage involves work on computerization of the language in order to identify or develop compatible IT resources: a character set in at least one font, a virtual keyboard and corpus processing programmes, which may also be used to fine-tool linguistic analysis of the language and enhance its linguistic resources. The third stage consists in developing and adapting cultural resources so that they may be shared in cyberspace. This means recording and digitizing as many text, sound and graphic records as possible and making them ready for posting on websites. It is also necessary to design the various ingredients of a website, such as menus, navigation bars, titles and other texts for human-machine communication. In some cases, it will be necessary to localize programmes in order to develop the language as a working tool and endow it with supplementary IT resources. Finally, it is useful to learn to develop websites in the poorly endowed language, possibly in tandem with a more widely used language. All tools necessary for such training and tools for creating forums and localizing freeware may be found on the Internet. Once it has a website, a forum, a mailing list, IP telephony, music, still photographs and video, the lesser-used language can now be well ensconced in cyberspace, but to survive there, a community capable of using it intensively must be developed. Assistance to local associations in developing such communities will contribute to the promotion and enhancement of the diversity of languages and cultures in cyberspace." (Conclusion, page 45-46)
more
"Die Texte des vorliegenden Bandes, eine Übersetzung der englischen Originalausgabe aus dem Jahr 2001, diskutieren, wie angesichts zunehmender staatlicher Kontrolle von Netzinhalten und starker wirtschaftlicher Interessen Freiheit im Netz immer noch möglich sein kann. In einem globalen Streifzug d
...
urch die Kultur des Internets analysiert Geert Lovink verschiedene Netzwerke, Institutionen, informelle Strukturen und deren Erfahrungen. In einem lebendigen Prozess zwischen Hoffnungen, Visionen, Scheitern und Weiterentwicklungen entstehen auch nach dem Ende der Internet-Euphorie weiterhin neue Geschichten von sozialer Phantasie, übertriebenen Erwartungen und streitbaren Lernprozessen. Diese Mikrogeschichten gegenwärtiger sozialer Bewegungen im Netz führen den Autor zu einem Plädoyer für einen "radikalen Pragmatismus". Darunter versteht er die Übernahme sozialer Verantwortung bei der Gestaltung des Internets als sozialen Raum. Die Ankunft in der Realität heißt aber auch Abschied nehmen von den Illusionen über das Internet als ein sich selbst regulierendes herrschaftsfreies Gebiet." (Klappentext)
more
"From cybercafes to businesses, from middle class houses to squatters settlements, from the political economy of Internet provision to the development of ecommerce, the authors have gathered a wealth of material based on fieldwork in Trinidad. Looking at the full range of Internet media -- including
...
websites, email and chat -- the book brings out unforeseen consequences and contradictions in areas as varied as personal relations, commerce, nationalism, sex and religion. This is the first book-length treatment of the impact of the Internet on a particular region. By focusing on one place, it demonstrates the potential for a comprehensive approach to new media. It points to the future direction of Internet research, proposing a detailed agenda for comparative ethnographic study of the cultural significance and effects of the Internet in modern society. Clearly written for the non-specialist reader, it offers a detailed account of the complex integration between on-line and off-line worlds. An innovative tie-in with the book's own website provides copious illustrations amounting to over 2,000 web-pages that bring the material right to your computer." (Publisher description)
more