Christian Fuchs: Internet and Society. Social Theory in the Information Age (2007)

In this exceptional study, Christian Fuchs discusses how the internet has transformed the lives of human beings and social relationships in contemporary society. By outlining a social theory of the internet and the information society, he demonstrates how the ecological, economic, political, and cultural systems of contemporary society have been transformed by new ICTs. Fuchs highlights how new forms of cooperation and competition are advanced and supported by the internet in subsystems of society and also discusses opportunities and risks of the information society.

Publisher Routledge, 2007
ISBN 0415961327, 9780415961325
Length 398 pages

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Patricia Pisters (ed.): Micropolitics of Media Culture. Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari (2001)

This book focuses on the micro-political implications of the work of Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari). General philosophical articles are coupled to more specific analyses of films (such as Fight Club and Schindler’s List) and other expressions of contemporary culture. The choice of giving specific attention to the analyses of images and sounds is not only related to the fact that audiovisual products are increasingly dominant in contemporary life, but also to the fact that film culture in itself is changing (‘in transition’) in capitalist culture. From a marginal place at the periphery of economy and culture at large, audiovisual products (ranging from art to ads) seem to have moved to the centre of the network society, as Manuel Castells calls contemporary society. Typical Deleuzian concepts such as micro-politics, the Body without Organs, becoming-minoritarian, pragmatics and immanence are explored in their philosophical implications and political force, whether utopian or dystopian. What can we do with Deleuze in contemporary media culture? A recurring issue throughout the book is the relationship between theory and practice, to which several solutions and problems are given.

Publisher Amsterdam University Press, 2001
ISBN 9053564721, 9789053564721
Length 302 pages

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Gary Hall: Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (2008)

In the sciences, the merits and ramifications of open access—the electronic publishing model that gives readers free, irrevocable, worldwide, and perpetual access to research—have been vigorously debated. Open access is now increasingly proposed as a valid means of both disseminating knowledge and career advancement. In Digitize This Book! Gary Hall presents a timely and ambitious polemic on the potential that open access publishing has to transform both “papercentric” humanities scholarship and the institution of the university itself.

Hall, a pioneer in open access publishing in the humanities, explores the new possibilities that digital media have for creatively and productively blurring the boundaries that separate not just disciplinary fields but also authors from readers. Hall focuses specifically on how open access publishing and archiving can revitalize the field of cultural studies by making it easier to rethink academia and its institutions. At the same time, by unsettling the processes and categories of scholarship, open access raises broader questions about the role of the university as a whole, forcefully challenging both its established identity as an elite ivory tower and its more recent reinvention under the tenets of neoliberalism as knowledge factory and profit center.

Rigorously interrogating the intellectual, political, and ethical implications of open access, Digitize This Book! is a radical call for democratizing access to knowledge and transforming the structures of academic and institutional authority and legitimacy.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN 0816648719, 9780816648719
Length 301 pages

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Joanne Richardson (ed.): Anarchitexts: Voices from the Global Digital Resistance (2005)

Anarchitexts brings together a global mix of voices from the new “underground”: engaged artists intervening in local struggles on the streets, media producers promoting technologies based on sharing and cooperation rather than privatization and competition, activists participating in global networks built through electronic democracies and decentralized forms of cooperation, and extraordinary people creating an alternative society through their everyday practices.

As a matter of principle Anarchitexts reflects the first-hand perspective of those involved at the point of production, not distanced reflections by critics, specialists, or armchair theorists.

Publisher Autonomedia, 2005
ISBN 1570271429, 9781570271427
Length 368 pages

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Michel de Certeau: The Practice of Everyday Life (1984/1988)

Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature in analytic philosophy, linguistics, sociology, semiology, and anthropology–to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature. Michel de Certeau considers the uses to which social representation and modes of social behavior are put by individuals and groups, describing the tactics available to the common man for reclaiming his own autonomy from the all-pervasive forces of commerce, politics, and culture. In exploring the public meaning of ingeniously defended private meanings, de Certeau draws brilliantly on an immense theoretical literature in analytic philosophy, linguistics, sociology, semiology, and anthropology–to speak of an apposite use of imaginative literature.

Translated by Steven Rendall
Publisher University of California Press, 1988
ISBN 0520236998, 9780520236998
Length 229 pages

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David Graeber: Toward An Anthropological Theory of Value. The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (2001)

This innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of Neoliberalism. Rooted in an engaged, dynamic realism, Graeber argues that projects of cultural comparison are in a sense necessarily revolutionary projects: He attempts to synthesize the best insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, arguing that these figures represent two extreme, but ultimately complementary, possibilities in the shape such a project might take. Graeber breathes new life into the classic anthropological texts on exchange, value, and economy. He rethinks the cases of Iroquois wampum, Pacific kula exchanges, and the Kwakiutl potlatch within the flow of world historical processes, and recasts value as a model of human meaning-making, which far exceeds rationalist/reductive economist paradigms.

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2001
ISBN 0312240457, 9780312240455
Length 337 pages

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Richard Barbrook: Imaginary futures – From Thinking Machines to the Global Village (2005, 2006)

Cooperative creativity and participatory democracy should be extended from the virtual world into all areas of life. This time, the new stage of growth must be a new civilisation.

This spring, a new work of literature will force both intellectual thinkers and everyone who is cyber-connected to re-evaluate the political history of the Internet.

Dr. Richard Barbrook traces the early days of the Internet, beginning from a pivotal point at the 1964 World’s Fair, in what critics are saying is the most well-researched and original account of cybertechnology among contemporary works. He demonstrates how business and ideological leaders put forth a carefully orchestrated vision of an imaginary future, where robots would do the washing up, go to the office and think for us. With America at the forefront of these promises, Barbrook shows how ideological forces joined to develop new information technologies during the Cold War era and how what they created historically has shaped the modern Internet, with intended political consequences.

Crucially, he argues that had the past been different, our technological and political present would not be what it is today. Barbrook’s conclusions about the modern state of the Internet, puts forward a call for action in how the world’s most important tool of revolutionary politics should be approached.

WARNING: This is a book that many who control the Internet do not want you to read.

Key terms: Fordism, W.W. Rostow, Marxism, cybernetic, Bell commission, artificial intelligence, gift economy, Stalinist, Maoist, Cold War game, Trotskyist, information society, laissez-faire liberalism, soft power, Hard power, American empire, Tet Offensive, Unisphere, grand narrative, Cold War Left

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Deptford.TV diaries (2006)

Deptford.TV is an audio-visual documentation of the regeneration process of Deptford (south-east London) in collaboration with SPC.org media lab, Bitnik.org, Boundless.coop, Liquid Culture and Goldsmiths College.

Since September 2005 we started assembling AV material around the area, asking community members, video artists, film-makers, visual artists and students to contribute statements, feedback and critique of the regeneration process of Deptford.

The unedited as well as edited media content is being made available on the Deptford.TV database and distributed over the Boundless.coop wireless network. The media is licensed through open content licenses such as Creative Commons and the GNU general public license.

This book is a compilation of theoretical underpinnings, interviews and written documentation of the project.

Contributors: Adnan Hadzi, Maria X, Heidi Seetzen, James Stevens, Erol Ziya, Bitnik media collective, Andrea Pozzi, Andrea Rota and Jonas Andersson, alongside selected public-license texts from Hakim Bey, Jaromil and Guy Debord.

Keywords:
Deptford, Pirate Bay, Telestreets, Free Culture movement, file-sharing, Creekside, Negativland, gift economy, Free Software movement, Berthold Brecht, internet archives, software patents, Cinelerra, Jaromil, technological determinism, urban regeneration, alternative media, VideoLAN, Cyberpunk, MEncoder

Published by Liquid Culture.

More: http://watch.deptford.tv/blog/?p=58

Free download:
http://www.deptford.tv/about/diaries/DeptfordTV-diaries1.pdf
http://www.deptford.tv/about/diaries/DeptfordTV-diaries1-cover.pdf