AltArt Foundation: E-Tribal Art (2009)

The project brings together 12 international artists to test new ways of reaching electronic tribes with their work.

Editors: Alina Suatean, Corina Bucea
Curators: István Szakáts, Thomas Dumke
Project manager: Rarita Zbranca
Project by AltArt Foundation, Cluj, and British Council
Partners: c6.org, European Alternatives, GMT+2 Foundation, InterSpace
Funded by Romanian Cultural Institute through Cantemir Programme.

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tripleC journal: Capitalist Crisis, Communication & Culture, Vol 8, No 2 (2010)

The worldwide economic downturn is indicative for a new large crisis of capitalism. The future of capitalism is in this situation not determined, but depends on collective human agency. This introduction to the special issue of tripleC on “Capitalist Crisis, Communication & Culture” presents general arguments about the crisis, a general model of the political economy of capitalist communication, and a systematic typology of literature about capitalist crisis & communication. The introduced model of the political economy of capitalist communication is comprised of seven interconnected moments: 1) the media content industry, 2) the media infrastructure industry, 3) the interaction of the media economy and the non-media economy, 4) the interaction of the finance sector and the media economy, 5) alternative media, 6) media reception, 7) media prosumption. The model is used for classifying actual and potential research about the communicative dimension of the new capitalist crisis.

tripleC (cognition, communication, co-operation): Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information
Society 8 (2): 193-309.
Editors: Fuchs, Christian, Matthias Schafranek, David Hakken and Marcus Breen.
Special issue on “Capitalist crisis, communication & culture“.
tripleC is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal (ISSN: 1726-670X)
All journal content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Austria License.

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Régis Debray: Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms (1996)

Media Manifestos sums up over a decade of Régis Debray’s research and writing on the evolution of systems of communication. Debray announces the battle-readiness of a new sub-discipline of the sciences humaines: “mediology.” Scion of that semiology of the sixties linked with the names of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco — and trans-Atlantically affiliated to the semiotics of C.S. Peirce and the media analyses of Marshall McLuhan (“medium is message”) — “mediology” is yet in (dialectical) revolt against its parent thought-system. Determined not to lapse back into the empiricism and psychologism with which semiology broke, mediology is just as resolved to dispel the illusion of the signifier, slough off the scolasticism of the code, and recover the world — in all its mediatized materiality.

Written with Debray’s customary brio, Media Manifestos is no mere contribution to “media studies.” Steeped in the intellectual ethos of Althusser and Foucault, informed by the historical work of the Annales school, and yet plugged in to today’s audiovisual culture, Debray’s book turns a neologism (“mediology”) into a tool-kit with which to rethink the whole business of mediation.

Translated by Eric Rauth
Publisher Verso, 1996
ISBN 1859840876, 9781859840870
179 pages

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Fibreculture Journal 1-15 (2003-2009)

Fibreculture Journal is a peer reviewed international journal that explores the issues and ideas of concern and interest to both the Fibreculture network and wider social formations. The journal encourages critical and speculative interventions in the debate and discussions concerning information and communication technologies and their policy frameworks, network cultures and their informational logic, new media forms and their deployment, and the possibilities of socio-technical invention and sustainability. Other broad topics of interest include the cultural contexts, philosophy and politics of information and creative industries; national and international strategies for innovation, research and development; education; media and culture, and new media arts.

What Now? : The Imprecise and Disagreeable Aesthetics of Remix
Fibreculture 15, 2009
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Web 2.0: Before, During and After the Event
Fibreculture 14, 2009
Edited by Darren Tofts and Christian McCrea
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After Convergence: What Connects?
Fibreculture 13, 2008
Edited by Caroline Bassett, Maren Hartmann, Kate O’Riordan
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Models, Metamodels and Contemporary Media
Fibreculture 12, 2008
Edited by Gary Genosko and Andrew Murphie
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The Futures of Digital Media Arts and Culture
Fibreculture 11, 2008
Edited by Andrew Hutchison and Ingrid Richardson
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New Media, Networks and New Pedagogies
Fibreculture 10, 2007
Edited by Adrian Miles
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General Issue
Fibreculture 9, 2006
Edited by Andrew Murphie
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Gaming Networks
Fibreculture 8, 2006
Edited by Chris Chesher, Alice Crawford and Julian Kücklich
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Distributed Aesthetics
Fibreculture 7, 2005
Edited by Lisa Gye, Anna Munster and Ingrid Richardson
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Mobility, New Social Intensities, and the Coordinates of Digital Networks
Fibreculture 6, 2005
Edited by Andrew Murphie, Larissa Hjorth, Gillian Fuller and Sandra Buckley
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Multitudes, Creative Organisation and the Precarious Condition of New Media Labour
Fibreculture 5, 2005
Edited by Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter
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Contagion and the Diseases of Information
Fibreculture 4, 2005
Edited by Andrew Goffey
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General Issue
Fibreculture 3, 2004
Edited by Andrew Murphie
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New Media, New Worlds?
Fibreculture 2, 2003
Edited by Andrew Murphie
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The Politics of Networks
Fibreculture 1, 2003
Edited by Andrew Murphie
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Fibreculture Journal: Internet theory + criticism + research
Publisher: Fibreculture Publications/Open Humanities Press, Australia
ISSN: 1449 – 1443

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Aether. The Journal of Media Geography 1-5 (2007-2010)

Aether offers a forum that examines the geography of media, including cinema, television, the Internet, music, art, advertising, newspapers and magazines, video and animation. It is our goal to provide a space for contributions to current issues surrounding these media, beginning with constructions of space & place, cultural landscapes, society, and identity.

Locative Media
Aether 5a, March 2010
Edited by Tristan Thielmann
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The Geography of Journalism
Aether 4, March 2009
Edited by Mike Gasher
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Aether 3, June 2008
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Imagining Geography Through Interactive Visual Media
Aether 2, April 2008
Edited by Leigh Schwartz and Paul C Adams
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Aether 1, Nov 2007
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Editors: James Craine, Jason Dittmer, Chris Lukinbeal, Giorgio Hadi Curti
Publisher: The Center for Geographic Studies, The College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, California State University, Northridge

Sarai Readers 01-07 (2001-2007)

Sarai Reader 07: Frontiers, 2007

Frontiers considers limits, edges, borders and margins of all kinds as the sites for declarations, occasions for conversations, arguments, debates, recounting and reflection. Our book suggests that you consider the frontier as the skin of our time and our world and we invite you to get under the skin of contemporary experience in order to generate a series of crucial (and frequently unsettling) narrative and analytical possibilities.

We have always viewed the Sarai Reader as hospitable to new and unprecedented ideas, as a space of refuge where wayward reflections can meet half forgotten agendas. we hope our text this year sets the stage for a productive encounter with the demand for an account of the boundaries, parameters and verges of our times.

Editors: Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi, Ravi Sundaram
Associate Editor: Smriti Vohra

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Sarai Reader 06: Turbulence, 2006

Sarai Reader 06 uses ‘Turbulence’ as a conceptual vantage point from which to interrogate all that is in the throes of terminal crisis, and to invoke all that is as yet unborn. It seek to examine ‘turbulence’ as a global phenomenon, unbounded by the arbitrary lines that denote national and state boundaries in a ‘political’ map of the world. It wants to see areas of low and high pressure in politics, economy and culture that transcend borders, to investigate the flow of information and processes between downstream and upstream sites in societies and cultures globally.

Editors: Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Awadhendra Sharan + Geert Lovink
Associate Editor: Smriti Vohra

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Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts, 2005

‘Bare Acts’ looks at ‘Acts’- at instruments of legislation, at things within and outside the law, and at ‘acts’ – as different ways of doing things in society and culture. The Reader foregrounds explorations of borders, surveillance, claims to authority and entitlement, the legal regulation of sexuality and trespasses of various kinds.

Editors: Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi + Geert Lovink
Guest Editor: Lawrence Liang
Associate Editor: Smriti Vohra

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Sarai Reader 04: Crisis / Media, 2004

The 2004 Reader produced by Sarai, is devoted to the dual themes of crisis reporting in the media, and the crisis within the media when it comes to the reportage of violence. Crisis pervades the times we live, and becomes palpable entity in itself. To acknowledge the pervasiveness of the crisis in our times, is also to engage with the media through which crisis, and the representation of crisis, become the ’substance of our morning’s meditations’.

Editorial collective: Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Monica Narula, Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi & Awadhendra Sharan [Sarai] + Geert Lovink

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Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies, 2003

“Shaping Technologies ” sets out to ratchet our engagement with the contemporary moment a notch higher, in directions that are sober, exhilarating and discomfiting, all at once. The book brings to the fore a series of situations and predicaments that mark the encounter between people and machines, between nature and culture, and between knowledge and power.

Editorial collective: Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta [Sarai], Geert Lovink, Marleen Stikker [Waag]

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Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life, 2002

This year’s Sarai Reader brings together a range of critical thinking on urban life and the contemporary, marked by spreading media cultures, new social conflict and globalisation. Scholars, media practitioners, critics and activists use a flow of images, memories and hidden realities to create a fascinating array of original interventions in thinking about cities today. In the context of India, where a large part of this reader has been edited, this is significant, given the frugality of writing on city life in this part of the world.

Editors: Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Geert Lovink, Shuddhabrata Sengupta

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Sarai Reader 01: The Public Domain, 2001

Sarai Reader 01, (which is the first of what we hope will be more such collections) can be seen both as a navigation log of actual voyages and a map for possible journeys into a real and imagined territory that we have provisionally called the “Public Domain”. This republic without territory is a sovereign entity that comes into being whenever people gather and begin to communicate, using whatever means that they have at hand, beyond the range of the telescope of the merchant, and outside the viewing platform of the microscope of the censor.

Editors: Raqs Media Collective (Sarai) + Geert Lovink (Waag)

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Produced at the Sarai Media Lab, Delhi

Artur-Axel Wandtke (ed.): Medienrecht: Praxishandbuch (2008) [German]

Dem “Medienrecht” als Gestaltungsmittel in den Informations- und Kommunikationsprozessen kommt in der praktischen Unternehmenskultur und in der Rechtsdurchsetzung eine immer größer werdende Bedeutung zu. Wirtschaftlich gewinnen die rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen der Informations- und Kommunikationsprozesse in der geistigen Produktion und deren Verwertungsbedingungen immer mehr an Gewicht. Werbemaßnahmen, Merchandising, Public Relations, kommerzialisierte Persönlichkeitsrechte, Telemedien, Online-Nutzung, Presseprodukte, Film- und Fernsehwerke und andere Erscheinungsformen stehen stellvertretend für eine Individual- und Massenkommunikation, die im herkömmlichen und virtuellen Markt eine entscheidende Rolle spielen.

Mit diesem Handbuch wird auf wissenschaftlicher Grundlage eine Gesamtdarstellung vor allem der privatrechtlichen Medienprozesse vorgelegt, die im Zusammenhang mit der Produktion und Vermarktung bzw. Nutzung von Zeichen, Bildern, Tönen und anderen Informationen (Medienprodukten) entstehen. Dabei werden auch die europarechtlichen Aspekte der Entwicklung des Medienrechts dargestellt.

Publisher Walter de Gruyter, 2008
ISBN 3899494229, 9783899494228
Length 1932 pages

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Palo Fabuš: Laschova teorie narcistní kultury jako inspirace pro mediální studia (2009) [Czech]

Práce se pokouší představit teorii narcistní kultury amerického historika Christophera Lasche jakožto inspiraci pro mediální studia. Činí tak analýzou vybraných mediálních teorií autorů Jeana Baudrillarda, Joshuy Meyrowitze, Neila Postmana a dvojice Brian Longhurst a Nicholas Abercrombie. Malá pozornost, kterou tyto teorie venují roli mediálního publika je zde interpretována jako bílé místo, které by Laschova teorie mohla zaplnit modelem narcistní osobnostní struktury.

Lasch ve své historické studii kulturních proměn ve 20. století vychází z rozpadu rodiny způsobeného psychologizací společnosti, vlivem reklamy a nástupem byrokratického paternalismu, který nahradil původně rodičovské funkce. Rodí se tak narcistní osobnost vyznačující se vnitřním psychologickým motorem sebe-nenávist a nutkavou potrebou obklopovat se iluzemi všemohoucnosti, která se projevuje vyhledáváním spektáklu a stažením se do sebe. Inspirativnost této teorie pro mediální studia je tak představena v podobe užitečného modelu pro analýzu médií v paradigmatu aktivních publik.

Klíčová slova: narcismus, Lasch, postmodernita, média, komunikace, Já, survivalismus, psychoanalýza.

Diplomová práce
Masarykova Univerzita, Fakulta sociálních studií
Vedoucí práce: prof. PhDr. Jiří Pavelka, CSc.
Brno: FSS MU, 2009

Lasch’s narcissism culture theory as an inspiration for media studies
The thesis aims to introduce the narcissism culture theory of american historian Christopher Lasch as an inspiration for media studies. It does so by analysing selected media theories of Jean Baudrillard, Joshua Meyrowitz, Neil Postman and Brian Longhurst with Nicholas Abercrombie. Little attention these theories draw to the role of media audience is interpreted here as a gap, which could be potentially filled by Lasch’s theory with its model of narcissistic character.
In his historical study of culture changes in 20th century Lasch starts from the dissolution of family inflicted by psychologization of society, influence of advertising and emergence of bureaucratic paternalism substituting rearing function of parents. Through these processes comes birth of narcissistic personality, which can be distinguished by inner psychological drive of self-hate and compulsive need to surround him- or herself with illusion of omnipotence manifested through seeking out of spectacle and drawing within. The inspirative potential of the theory is thus introduced in a form of a useful model for a media analysis within the active audience paradigm.

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Ana Peraica (ed.): Victims Symptom. PTSD and Culture (2009)

Victims’ Symptom is a collection of interviews, essays, artists’ statements and glossary definitions, which was originally launched as a Web project (http://victims.labforculture.org). Produced in 2007, the project brought together cases related to past and current sites of conflict such as Srebrenica, Palestine, and Kosovo reporting from different (and sometimes conflicting) international viewpoints. The Victims Symptom Reader collects critical concepts in media victimology and addresses the representation of victims in economies of war.

Texts: Sezgin Boynik, Adila Laidi Hanieh, Geert Lovink, Ana Peraica, Stevan Vuković
Interviews by: Ana Peraica (with Enrique Arroyo, Noam Chomsky, Agricola da Cologne, Anur
Hadžiomerspahic, Joseph de Lappe) and Marko Stamenkovic (with Peter Fuchs, Jonas Staal,
Carlos Motta, Neery Melkonian and Tomas Tomlinas)
Artists’ statements: Mauricio Arango, Alejandro Duque, Andreja Kuluncic, Marko Peljhan and
Martha Rosler
Glossary: Tihana Jendricko and Tina Peraica
Comissioned by: Lab for Culture, Amsterdam, 2008
Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2009.
Series: Theory on Demand #3
ISBN: 978-90-78146-11-7.
This publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works 3.0 Netherlands License.

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Robert Hassan: Media, Politics and the Network Society (2004)

The rise of the network society ? the suffusion of much of the economy, culture and society with digital interconnectivity ? is a development of immense significance. In this innovative book, Robert Hassan unpacks the dynamics of this new information order and shows how they have affected both the way media and politics are `played?, and how these are set to reshape and reorder our world. Using many of the current ideas in media theory, cultural studies and the politics of the newly evolving `networked civil society?, Hassan argues that the network society is steeped with contradictions and in a state of deep flux.

* What is the network society?
* What effects does it have upon media, culture and politics?
* What are the competing forces in the network society, and how are they reshaping the world?

This is a key text for undergraduate students in media studies, politics, cultural studies and sociology, and will be of interest to anyone who wishes to understand the network society and play a part in shaping it.

Series: Issues in cultural and media studies
Publisher McGraw-Hill International, 2004
ISBN 0335213154, 9780335213153
Length 158 pages

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Brendan Dooley, Sabrina Baron (eds.): The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (2001)

The invention and spread of newspapers in the seventeenth century had a profound effect on early modern European culture and politics. The European pattern for the delivery and consumption of political information provided the model for the rest of the world. However, the transition to printed news was neither rapid nor easy and a greater circulation of news had widely varying effects.
Recent research has revealed much about the origins and development of news publishing in each of its European settings. This book is the first to bring this research together in comprehensive survey. The international contributors to this volume study all of the most important information markets in Europe. Topics covered include:
* the relation between printed and manuscript news
* role of censorship mechanisms
* effects of politics on reading and publishing
* effects of reading on contemporary politics

What emerges from this research is a new view of political information as an enterprise, and of the products of information as commodities circulating far and wide.

Publisher Routledge, 2001
ISBN 0415203104, 9780415203104
Length 310 pages

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Nick Couldry: The Place of Media Power. Pilgrims and Witnesses of the Media Age (2000)

This fascinating study focuses on an area neglected in previous studies of the media: the meetings between ordinary people and the media. Couldry explores what happens when people who normally consume the media witness media processes in action, or even become the object of media attention themselves. Such encounters, Couldry argues, offer a new way of thinking about the media’s impact on contemporary social life, the basis of their social authority, and the possibility of challenging it.

Publisher Routledge, 2000
ISBN 0415213150, 9780415213158
Length 238 pages

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Vincent Mosco: The Digital Sublime. Myth, Power, and Cyberspace (2004)

The digital era promises, as did many other technological developments before it, the transformation of society: with the computer, we can transcend time, space, and politics-as-usual. In The Digital Sublime, Vincent Mosco goes beyond the usual stories of technological breakthrough and economic meltdown to explore the myths constructed around the new digital technology and why we feel compelled to believe in them. He tells us that what kept enthusiastic investors in the dotcom era bidding up stocks even after the crash had begun was not willful ignorance of the laws of economics but belief in the myth that cyberspace was opening up a new world.

Myths are not just falsehoods that can be disproved, Mosco points out, but stories that lift us out of the banality of everyday life into the possibility of the sublime. He argues that if we take what we know about cyberspace and situate it within what we know about culture—specifically the central post-Cold War myths of the end of history, geography, and politics—we will add to our knowledge about the digital world; we need to see it “with both eyes”—that is, to understand it both culturally and materially.

After examining the myths of cyberspace and going back in history to look at the similar mythic pronouncements prompted by past technological advances—the telephone, the radio, and television, among others—Mosco takes us to Ground Zero. In the final chapter he considers the twin towers of the World Trade Center—our icons of communication, information, and trade—and their part in the politics, economics, and myths of cyberspace.

Publisher MIT Press, 2004
ISBN: 0-262-13439-X, 978-0-262-13439-2
232 pages

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Mario Carpo: Architecture in the Age of Printing. Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory (2001)

The discipline of architecture depends on the transmission in space and time of accumulated experiences, concepts, rules, and models. From the invention of the alphabet to the development of ASCII code for electronic communication, the process of recording and transmitting this body of knowledge has reflected the dominant information technologies of each period. In this book Mario Carpo discusses the communications media used by Western architects, from classical antiquity to modern classicism, showing how each medium related to specific forms of architectural thinking.

Carpo highlights the significance of the invention of movable type and mechanically reproduced images. He argues that Renaissance architectural theory, particularly the system of the five architectural orders, was consciously developed in response to the formats and potential of the new printed media. Carpo contrasts architecture in the age of printing with what preceded it: Vitruvian theory and the manuscript format, oral transmission in the Middle Ages, and the fifteenth-century transition from script to print. He also suggests that the basic principles of “typographic” architecture thrived in the Western world as long as print remained our main information technology. The shift from printed to digital representations, he points out, will again alter the course of architecture.

Translated by Sarah Benson
Publisher MIT Press, 2001
ISBN 0262032880, 9780262032889
Length 246 pages

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Douglas Kellner: Media Spectacle (2003)

During the mid-1990s, the O.J. Simpson murder trial dominated the media in the United States and were circulated throughout the world via global communications networks. The case became a spectacle of race, gender, class and violence, bringing in elements of domestic melodrama, crime drama and legal drama. According to this fascinating new book, the Simpson case was just one example of what the author calls ‘media spectacle’ – a form of media culture that puts contemporary dreams, nightmares, fantasies and values on display. Through the analysis of several such media spectacles – including Elvis, The X Files, Michael Jordan, and the Bill Clinton sex scandals – Doug Kellner draws out important insights into media, journalism, the public sphere and politics in an era of new technologies.

In this excellent follow up to his best selling Media Culture, Kellner’s fascinating new volume delivers an informative read for students of sociology, culture and media.

Publisher Routledge, 2003
ISBN 0415268281, 9780415268288
Length 192 pages

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