Read Me! ASCII Culture & The Revenge of Knowledge. Filtered by Nettime (1999)

A compilation of writings and debates from the Nettime newsgroup and internet mailing list. This book documents the debates over emerging media technologies that are currently reshaping society. What are the liberatory potentials? Where are the points of political conflict and class struggle in this new culture? What are the pitfalls of new technology? Read Me! provides the beginnings of this discussion and an outline for what has become a continuing forum on the Net.

Edited by Josephine Bosma, Pauline van Mourik Broekman, Ted Byfield, Matthew Fuller, Geert Lovink, Diana McCarty, Pit Schultz Felix Stalder, McKenzie Wark, and Faith Wilding
Publisher: Autonomedia (February, 1999)
ISBN: 1570270899, 978-1570270895
556 pages

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AltArt Foundation: Bare Share. Culture of File Sharing in Romania (2007)

The exhibition contained the works of largely anonymous artists and some of the best known – active in the digital space. The territory researched is the DC++-based neighborhood networks – providers of an endemic culture where the act of sharing is the prototypical contract of participating in this culture. Sharing while not expecting immediate gratification make neighborhood networks complex gift economies – where the community becomes an entity, the real gifting partner – playing the role of the donor and recipient in the same time.

This ideology of exchange – regardless of legal issues or moral concerns – builds a subculture of consumption that is maintained through giving. Gifting becomes a tool for the collapse of the permission-culture-based capitalist market hegemony while it is serving as an alternative consumption activity at the electronic frontier.

Curators: Istvan Szakáts, Stefan Tiron
Project by AltArt Foundation

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Manuel Castells: The Power of Identity: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, 2nd ed. (2009)

In this second volume of The Information Age trilogy, with an extensive new preface following the recent global economic crisis, Manuel Castells deals with the social, political, and cultural dynamics associated with the technological transformation of our societies and with the globalization of the economy.

* Extensive new preface examines how dramatic recent events have transformed the socio-political landscape of our world
* Applies Castells’ hypotheses to contemporary issues such as Al Qaeda and global terrorist networks, American unilateralism and the crisis of political legitimacy throughout the world
* A brilliant account of social, cultural, and political conflict and struggle all over the world
* Analyzes the importance of cultural, religious, and national identity as sources of meaning for people, and its implications for social movement
* Throws new light on the dynamics of global and local change

Publisher John Wiley and Sons, 2009
Information Age Series, Manuel Castells
ISBN 1405196874, 9781405196871
Length 584 pages

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Kazys Varnelis (ed.): Networked Publics (2008)

Digital media and network technologies are now part of everyday life. The Internet has become the backbone of communication, commerce, and media; the ubiquitous mobile phone connects us with others as it removes us from any stable sense of location. Networked Publics examines the ways that the social and cultural shifts created by these technologies have transformed our relationships to (and definitions of) place, culture, politics, and infrastructure.

Four chapters—each by an interdisciplinary team of scholars using collaborative software—provide a synoptic overview along with illustrative case studies. The chapter on place describes how digital networks enable us to be present in physical and networked places simultaneously (on the phone while on the road; on the Web while at a café)—often at the expense of non-digital commitments. The chapter on culture explores the growth of amateur-produced and -remixed content online and the impact of these practices on the music, anime, advertising, and news industries. The chapter on politics examines the new networked modes of bottom-up political expression and mobilization, and the difficulty in channeling online political discourse into productive political deliberation. And finally, the chapter on infrastructure notes the tension between openness and control in the flow of information, as seen in the current controversy over net neutrality. An introduction by anthropologist Mizuko Ito and a conclusion by architecture theorist Kazys Varnelis frame the chapters, giving overviews of the radical nature of these transformations.

Publisher MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 0262220857, 9780262220859
Length 176 pages

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Philip Armstrong: Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political (2009)

Significantly advancing our notion of what constitutes a network, Philip Armstrong proposes a rethinking of political public space that specifically separates networks from the current popular discussion of globalization and information technology.

Analyzing a wide range of Jean-Luc Nancy’s works, Reticulations shows how his project of articulating the political in terms of singularities, pluralities, and multiplicities can deepen our understanding of networks and how they influence community and politics. Even more striking is the way Armstrong associates this general complex in Nancy’s writing with his concern for what Nancy calls the retreat of the political. Armstrong highlights what Nancy’s perspective on networks reveals about movement politics as seen in the 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization, the impact of technology on citizenship, and finally how this perspective critiques the model of networked communism constructed by Hardt and Negri. Contesting the exclusive link between technology and networks,

Reticulations ultimately demonstrates how network society creates an entirely new politics, one surprisingly rooted in community.

Publisher    U of Minnesota Press, 2009
ISBN    0816654905, 9780816654901
Length    336 pages

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Paul B. Hartzog: Panarchy: Governance in the Network Age

Paul Hartzog introduces the concept of panarchy, a sociopolitical field that emerges when connective technologies, which lower the threshold for collective action, enable cooperative peer-to-peer production – of knowledge, of tools, of power.

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Saskia Sassen (ed.): Global Networks, Linked Cities (2002)

In her pioneering book The Global City, Saskia Sassen argued that certain cities in the postindustrial world have become central nodes in the new service economy, strategic sites for the acceleration of capital and information flows as well as spaces of increasing socio-economic polarization. One effect has been that such cities have gained in importance and power relative to nation-states.
In this new collection of essays, Sassen and a distinguished group of contributors expand on the author’s earlier work in a number of important ways, focusing on two key issues. First, they look at how information flows have bound global cities together in networks, creating a global city web whose constituent cities become “global” through the networks they participate in. Second, they investigate emerging global cities in the developing world-Sao Paulo, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Mexico City, Beirut, the Dubai-Iran corridor, and Buenos Aires. They show how these globalizing zones are not only replicating many features of the top tier of global cities, but are also generating new socio-economic patterns as well. These new patterns of development promise to lead to significant changes in the structure of the global economy, as more and more cities worldwide are integrated into globalization’s circuitry.

Includes contributions from:Linda Garcia, Patrice Riemens, Geert Lovink, Peter Taylor, David Smith, Michael Timberlake, Stephen Graham, Sueli Schiffer Ramos, Christoff Parnreiter, Felicity Gu, David Meyer, Pablo Ciccolella, Iliana Mignaqui, Eric Huybrechts, Ali Parsa. Also includes six maps.

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global cities, Mexico City, Mercosur, Buenos Aires, telematics, Sharjah, Beirut, Sao Paulo, Iran, Brazil, Bandar Abbas, maquiladora, Kish Island, optic fiber, Tokyo, nomic, Lujiazui, Abu Dhabi, Argentina

Publisher Routledge, 2002
ISBN 0415931630, 9780415931632
Length 368 pages

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Kristóf Nyíri – The Networked Mind (2005)

The paper discusses the role of networks in cognition on two levels: on the level of the organization of ideas, and on the level of interpersonal communication. Any interesting system of ideas forms a network: ideas presented in a linear order (the order forced upon us by verbal expression) will necessarily convey a distorted picture of the underlying patterns of thought. Networks of ideas typically consist of a great number of nodes with just a few links, and a small number of hubs with very many links; that is, they are, to employ Albert-László Barabási’s term, “scale-free.” Barabási fits into a specific tradition: Hungarians had an early influence on the philosophy of networks, and on the philosophy of communication as developed at Marshall McLuhan’s Toronto Circle. In fact, this was the circle in which certain Hungarian and Austrian ideas on mediated collective thinking first came together—a telling testimony to the conditions of disturbed communication and idiosyncratic networking typical of East-Central Europe, past and present. The nodes-and-hubs pattern is characteristic, too, of social networks, in particular of scholarly and scientific networks. The paper analyses the role of “invisible colleges”—informal groups of scientific elites through whom the communication of information both within a field and across fields is channelled. By way of conclusion the notion of a new type of personality, the “network individual,” is discussed: the network individual is the person reintegrated, after centuries of relative isolation induced by the printing press, into the collective thinking of society—the individual whose mind is manifestly mediated, once again, by the minds of those forming his/her smaller or larger community.

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Howard Rheingold: Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Extending Technology (1985)

The digital revolution did not begin with the teenage millionaires of Silicon Valley, claims Howard Rheingold, but with such early intellectual giants as Charles Babbage, George Boole, and John von Neumann. In a highly engaging style, Rheingold tells the story of what he calls the patriarchs, pioneers, and infonauts of the computer, focusing in particular on such pioneers as J. C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, and Alan Kay.

Taking the reader step by step from nineteenth-century mathematics to contemporary computing, he introduces a fascinating collection of eccentrics, mavericks, geniuses, and visionaries. The book was originally published in 1985, and Rheingold’s attempt to envision computing in the 1990s turns out to have been remarkably prescient. This edition contains an afterword, in which Rheingold interviews some of the pioneers discussed in the book. As an exercise in what he calls “retrospective futurism,” Rheingold also looks back at how he looked forward.

First published by Simon & Schuster, 1985

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Howard Rheingold: The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (1993)

Howard Rheingold has been called the First Citizen of the Internet. In this book he tours the “virtual community” of online networking. He describes a community that is as real and as much a mixed bag as any physical communityandmdash;one where people talk, argue, seek information, organize politically, fall in love, and dupe others. At the same time that he tells moving stories about people who have received online emotional support during devastating illnesses, he acknowledges a darker side to people’s behavior in cyberspace. Indeed, contends Rheingold, people relate to each other online much the same as they do in physical communities.

Perseus Books · 1993
ISBN: 978-0-201-60870-0
ISBN-10: 0-201-60870-7

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Craig J. Saper: Networked Art (2001)

Outlines an exciting new approach to this confluence of art, media, and poetry.

The experimental art and poetry of the last half of the twentieth century offers a glimpse of the emerging networked culture that electronic devices will make omnipresent. Craig J. Saper demarcates this new genre of networked art, which uses the trappings of bureaucratic systems—money, logos, corporate names, stamps—to create intimate situations among the participants.

In Saper’s analysis, the pleasures that these aesthetic situations afford include shared special knowledge or new language among small groups of participants. Functioning as artworks in themselves, these temporary institutional structures—etworks, publications, and collective works—give rise to a gift-exchange community as an alternative economy and social system. Saper explains how this genre developed from post-World War II conceptual art, including periodicals as artworks in themselves; lettrist, concrete, and process poetry; Bauhaus versus COBRA; Fluxus publications, kits, and machines; mail art and on-sendings. The encyclopedic scope of the book includes discussions of artists from J. Beuys to J. S. G. Boggs, and Bauhaus’s Max Bill to Anna Freud Banana. Networked Art is an essential guide to the digital artists and networks of the emerging future.

Key words and phrases: Fluxus, concrete poetry, mail art, mail artists, visual poetry, Dick Higgins, Big Dada, conceptual art, Ray Johnson, George Maciunas, sound poetry, Ken Friedman, Guy Bleus, Bauhaus, detournement, neoist, Max Bill, Augusto de Campos, George Brecht, Joseph Beuys

Published by U of Minnesota Press, 2001
ISBN 0816637075, 9780816637072
198 pages

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India and the IT Revolution: Networks of Global Culture

“India and the IT Revolution” explores the contemporary emergence of cosmopolitan, high-tech India as marking the arrival of a truly global cyberculture. It argues against the notion that globalization is a process of “Westernization,” which radiates out unilaterally from the core, imposing itself upon a passive, backward periphery. Instead, it conceives of global culture as a dynamic, innovative network, which proceeds primarily from its edges.

India and the IT Revolution: Networks of Global Culture
By Anna Greenspan
Published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2005
ISBN 1403939438, 9781403939432
202 pages

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The Internet in China: Cyberspace and Civil Society

The Internet in China examines the cultural and political ramifications of the Internet for Chinese society. The rapid growth of the Internet has been enthusiastically embraced by the Chinese government, but the government has also rushed to seize control of the virtual environment. Individuals have responded with impassioned campaigns against official control of information. The emergence of a civil society via cyberspace has had profound effects upon China–for example, in 2003, based on an Internet campaign, the Chinese Supreme People’s Court overturned the ruling of a local court for the first time since the Communist Party came to power in 1949.
The important question this book asks is not whether the Internet will democratize China, but rather in what ways the Internet is democratizing communication in China. How is the Internet empowering individuals by fostering new types of social spaces and redefining existing social relations?

The Internet in China: Cyberspace and Civil Society
By Zixue Tai
Edition: illustrated
Published by CRC Press, 2006
ISBN 0415976553, 9780415976558
365 pages
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Connected, or, What it means to live in the network society

In the twenty-first century, a network society is emerging. Fragmented, visually saturated, characterized by rapid technological change and constant social upheavals, it is dizzying, excessive, and sometimes surreal. In this breathtaking work, Steven Shaviro investigates popular culture, new technologies, political change, and community disruption and concludes that science fiction and social reality have become virtually indistinguishable. Connected is made up of a series of mini-essays–on cyberpunk, hip-hop, film noir, Web surfing, greed, electronic surveillance, pervasive multimedia, psychedelic drugs, artificial intelligence, evolutionary psychology, and the architecture of Frank Gehry, among other topics. Shaviro argues that our strange new world is increasingly being transformed in ways, and by devices, that seem to come out of the pages of science fiction, even while the world itself is becoming a futuristic landscape. The result is that science fiction provides the most useful social theory, the only form that manages to be as radical as reality itself. Connected looks at how our networked environment has manifested itself in the work of J. G. Ballard, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, K. W. Jeter, and others. Shaviro focuses on science fiction not only as a form of cultural commentary but also as a prescient forum in which to explore the forces that are morphing our world into a sort of virtual reality game. Original and compelling, Connected shows how the continual experimentation of science fiction, like science and technology themselves, conjures the invisible social and economic forces that surround us. One of our most exciting thinkers explores thelook and feel of our cultural moment.

Connected, or, What it means to live in the network society
By Steven Shaviro
Published by U of Minnesota Press, 2003
ISBN 0816643636, 9780816643639
289 pages

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Mark Nunes: Cyberspaces of Everyday Life (2006)

Networks and computer-mediated communication now penetrate the spaces of everyday life at a fundamental level. We communicate, work, bank, date, check the weather, and fuel conspiracy theories online. In each instance, users interact with network technology as much more than a computational device. Cyberspaces of Everyday Life provides a critical framework for understanding how the Internet takes part in the production of social space. Mark Nunes draws on the spatial analysis work of Henri Lefebvre to make sense of cyberspace as a social product. Looking at online education, he explores the ways in which the Internet restructures the university. Nunes also examines social uses of the World Wide Web and illustrates the ways online communication alters the relation between the global and the local. He also applies Deleuzian theory to emphasize computer-mediated communications’ performative elements of spatial production. Addressing the social and cultural implications of spam and anti-spam legislation, as well as how the burst Internet stock bubble and the Patriot Act have affected the relationship between networked spaces and daily living, Cyberspaces of Everyday Life sheds new light on the question of virtual space and its role in the offline world. Mark Nunes is associate professor and chair of the humanities department at Georgia Perimeter College, Clarkston Campus.

Cyberspaces of Everyday Life
By Mark Nunes
Published by University of Minnesota Press, 2006
ISBN 0816647917, 9780816647910
223 pages

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