D. E. Wittkower (ed.): Facebook and Philosophy: What’s on Your Mind? (2010)

28 January 2011, dusan

Facebook and Philosophy is an entertaining, multi-faceted exploration of what Facebook means for us and for our relationships. With discussions ranging from the nature of friendship and its relationship to “friending,” to the (debatable) efficacy of “online activism,” this book is the most extensive and systematic attempt to understand Facebook yet. And with plenty of new perspectives on Twitter and Web 2.0 along the way, this fun, thought-provoking book is a serious and significant contribution for anyone working with social media, whether in academia, journalism, public relations, activism, or business. Exploring far-reaching questions — Can our interactions on Facebook help us care about each other more? Does Facebook signal the death of privacy, or (perhaps worse yet) the death of our desire for privacy? — Facebook and Philosophy is vital reading for anyone involved in social networks today.

Publisher Open Court, 2010
Volume 50 of Popular Culture and Philosophy
ISBN 0812696751, 9780812696752
288 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-3-9)

Roy Ascott (ed.): Art, Technologies, Consciousness: mind@large (2000)

28 January 2011, dusan

Within a technological context, this volume addresses contemporary theories of consciousness, subjective experience, the creation of meaning and emotion, and relationships between cognition and location. Its focus is both on and beyond the digital culture, seeking to assimilate new ideas emanating from the physical sciences as well as embracing spiritual and artistic aspects of human experience.

Developing on the studies published in Roy Ascott’s successful Reframing Consciousness, the book documents the very latest work from those connected with the internationally acclaimed CAiiA-STAR centre and its conferences. Their artistic and theoretical research in new media and art includes aspects of:
• artificial life
• robotics
• technoetics
• performance
• computer music
• intelligent architecture
• telematic art

With profound insights for those in fields of Art, Media and Design – both academics and professionals — this book will also provide new ideas for software designers working on material to be used by the arts community.

Publisher Intellect Books, 2000
ISBN 1841500410, 9781841500416
204 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-24)

Jodi Dean: Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (2010)

28 January 2011, dusan

Blog Theory offers a critical theory of contemporary media. Furthering her account of communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean explores the ways new media practices like blogging and texting capture their users in intensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. Her wide-ranging and theoretically rich analysis extends from her personal experiences as a blogger, through media histories, to newly emerging social network platforms and applications.

Set against the background of the economic crisis wrought by neoliberalism, the book engages with recent work in contemporary media theory as well as with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Zizek. Through these engagements, Dean defends the provocative thesis that reflexivity in complex networks is best understood via the psychoanalytic notion of the drives. She contends, moreover, that reading networks in terms of the drives enables us to grasp their real, human dimension, that is, the feelings and affects that embed us in the system.

In remarkably clear and lucid prose, Dean links seemingly trivial and transitory updates from the new mass culture of the internet to more fundamental changes in subjectivity and politics. Everyday communicative exchanges–from blog posts to text messages–have widespread effects, effects that not only undermine capacities for democracy but also entrap us in circuits of domination.”

Publisher Polity, 2010
ISBN 0745649696, 9780745649696
140 pages

Reviews: Jussi Parikka (Leonardo, 2010), Julia Lupton (LA Review of Books, 2012), Matthew Flisfeder (Reviews in Cultural Theory, 2012), McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar, 2015).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-5-31)