Geert Lovink, Miriam Rasch (eds.): Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives (2013)

The Unlike Us Reader offers a critical examination of social media, bringing together theoretical essays, personal discussions, and artistic manifestos. How can we understand the social media we use everyday, or consciously choose not to use? We know very well that monopolies control social media, but what are the alternatives? While Facebook continues to increase its user population and combines loose privacy restrictions with control over data, many researchers, programmers, and activists turn towards designing a decentralized future. Through understanding the big networks from within, be it by philosophy or art, new perspectives emerge.

Unlike Us is a research network of artists, designers, scholars, activists, and programmers, with the aim to combine a critique of the dominant social media platforms with work on ‘alternatives in social media’, through workshops, conferences, online dialogues, and publications. Everyone is invited to be a part of the public discussion on how we want to shape the network architectures and the future of social networks we are using so intensely.

Contributors: Solon Barocas, Caroline Bassett, Tatiana Bazzichelli, David Beer, David M. Berry, Mercedes Bunz, Florencio Cabello, Paolo Cirio, Joan Donovan, Louis Doulas, Leighton Evans, Marta G. Franco, Robert W. Gehl, Seda Gürses, Alexandra Haché, Harry Halpin, Mariann Hardey, Pavlos Hatzopoulos, Yuk Hui, Ippolita, Nathan Jurgenson, Nelli Kambouri, Jenny Kennedy, Ganaele Langlois, Simona Lodi, Alessandro Ludovico, Tiziana Mancinelli, Andrew McNicol, Andrea Miconi, Arvind Narayanan, Wyatt Niehaus, Korinna Patelis, PJ Rey, Sebastian Sevignani, Bernard Stiegler, Marc Stumpel, Tiziana Terranova, Vincent Toubiana, Brad Troemel, Lonneke van der Velden, Martin Warnke and D.E. Wittkower.

Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, February 2013
INC Reader #3
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9789081857529
386 pages
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Johana Švarcová, Stanislav Abrahám (eds.): Manuál pro uživatele elektronické hudby (2009) [Czech]

Publikace obsahuje několik textů a rozhovorů s umělci, zabývající se teoretickou reflexí současné scény akustických umění, elektronických nástrojů, sdílení elektronické hudby a aspektů užívání technologií.

Manuál je součástí projektu AV Slabikář – série workshopů zaměřených na vzdělávání v oblasti audiovizuální tvorby, který v roce 2009 realizovalo občanské sdružení Lemurie.

Texty: Stanislav Abrahám, David Doubek, Michal Cáb, Bob Ostertag.
Interview: Ivan Palacký, Petr Marek, Pavel Pernický.

Publisher Lemurie, 2009
47 pages

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Michael Mandiberg (ed.): The Social Media Reader (2012)

With the rise of web 2.0 and social media platforms taking over vast tracts of territory on the internet, the media landscape has shifted drastically in the past 20 years, transforming previously stable relationships between media creators and consumers. 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 styles 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 NYU Press, 2012
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license
ISBN 0814763022, 9780814763025
289 pages

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The CryptoParty Handbook (2012)

This handbook is designed to help those with no prior experience to protect their basic human right to Privacy in networked, digital domains. By covering a broad array of topics and use contexts it is written to help anyone wishing to understand and then quickly mitigate many kinds of vulnerability using free, open-source tools. Most importantly however this handbook is intended as a reference for use during Crypto Parties.

Facilitated by Adam Hyde
Core Team: Marta Peirano, Asher Wolf, Julian Oliver, Danja Vasiliev, Malte Dik, Brendan Howell, Jan Gerber, Brian Newbold,
Assisted by Teresa Dillon, AT, Carola Hesse, Chris Pinchen, ‘LiamO’, ‘l3lackEyedAngels’, ‘Story89′, Travis Tueffel
Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 Unported license
386+ pages
via Julian Oliver

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Tero Karvinen, Kimmo Karvinen: Make a Mind-Controlled Arduino Robot: Use Your Brain as a Remote (2011)

Build a robot that responds to electrical activity in your brain—it’s easy and fun. If you’re familiar with Arduino and have basic mechanical building skills, this book will show you how to construct a robot that plays sounds, blinks lights, and reacts to signals from an affordable electroencephalography (EEG) headband. Concentrate and the robot will move. Focus more and it will go faster. Let your mind wander and the robot will slow down.

You’ll find complete instructions for building a simple robot chassis with servos, wheels, sensors, LEDs, and a speaker. You also get the code to program the Arduino microcontroller to receive wireless signals from the EEG. Your robot will astound anyone who wears the EEG headband.

This book will help you:
- Connect an inexpensive EEG device to Arduino
- Build a robot platform on wheels
- Calculate a percentage value from a potentiometer reading
- Mix colors with an RGB LED
- Play tones with a piezo speaker
- Write a program that makes the robot avoid boundaries
- Create simple movement routines

Publisher O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2011
ISBN 1449311547, 9781449311544
98 pages

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Libre Graphics Magazine 1.4: The Physical, the Digital and the Designer (2012)

The fourth issue of magazine on open source graphic design and graphics.

Editorial team: Ana Carvalho, Ginger Coons, Ricardo Lafuente
Publisher: Ginger Coons, May 2012
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (CC-BY-SA)
ISSN 1925-1416
52 pages

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Libre Graphics Magazine 1.3: Collaboration, collaboratively (2011)

The third issue of magazine on open source graphic design and graphics.

Editorial team: Ana Carvalho, Ginger Coons, Ricardo Lafuente
Publisher: Ginger Coons, August 2011
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license (CC-BY-SA)
ISSN 1925-1416
60 pages

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