Fred Turner: Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production (2009)

Every August for more than a decade, thousands of information technologists and other knowledge workers have trekked out into a barren stretch of alkali desert and built a temporary city devoted to art, technology and communal living: Burning Man. Drawing on extensive archival research, participant observation, and interviews, this paper explores the ways that Burning Man’s bohemian ethos supports new forms of production emerging in Silicon Valley and especially at Google. It shows how elements of the Burning Man world – including the building of a socio-technical commons, participation in project-based artistic labor, and the fusion of social and professional interaction – help shape and legitimate the collaborative manufacturing processes driving the growth of Google and other firms. The paper thus develops the notion that Burning Man serves as a key cultural infrastructure for the Bay area’s new media industries. (Abstract)

Key Words: peer production, counterculture, cultural economy, art and technology, cultural infrastructure, free labor.

Published in New Media & Society 11, 2009

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Nada Švob-Đokić (ed.): The Emerging Creative Industries in Southeastern Europe (2005)

The book The Emerging Creative Industries in Southeastern Europe is a collection of papers that resulted from the postgraduate course Managing Cultural Transitions: Southeastern Europe – The Impact of Creative Industries, organized by the Department for Culture and Communication of the Institute for International Relations, Zagreb, and held at the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik, 8-15 May 2005. The book gathers contributions by 11 authors who analyze creative industries and cultural cooperation in South East Europe, through three chapters: Creative Industries in Southeastern Europe; Cultural Exchange and Cooperation in Southeastern Europe and Cultural Cooperation Contexts.

The creative industries or, rather, culture industries as they appeared in the Southeastern European countries, stem from the tradition of industrial and market-oriented cultural production taken to be low culture or even kitsch cultural production, undermined during the times of socialism. In the transition period these industries became more associated with the ideas of modernization and technological progress, and strongly prompted by imports of cultural consumerism based on pop cultural products. It became clearly visible that small-scale cultural industries and productions might be both economically and culturally reasonable if supported by regionalist ideas and intra-regional cultural cooperation, which might, perhaps, establish links among small and very diverse Southeastern European cultures. However, the influence of large transnational corporations, which are turning the region into a part of the global cultural market, has not yet been undermined.

In The Emerging Creative Industries in Southeastern Europe authors from the region add a new dimension to this discussion and show how the Southeast European transitional societies, at best “mixed societies” undergoing different types of the modernization process, may react to challenges relating to the development of creative industries and creative economies. The authors clearly stress that in spite of numerous commonalities, the differences between countries in the region, and also within them, may still produce very different reactions to the challenge of creative industries and the markets they may be cultivating.

Collection of papers from the course
Managing Cultural Transitions: Southeastern Europe – The Impact of Creative Industries
Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik, 8 – 15 May 2005
Edited by Nada Švob-Đokić
Culturelink Joint Publications Series No. 8
Institute for International Relations
Zagreb, 2005
ISBN 953-6096-37-4

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Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition: System Error (2005)

A resource for student activism on environmental, labor and human rights problems associated with the high-tech industry. The report includes information on responsible recycling and environmentally and socially responsible purchasing.

Project website

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