Joe Karaganis (ed.): Structures of Participation in Digital Culture (2008)

Structures of Participation in Digital Culture, edited by SSRC Program Director Joe Karaganis, explores digital technologies that are engines of cultural innovation, from the virtualization of group networks and social identities to the digital convergence of textural and audio-visual media. User-centered content production, from Wikipedia to YouTube to Open Source, has become the emblem of this transformation, but the changes run deeper and wider than these novel organizational forms. Digital culture is also about the transformation of what it means to be a creator within a vast and growing reservoir of media, data, computational power, and communicative possibilities. We have few tools and models for understanding the power of databases, network representations, filtering techniques, digital rights management, and the other new architectures of agency and control. We have fewer accounts of how these new capacities transform our shared cultures, our understanding of them, and our capacities to act within them. Advancing that account is the goal of this volume.

Publisher The Social Science Research, New York, 2007
ISBN 0979077222, 9780979077227
284 pages

PDF (updated on 2013-6-6)
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David Dunn (ed.): Eigenwelt Der Apparatewelt – Pioneers of Electronic Art (1992)

A major reference for the history of media arts.

Artistic director: Peter Weibel
Curators: Woody Vasulka and Steina Vasulka
Publisher The Vasulkas, Santa Fe, 1992
Published on the occasion of the exhibition held “Eigenwelt der Apparatewelt. Pionere der elektronischen Kunst”, June 22 – July 5, 1992, Ars Electronica, Linz
240 pages

authors

PDF (updated on 2012-10-21)
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Deptford.TV Diaries II: Pirate Strategies (2008)

“This reader problematises the notion of ‘tactical media’. As McKenzie Wark and others stated already in 2003: ‘can tactical media anticipate, rather than be merely reactive?’ By calling for a strategic approach to media production and distribution, the intention is to overcome some of the structural paradoxes inherent to ‘alternative’ or ‘oppositional’ media, especially since much of the free / open culture dissemination on the Internet has become the new “mainstream” in itself (think of the casual defiance of copyright played out relentlessly and on a mass scale with file-sharing, social networking, and everyday media consumption).

The book is a compilation of theoretical underpinnings, local narratives and written documentation not only of the Deptford.TV project but of phenomena relating to this new situation of ‘strategic media’.”

Keywords: alternative media, strategic media, documentary filmmaking, piracy, file-sharing, digitization, media distribution, local regeneration, urban change.
Steal This Film, YouTube, copyleft, object code, Pirate Bay, Lewisham, Guanxi, Lawrence Lessig, Critical Art Ensemble, Facebook, Pepys estate, Armin Medosch, remix culture, Found footage, Linux, Node.London, Debian Social Contract, Jonas Andersson, Cory Doctorow

Publisher OWN, SPC Media Lab, Deckspace, London, 2008
Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 License
ISBN 9781906496111
171 pages

Publisher

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