Nordic Media Culture – Actors and Practices (2003), ed. Minna Tarkka and Mirjam Martevo

Nordic media culture – actors and practices publishes results of the Nordic research project carried out by m-cult in collaboration with PNEK (NO), CRAC (SE), Lorna (IS) and CultureNet Denmark (DK). The report contains an overview of Nordic media culture, reports from the national “scenes” in the five countries, proposals, project presentations and a catalogue of key organisations in the field. The research project was funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Nordic Cultural Fund.

Helsinki: m-cult 2003
140 pages (in English)
ISBN 952-91-5878-5 (paperback)
ISBN 952-91-5880-7 (pdf)

More info: http://www.m-cult.org/publications_en.htm

PDF

Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker: The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (2007)

“The network has become the core organizational structure for postmodern politics, culture, and life, replacing the modern era’s hierarchical systems. From peer-to-peer file sharing and massive multiplayer online games to contagion vectors of digital or biological viruses and global affiliations of terrorist organizations, the network form has become so invasive that nearly every aspect of contemporary society can be located within it.

Borrowing their title from the hacker term for a program that takes advantage of a flaw in a network system, Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker challenge the widespread assumption that networks are inherently egalitarian. Instead, they contend that there exist new modes of control entirely native to networks, modes that are at once highly centralized and dispersed, corporate and subversive.

In this provocative book-length essay, Galloway and Thacker argue that a whole new topology must be invented to resist and reshape the network form, one that is as asymmetrical in relationship to networks as the network is in relation to hierarchy.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2007
ISBN 0816650446, 9780816650446
196 pages

Reviews: Daniel Gilfillan, Nathaniel Tkacz.

PDF (updated on 2012-7-8)

Sherry Turkle (ed.): The Inner History of Devices (2008)

For more than two decades, in such landmark studies as The Second Self and Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle has challenged our collective imagination with her insights about how technology enters our private worlds. In The Inner History of Devices, she describes her process, an approach that reveals how what we make is woven into our ways of seeing ourselves. She brings together three traditions of listening—that of the memoirist, the clinician, and the ethnographer. Each informs the others to compose an inner history of devices. We read about objects ranging from cell phones and video poker to prosthetic eyes, from Web sites and television to dialysis machines.

In an introductory essay, Turkle makes the case for an “intimate ethnography” that challenges conventional wisdom. One personal computer owner tells Turkle: “This computer means everything to me. It’s where I put my hope.” Turkle explains that she began that conversation thinking she would learn how people put computers to work. By its end, her question has changed: “What was there about personal computers that offered such deep connection? What did a computer have that offered hope?” The Inner History of Devices teaches us to listen for the answer.

In the memoirs, ethnographies, and clinical cases collected in this volume, we read about an American student who comes to terms with her conflicting identities as she contemplates a cell phone she used in Japan (“Tokyo sat trapped inside it”); a troubled patient who uses email both to criticize her therapist and to be reassured by her; a compulsive gambler who does not want to win steadily at video poker because a pattern of losing and winning keeps her more connected to the body of the machine. In these writings, we hear untold stories. We learn that received wisdom never goes far enough.

Publisher MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 0262201763, 9780262201766
208 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated 2012-11-4)