Amanda Spink, Michael Zimmer: Web Search: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (2008)

Web search engines have emerged as one of the dominant technologies of modern life, leaving few aspects of our everyday activities untouched. Search engines are not just indispensable tools for finding and accessing information online, but have become a defining component of the human condition and can be conceptualized as a complex behavior embedded within an individual’s everyday social, cultural, political, and information-seeking activities.

This book investigates Web search from the non-technical perspective, bringing together chapters that represent a range of multidisciplinary theories, models, and ideas about Web searching. They examine the various roles and impacts of Web searching on the social, cultural, political, legal, and informational spheres of our lives, such as the impact on individuals, social groups, modern and postmodern ways of knowing, and public and private life. By critically examining the issues, theories, and formations arising from, and surrounding, Web searching, Web Search: Multidisciplinary Perspectives represents an important contribution to the emerging multidisciplinary body of research on Web search engines.

The new ideas and novel perspectives on Web searching gathered in this volume will prove valuable for research and curricula in the fields of social sciences, communication studies, cultural studies, information science, and related disciplines.

Published by Springer, 2008
ISBN 3540758283, 9783540758280
351 pages

Key terms: rhizome, PageRank, Yahoo, Google Bombs, mental models, Google Inc, Ulster Loyalist, Infoseek, hypertext, Northern Irish, Search Engine Watch, mass media, copyright infringement, Web cookies, rhizomatic, searchers, World Wide Web, YouTube, Meta tags, Lycos

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Lawrence Lessig: Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008)

The author of Free Culture shows how we harm our childrenand almost anyone who creates, enjoys, or sells any art formwith a restrictive copyright system driven by corporate interests. Lessig reveals the solutions to this impasse offered by a collaborative yet profitable hybrid economy. Lawrence Lessig, the reigning authority on intellectual property in the Internet age, spotlights the newest and possibly the most harmful culture war waged against our kids and others who create and consume art. Americas copyright laws have ceased to perform their original, beneficial role: protecting artists creations while allowing them to build on previous creative works. In fact, our system now criminalizes those very actions. For many, new technologies have made it irresistible to flout these unreasonable and ultimately untenable laws. Some of todays most talented artists are felons, and so are our kids, who see no reason why they shouldnt do what their computers and the Web let them do, from burning a copyrighted CD for a friend to biting riffs from films, videos, songs, etc and making new art from them. Criminalizing our children and others is exactly what our society should not do, and Lessig shows how we can and must end this conflicta war as ill conceived and unwinnable as the war on drugs. By embracing read-write culture, which allows its users to create art as readily as they consume it, we can ensure that creators get the supportartistic, commercial, and ethicalthat they deserve and need. Indeed, we can already see glimmers of a new hybrid economy that combines the profit motives of traditional business with the sharing economy evident in such Web sites as Wikipedia and YouTube. The hybrid economy will become ever more prominent in every creative realmfrom news to musicand Lessig shows how we can and should use it to benefit those who make and consume culture. Remix is an urgent, eloquent plea to end a war that harms our children and other intrepid creative users of new technologies. It also offers an inspiring vision of the post-war world where enormous opportunities await those who view art as a resource to be shared openly rather than a commodity to be hoarded.

First published by Penguin Group USA, 2008
Published by Bloomsbury Publishing, October 2008
Creative Commons BY-NC 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9781408113479
352 pages

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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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