Wilma de Jong, Martin Shaw, Neil Stammers (eds.): Global Activism, Global Media (2005)

“Radical political activist movements are growing all the time. To reach a wider audience each organisation has formed networks and websites, exploiting new communications technologies as well as conventional media to get its message across. This is often very successful: activist politics have come to influence ‘mainstream’ politics over fundamental issues such as trade, gender relations, the environment and war. This book brings together activists and academics in one volume, to explore the theory and practice of global activism’s relation to all forms of media, mainstream and otherwise. The contributors examine how global activism is represented in the mainstream press and explain the strategies that activists adopt to spread their own ideas. Investigating Indymedia and internet activism, they show how transformations in communications technology offer new possibilities, and explain how activists have successfully used and developed their own media. Case studies and topics include the world social forums, an example of a campaign from the NGO Action Aid, a campaign strategy from an internet activist, Greenpeace and the Brent Spar conflict, the World Development Movement and representations in the mainstream press, the Independent Media Centre, transgender activism on the net, Amnesty International, Oxfam and the internet.”

Publisher Pluto Press, 2005
ISBN 0745321968, 9780745321967
235 pages

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Geert Lovink: Dark Fiber: Tracking Critical Internet Culture (2002)

“According to media critic Geert Lovink, the Internet is being closed off by corporations and governments intent on creating a business and information environment free of dissent. Calling himself a radical media pragmatist, Lovink envisions an Internet culture that goes beyond the engineering culture that spawned it to bring humanities, user groups, social movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), artists, and cultural critics into the core of Internet development.

In Dark Fiber, Lovink combines aesthetic and ethical concerns and issues of navigation and usability without ever losing sight of the cultural and economic agendas of those who control hardware, software, content, design, and delivery. He examines the unwarranted faith of the cyber-libertarians in the ability of market forces to create a decentralized, accessible communication system. He studies the inner dynamics of hackers’ groups, Internet activists, and artists, seeking to understand the social laws of online life. Finally, he calls for the injection of political and economic competence into the community of freedom-loving cyber-citizens, to wrest the Internet from corporate and state control.

The topics include the erosion of email, bandwidth for all, the rise and fall of dot-com mania, techno-mysticism, sustainable social networks, the fight for a public Internet time standard, the strategies of Internet activists, mailing list culture, and collaborative text filtering. Stressing the importance of intercultural collaboration, Lovink includes reports from Albania, where NGOs and artists use new media to combat the country’s poverty and isolation; from Taiwan, where the September 1999 earthquake highlighted the cultural politics of the Internet; and from Delhi, where a new media center explores free software, public access, and Hindi interfaces.”

Publisher    MIT Press, 2002
ISBN    0262621800, 9780262621809
382 pages

Reviews: McKenzie Wark (Rhizome, 2002), Lisa Nakamura (Mute, 2002), Franco Berardi Bifo (Generation Online, n.d.), Catriona Mills (M/C Reviews), Christina Van Houten (Rhizomes, 2009), Kirk McElhearn (Technology & Society, n.d.), Evangelos Milios (Social Science Computer Review, 2003), Arnold Peskin (Journal of Urban Technology, 2003).

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PDF (added on 2018-10-24)

Philip Armstrong: Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political (2009)

“Significantly advancing our notion of what constitutes a network, Philip Armstrong proposes a rethinking of political public space that specifically separates networks from the current popular discussion of globalization and information technology.

Analyzing a wide range of Jean-Luc Nancy’s works, Reticulations shows how his project of articulating the political in terms of singularities, pluralities, and multiplicities can deepen our understanding of networks and how they influence community and politics. Even more striking is the way Armstrong associates this general complex in Nancy’s writing with his concern for what Nancy calls the retreat of the political. Armstrong highlights what Nancy’s perspective on networks reveals about movement politics as seen in the 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization, the impact of technology on citizenship, and finally how this perspective critiques the model of networked communism constructed by Hardt and Negri.

Contesting the exclusive link between technology and networks, Reticulations ultimately demonstrates how network society creates an entirely new politics, one surprisingly rooted in community.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2009
Volume 27 of Electronic mediations
ISBN 0816654905, 9780816654901
307 pages

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PDF (updated on 2014-9-20)