Henry Jenkins, David Thorburn (eds.): Democracy and New Media (2003)

Digital technology is changing our politics. The World Wide Web is already a powerful influence on the public’s access to government documents, the tactics and content of political campaigns, the behavior of voters, the efforts of activists to circulate their messages, and the ways in which topics enter the public discourse. The essays collected here capture the richness of current discourse about democracy and cyberspace. Some contributors offer front-line perspectives on the impact of emerging technologies on politics, journalism, and civic experience. What happens, for example, when we increase access to information or expand the arena of free speech? Other contributors place our shifting understanding of citizenship in historical context, suggesting that notions of cyber-democracy and online community must grow out of older models of civic life. Still others consider the global flow of information and test our American conceptions of cyber-democracy against developments in other parts of the world. How, for example, do new media operate in Castro’s Cuba, in post-apartheid South Africa, and in the context of multicultural debates on the Pacific Rim? For some contributors, the new technologies endanger our political culture; for others, they promise civic renewal.

Publisher MIT Press, 2003
Media in Transition series
ISBN: 0262101017, 9780262101011
397 pages

publisher
google books

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Jay David Bolter, Richard Grusin: Remediation: Understanding New Media (1999)

Media critics remain captivated by the modernist myth of the new: they assume that digital technologies such as the World Wide Web, virtual reality, and computer graphics must divorce themselves from earlier media for a new set of aesthetic and cultural principles. In this richly illustrated study, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin offer a theory of mediation for our digital age that challenges this assumption. They argue that new visual media achieve their cultural significance precisely by paying homage to, rivaling, and refashioning such earlier media as perspective painting, photography, film, and television. They call this process of refashioning “remediation,” and they note that earlier media have also refashioned one another: photography remediated painting, film remediated stage production and photography, and television remediated film, vaudeville, and radio.

Publisher: MIT Press, 1999
ISBN: 0262024527, 9780262024525
295 pages

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google books

PDF (CHM; updated on 2012-9-3)
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Radical Education Collective (eds.): New Public Spaces: Dissensual Political and Artistic Practices in the Post-Yugoslav Context (2009)

New public spaces: dissensual political and aesthetical practices in the post-Yugoslav context is a reader edited by a Radical Education Collective from Ljubljana (Gal Kirn, Gasper Kralj and Bojana Piskur). It drew its inspiration from encounters and conversations with activists, artists, critical thinkers, curators, militant researchers and writers from Belgrade, Helsinki, Istanbul, Ljubljana, London, Pristina and Prizren in April and May 2008 at the social centre ROG and the AKC Metelkova mesto in Ljubljana. Those encounters challenged not only the distinction between ‘serious’ discussions and ‘informal’ debates – that instantly reproduce linear time and hierarchical space – but also our mutual ability to listen, talk and share experiences (instead of consume information). Contributions were subsequently elaborated into the reader, which consists of two parts. In the first part, engaged collectives reflect on the organisation of different political issues: from anti-capitalist and student struggles, to immigrant workers and the re-appropriation of public spaces in the region. The second part focuses on specific art collectives from Kosovo and Ljubljana, which are occupied with the question of space: why was space so important when rethinking the relation between art and politics, and also what can one do with the space? Here, a set of political practices enabled art collective to undermine the presupposed liberal border between public and private. The reader concludes with a presentation of some art projects that intervened and articulated spatial and visual transformations in the post-Yugoslav context.

Authors and contributors: Barbara Beznec, Sezgin Boynik, Ibrahim Ćurić, Cornelia Durka, Janna Graham, Minna Henriksson, Gal Kirn, Gašper Kralj, Andreja Kulunčić, Andrej Kurnik, Polona Mozetič, Said Mujić, Osman Pezić, Bojana Piškur, Marjetica Potrč, Tjaša Pureber, Radical Education Collective, TEMP, Darij Zadnikar, Antonios Vradis

Edited and compiled by: Gal Kirn, Gašper Kralj, Bojana Piškur
Published by Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (NL), Modern Galerija, Ljubljana / Museum of Modern Art, July 2009
ISBN 978–90–72076–87–8

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PDF (PDF articles merged into a single file)
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