Yochai Benkler: A Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle Over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate (draft, 2011)

A study of the events surrounding the Wikileaks document releases in 2010 provides a rich set of insights about the weaknesses and sources of resilience of the emerging networked fourth estate. It marks the emergence of a new model of watchdog function, one that is neither purely networked nor purely traditional, but is rather a mutualistic interaction between the two. It identifies the peculiar risks to, and sources of resilience of, the networked fourth estate in a multidimensional system of expression and restraint, and suggests the need to resolve a major potential vulnerability—the extralegal cooperation between the government and private infrastructure companies to restrict speech without being bound by the constraints of legality. Finally, it offers a richly detailed event study of the complexity of the emerging networked fourth estate, and the interaction, both constructive and destructive, between the surviving elements of the traditional model and the emerging elements of the new. It teaches us that the traditional, managerial-professional sources of responsibility in a free press function imperfectly under present market conditions, while the distributed models of mutual criticism and universal skeptical reading, so typical of the Net, are far from powerless to deliver effective criticism and self-correction where necessary. The future likely is, as the Guardian described its own experience with Wikileaks, “a new model of co-operation,” between surviving elements of the traditional, mass-mediated fourth estate, and its emerging networked models. The transition to this new model will likely be anything but smooth.

Working Paper of article forthcoming in the Harvard Civil Rights – Civil Liberties Law Review.
8 February 2011 version.
66 pages

PDF
Update: PDF (current version)

Eduardo Kac (ed.): Media Poetry: An International Anthology (2007)

“The first international anthology to document a radically new poetry which takes language beyond the confines of the printed page into a non-linear world of digital interactivity and hyperlinkage.

The work of the poets discussed in this book challenges even the innovations of experimental poetics. It embraces new technologies to explore a new syntax made of linear and non-linear animation, hyperlinkage, interactivity, real-time text generation, spatiotemporal discontinuities, self-similarity, synthetic spaces, immateriality, diagrammatic relations, visual tempo, multiple simultaneities, and many other innovative procedures.

This new media poetry, although defined within the field of experimental poetics, departs radically from the avant-garde movements of the first half of the century, and the print-based approaches of the second half. Through an embrace of the vast possibilities made available through new media, the artists in this anthology have become the poetic pioneers for the next millennium.”

Publisher Intellect Books, 2007
Lives of Great Explorers series
ISBN 1841500305, 9781841500300
224 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-7-30)

Richard Sennett: The Culture of the New Capitalism (2006) [EN, ES, PT]

The distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett surveys major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that is taking its place. He shows how these changes affect everyday life—how the work ethic is changing; how new beliefs about merit and talent displace old values of craftsmanship and achievement; how what Sennett calls “the specter of uselessness” haunts professionals as well as manual workers; how the boundary between consumption and politics is dissolving.

In recent years, reformers of both private and public institutions have preached that flexible, global corporations provide a model of freedom for individuals, unlike the experience of fixed and static bureaucracies Max Weber once called an “iron cage.” Sennett argues that, in banishing old ills, the new-economy model has created new social and emotional traumas. Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary institutions: the culture of the new capitalism demands an ideal self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability rather than accomplishment, willing to discount or abandon past experience. In a concluding section, Sennett examines a more durable form of self hood, and what practical initiatives could counter the pernicious effects of “reform.”

Publisher Yale University Press, 2006
Castle Lectures in Ethics, Politics and Economics series
ISBN 0300119925, 9780300119923
214 pages

Publisher

The Culture of the New Capitalism (PDF), PDF (English, updated on 2014-12-22)
La cultura del nuevo capitalismo (PDF), PDF (Spanish, trans. Marco Aurelio Galmarini, 2006, no OCR, updated on 2014-12-22)
A cultura do novo capitalismo (PDF), PDF (Portuguese, trans. Clovis Marques, 2006, updated on 2014-12-22)