Martin Hirst: News 2.0: Can Journalism Survive the Internet? (2011)

Technology is transforming the media and with it, the practice of journalism. Martin Hirst investigates the implications of the new media explosion for the Fourth Estate and the way news is gathered and consumed around the world.

There have never been so many ways of producing news and news-like content. From podcasts, to YouTube, blogs and the phenomenal popularity of social media, seismic shifts are underway in global media.

News 2.0 bridges the gap between theory and practice to present an integrated approach to journalism that redefines the profession. Key ideas in journalism theory, political economy and media studies are used to explore the changing cultures of journalism in an historical context.

Hirst explains the fragmentation of the mass audience for news products, and how digital commerce has disconnected consumers from real democracy. He argues that journalism requires a restatement of the role of journalists as public intellectuals with a commitment to truth, trust and the public interest.

Publisher Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2011
ISBN 1742370578, 9781742370576
256 pages

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Janet Hope: Biobazaar. The Open Source Revolution and Biotechnology (2008)

Fighting disease, combating hunger, preserving the balance of life on Earth: the future of biotechnological innovation may well be the future of our planet itself. And yet the vexed state of intellectual property law–a proliferation of ever more complex rights governing research and development–is complicating this future. At a similar point in the development of information technology, “open source” software revolutionized the field, simultaneously encouraging innovation and transforming markets. The question that Janet Hope explores in Biobazaar is: can the open source approach do for biotechnology what it has done for information technology? Her book is the first sustained and systematic inquiry into the application of open source principles to the life sciences.

The appeal of the open source approach–famously likened to a “bazaar,” in contrast to the more traditional “cathedral” style of technology development–lies in its safeguarding of community access to proprietary tools without discouraging valuable commercial participation. Traversing disciplinary boundaries, Hope presents a careful analysis of intellectual property-related challenges confronting the biotechnology industry and then paints a detailed picture of “open source biotechnology” as a possible solution. With insights drawn from interviews with Nobel Prize-winning scientists and leaders of the free and open source software movement–as well as company executives, international policymakers, licensing experts, and industry analysts–her book suggests that open source biotechnology is both desirable and broadly feasible–and, in many ways, merely awaiting its moment.

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2008
ISBN 0674026357, 9780674026353
428 pages

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Bernard Stiegler: Acting Out (2003/2009)

“Acting Out is the first appearance in English of two short books published by Bernard Stiegler in 2003. In How I Became a Philosopher, he outlines his transformation during a five-year period of incarceration for armed robbery. Isolated from what had been his world, Stiegler began to conduct a kind of experiment in phenomenological research. Inspired by the Greek stoic Epictetus, Stiegler began to read, write, and discover his vocation, eventually studying philosophy in correspondence with Gérard Granel who was an important influence on a number of French philosophers, including Jacques Derrida, who was later Stiegler’s teacher.

The second book, To Love, To Love Me, To Love Us, is a powerful distillation of Stiegler’s analysis of the contemporary world. He maintains that a growing loss of a sense of individual and collective existence leads to a decreased ability to love oneself, and, by extension, others. This predicament is viewed through a tragic event: in 2002, in Nanterre, France, Richard Durn, a local activist, stormed the city’s town hall, shooting and killing eight people. Durn committed suicide the following day. The later publication of Durn’s his journal revealed a man struggling with the feeling that he did not exist, for which he tried to compensate by committing an atrocity. For Stiegler, this exemplifies how love of self becomes pathological: a “me” assassinates an “us” with which it cannot identify.”

How I Became a Philosopher was originally published in French in 2003 under the title Passer al’acte.
To love, to love me, to love us was originally published in French in 2003 under the title Aimer, s’aimer, nous aimer.

Translated by David Barison, Daniel Ross, and Patrick Crogan
Publisher Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 2009
Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series
ISBN 0804758697, 9780804758697
93 pages

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