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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Jen Angel: Becoming the Media: A Critical History Of Clamor Magazine (2008)

Clamor Magazine was a movement publication that existed between 2000 and 2006, covering radical politics, culture, and activism. Clamor published 38 issues and featured over 1,000 different writers and artists. The mission statement was:

Clamor is a quarterly print magazine and online community of radical thought, art, and action. An iconoclast among its peers, Clamor is an unabashed celebration of self-determination, creativity, and shit-stirring. Clamor publishes content of, by, for, and with marginalized communities. From the kitchen table to shop floor, the barrio to the playground, the barbershop to the student center, it’s old school meets new school in a battle for a better tomorrow. Clamor is a do-it-yourself guide to everyday revolution.

This analysis is presented as a case study on how movement projects and organizations deal with vital but rarely discussed issues such as management, sustainability, ownership, structure, finance, decision making, power, diversity, and vision.

Publisher PM Press, 2008
ISBN 1604860227, 9781604860221
Length 44 pages

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Oleg Kireev: Media-Activist Cookbook (2006) [Russian]

The publication introduces to the Russian audience topics of tactical media and communicates experience of groups and movements, such as telestreet, Paper Tiger TV, Digital City, The Yes Men, Kein Mensch ist illegal, Critical Art Ensemble; experiences of flashmob, culture jamming, campaigning. It also digs into the history of pirate radios, videoactivism and free software movement. Specifically to Russia, it investigates topics of political technologies (as used in political campaigns and media), and traces the domestic history of free communication in samizdat.

Five translated articles appear in the appendix: David Garcia’s and Geert Lovink’s “ABC of tactical media”, Matteo Pasquinelli’s “Urban Television Manifesto”, “On the use of tactical media in the orange revolution” (by the Ukrainian portal Zaraz. org), Geert Lovink’s “Theory of mixing” and Konrad Becker’s “Freedom of expression and new technologies”.

Publisher Ultra.Culture, Moscow-Yekaterinburg, 2006
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