Goran D. Putnik, Maria Manuela Cunha (eds.): Encyclopedia of Networked and Virtual Organizations (2008)

The virtual enterprise as a new organizational paradigm has three fundamental features: dynamics of network reconfiguration, virtuality, and external entities as environments for enabling or supporting the virtual enterprise integration as well as reconfiguration dynamics. The field of knowledge on this topic is highly fragmented due to the inexistence of a transfer of knowledge between regions, developers, and researchers.

The Encyclopedia of Networked & Virtual Organizations documents the most relevant contributions to the introduction of networked, dynamic, agile, and virtual organizational models; definitions; taxonomies; opportunities; and reference models and architectures. These volumes pool the existing works, approaches, solutions, and needs of the virtual enterprise research community to create a repository of the main developments regarding the virtual organization, compiling definitions, characteristics, comparisons, advantages, practices, enabling technologies, and best practices.

Publisher: Information Science Reference
ISBN: 159904885X, 978-1599048857
2060 pages

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Matthew Fuller: Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (2005)

In Media Ecologies, Matthew Fuller asks what happens when media systems interact. Complex objects such as media systems—understood here as processes, or elements in a composition as much as “things”—have become informational as much as physical, but without losing any of their fundamental materiality. Fuller looks at this multiplicitous materiality—how it can be sensed, made use of, and how it makes other possibilities tangible. He investigates the ways the different qualities in media systems can be said to mix and interrelate, and, as he writes, “to produce patterns, dangers, and potentials.”

Fuller draws on texts by Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze as well as writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Marshall McLuhan, Donna Haraway, Friedrich Kittler, and others, to define and extend the idea of “media ecology.” Arguing that the only way to find out about what happens when media systems interact is to carry out such interactions, Fuller traces a series of media ecologies—”taking every path in a labyrinth simultaneously,” as he describes one chapter. He looks at contemporary London-based pirate radio and its interweaving of high- and low-tech media systems; the “medial will to power” illustrated by “the camera that ate itself”; how, as seen in a range of compelling interpretations of new media works, the capacities and behaviors of media objects are affected when they are in “abnormal” relationships with other objects; and each step in a sequence of Web pages, Cctv—world wide watch, that encourages viewers to report crimes seen via webcams.

Contributing to debates around standardization, cultural evolution, cybernetic culture, and surveillance, and inventing a politically challenging aesthetic that links them, Media Ecologies, with its various narrative speeds, scales, frames of references, and voices, does not offer the academically traditional unifying framework; rather, Fuller says, it proposes to capture “an explosion of activity and ideas to which it hopes to add an echo.”

Published by MIT Press, 2005
ISBN 026206247X, 9780262062473
265 pages

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Tiziana Terranova: Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (2004)

“In an age of email lists and discussion groups, e-zines and weblogs, bringing together users, consumers, workers and activists from around the globe, what kinds of political subjectivity are emerging? What kinds of politics become possible in a time of information overload and media saturation? What structures of power and control operate over a self-organising system like the internet?

In this highly original new work, Tiziana Terranova investigates the political dimension of the network culture in which we now live, and explores what the new forms of communication and organisation might mean for our understanding of power and politics. Terranova engages with key concepts and debates in cultural theory and cultural politics, using examples from media culture, computing, network dynamics, and internet activism within the anti-capitalist and anti-war movements.

Network Culture concludes that the nonlinear network dynamics that link different modes of communication at different levels (from local radio to satellite television, from the national press to the internet, from broadcasting to rumours and conspiracy theories) provide the conditions within which another politics can emerge. This other politics, the book suggests, does not entail the production of a new political discourse or ideology, but the invention of micropolitical tactics able to stand up to new forms of social control.”

Published by Pluto Press, 2004
ISBN 0745317499, 9780745317496
208 pages

Reviews: Wright (Mute, 2005), Zeffiro (Canadian Journal of Communication, 2006), Jackson (Participations, 2008), Wark (Public Seminar, 2015).

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