Ellen Mickiewicz: Split Signals: Television and Politics in the Soviet Union (1990)
Filed under book | Tags: · communism, mass media, politics, public broadcasting, radio, soviet union, television
Television has changed drastically in the Soviet Union over the last three decades. In 1960, only five percent of the population had access to TV, but now the viewing population has reached near total saturation. Today’s main source of information in the USSR, television has become Mikhail Gorbachev’s most powerful instrument for paving the way for major reform.
Containing a wealth of interviews with major Soviet and American media figures and fascinating descriptions of Soviet TV shows, Ellen Mickiewicz’s wide-ranging, vividly written volume compares over one hundred hours of Soviet and American television, covering programs broadcast during both the Chernenko and Gorbachev governments. Mickiewicz describes the enormous significance and popularity of news programs and discusses how Soviet journalists work in the United States. Offering a fascinating depiction of the world seen on Soviet TV, she also explores the changes in programming that have occurred as a result of glasnost.
Publisher Oxford University Press US, 1990
ISBN 0195063198, 9780195063196
304 pages
PDF (16 MB, updated on 2014-4-27)
Comment (0)Patricia Pisters (ed.): Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · anarchism, body without organs, communism, deterritorialization, gift economy, immanence, philosophy, politics, semiotics
This book focuses on the micro-political implications of the work of Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari). General philosophical articles are coupled to more specific analyses of films (such as Fight Club and Schindler’s List) and other expressions of contemporary culture. The choice of giving specific attention to the analyses of images and sounds is not only related to the fact that audiovisual products are increasingly dominant in contemporary life, but also to the fact that film culture in itself is changing (‘in transition’) in capitalist culture. From a marginal place at the periphery of economy and culture at large, audiovisual products (ranging from art to ads) seem to have moved to the centre of the network society, as Manuel Castells calls contemporary society. Typical Deleuzian concepts such as micro-politics, the Body without Organs, becoming-minoritarian, pragmatics and immanence are explored in their philosophical implications and political force, whether utopian or dystopian. What can we do with Deleuze in contemporary media culture? A recurring issue throughout the book is the relationship between theory and practice, to which several solutions and problems are given.
Publisher Amsterdam University Press, 2001
ISBN 9053564721, 9789053564721
302 pages
PDF (no OCR; some pages missing; updated on 2012-11-4)
Comment (0)Philip Armstrong: Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · citizenship, communism, community, deterritorialization, marxism, network culture, networks, philosophy, politics, social movements, technology
“Significantly advancing our notion of what constitutes a network, Philip Armstrong proposes a rethinking of political public space that specifically separates networks from the current popular discussion of globalization and information technology.
Analyzing a wide range of Jean-Luc Nancy’s works, Reticulations shows how his project of articulating the political in terms of singularities, pluralities, and multiplicities can deepen our understanding of networks and how they influence community and politics. Even more striking is the way Armstrong associates this general complex in Nancy’s writing with his concern for what Nancy calls the retreat of the political. Armstrong highlights what Nancy’s perspective on networks reveals about movement politics as seen in the 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization, the impact of technology on citizenship, and finally how this perspective critiques the model of networked communism constructed by Hardt and Negri.
Contesting the exclusive link between technology and networks, Reticulations ultimately demonstrates how network society creates an entirely new politics, one surprisingly rooted in community.”
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2009
Volume 27 of Electronic mediations
ISBN 0816654905, 9780816654901
307 pages
PDF (updated on 2014-9-20)
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