Fred Turner: From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006)
Filed under book | Tags: · collaboration, counterculture, cyberculture, cybernetics, history of communications, history of computing, internet, silicon valley, technology, virtual communities, web, wired
“In the early 1960s, computers haunted the American popular imagination. Bleak tools of the cold war, they embodied the rigid organization and mechanical conformity that made the military-industrial complex possible. But by the 1990s—and the dawn of the Internet—computers started to represent a very different kind of world: a collaborative and digital utopia modeled on the communal ideals of the hippies who so vehemently rebelled against the cold war establishment in the first place.
From Counterculture to Cyberculture is the first book to explore this extraordinary and ironic transformation. Fred Turner here traces the previously untold story of a highly influential group of San Francisco Bay–area entrepreneurs: Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth network. Between 1968 and 1998, via such familiar venues as the National Book Award–winning Whole Earth Catalog, the computer conferencing system known as WELL, and, ultimately, the launch of the wildly successful Wired magazine, Brand and his colleagues brokered a long-running collaboration between San Francisco flower power and the emerging technological hub of Silicon Valley. Thanks to their vision, counterculturalists and technologists alike joined together to reimagine computers as tools for personal liberation, the building of virtual and decidedly alternative communities, and the exploration of bold new social frontiers.
Shedding new light on how our networked culture came to be, this fascinating book reminds us that the distance between the Grateful Dead and Google, between Ken Kesey and the computer itself, is not as great as we might think.”
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2006
ISBN 0226817415, 9780226817415
x+327+16 pages
Review: Samuel Goëta (Questions de communication, 2013, FR).
PDF (updated 2019-2-25)
Comment (0)Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · community, internet, myspace, networks, organization, technology, virtual communities, web 2.0, wikipedia
“A revelatory examination of how the wildfirelike spread of new forms of social interaction enabled by technology is changing the way humans form groups and exist within them, with profound long-term economic and social effects-for good and for ill.
A handful of kite hobbyists scattered around the world find each other online and collaborate on the most radical improvement in kite design in decades. A midwestern professor of Middle Eastern history starts a blog after 9/11 that becomes essential reading for journalists covering the Iraq war. Activists use the Internet and e-mail to bring offensive comments made by Trent Lott and Don Imus to a wide public and hound them from their positions. A few people find that a world-class online encyclopedia created entirely by volunteers and open for editing by anyone, a wiki, is not an impractical idea. Jihadi groups trade inspiration and instruction and showcase terrorist atrocities to the world, entirely online. A wide group of unrelated people swarms to a Web site about the theft of a cell phone and ultimately goads the New York City police to take action, leading to the culprit’s arrest.
With accelerating velocity, our age’s new technologies of social networking are evolving, and evolving us, into new groups doing new things in new ways, and old and new groups alike doing the old things better and more easily. You don’t have to have a MySpace page to know that the times they are a changin’. Hierarchical structures that exist to manage the work of groups are seeing their raisons d’tre swiftly eroded by the rising technological tide. Business models are being destroyed, transformed, born at dizzying speeds, and the larger social impact is profound.
One of the culture’s wisest observers of the transformational power of the new forms of tech-enabled social interaction is Clay Shirky, and Here Comes Everybody is his marvelous reckoning with the ramifications of all this on what we do and who we are. Like Lawrence Lessig on the effect of new technology on regimes of cultural creation, Shirky’s assessment of the impact of new technology on the nature and use of groups is marvelously broad minded, lucid, and penetrating; it integrates the views of a number of other thinkers across a broad range of disciplines with his own pioneering work to provide a holistic framework for understanding the opportunities and the threats to the existing order that these new, spontaneous networks of social interaction represent. Wikinomics, yes, but also wikigovernment, wikiculture, wikievery imaginable interest group, including the far from savory. A revolution in social organization has commenced, and Clay Shirky is its brilliant chronicler.”
Publisher Allen Lane, March 2008
ISBN 0713999896, 9780713999891
327 pages
review (Felix Stalder, Mute); responses to Stalder’s review (Brian Holmes, Dmytri Kleiner, Geert Lovink, and others, Nettime)
review (Stuart Jefferies, The Guardian)
review (Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica)
review (David Carr, New York Times)
review (Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing)
review (Tara Brabazon, Times Higher Education)
book’s webibliography (mymindonbooks.com)
PDF (updated on 2013-5-8)
MOBI (updated on 2013-5-8)
José Luis Brea: La era Postmedia: Acción comunicativa, prácticas(post)artísiticas y dispositivos neomediales (2002) [Spanish]
Filed under book | Tags: · activism, art, electronic art, hacktivism, internet, net art, postmedia, technology, virtual communities
Acaso uno de los sueños programáticos de las vanguardias que más ha quedado en suspenso, con el transcurso del siglo 20, sea el de generar “comunidades de productores de medios”, para utilizar la conocida expresión de Bertold Brecht. Su experimentación con la radio, la de los artistas soviéticos con el cine, la de las neovanguardias sesentayochistas con el vídeo, la tele-guerrila o el cine expandido, todas ellas han fijado un sueño nunca realizado (pero tampoco nunca abandonado): el de desarrollar -a través de la propia práctica artística, concibiendo ésta por tanto como activismo a la vez político y medial- esferas públicas autónomas, dispositivos de interacción social capaces de inducir entre los ciudadanos modos de comunicación directa, no mediada por el interés de las industrias o los aparatos de estado.
La aparición de la red internet ha venido a renovar y actualizar la virtualidad de ese sueño. Cabe incluso afirmar que la aproximación del mundo del arte al de la red ha estado marcada por la cautivadora fantasmagoría de ese programa, revisitado. Entre tanto, han surgido maneras y lenguajes artísticos entregados a experimentar las potencialidades formales del nuevo soporte, dando lugar a eso que ya es habitual denominar net.art. Pero al mismo tiempo, cabe reconocer un espíritu de activismo que concentra sus esfuerzos justamente en el desarrollo de tales “comunidades de productores de medios”. En este caso se trata de “comunidades web”, que se encuentran e intercambian sus producciones generando sus propios dispositivos de interacción pública, sus propios “medios”, en un ámbito independiente de comunicación capilar. En un dominio postmedial en el que la circulación pública de la información ya no esté exhaustivamente sometida a la regulación jerarquizada característica de los tradicionales medios de comunicación, estructuralmente orientados a la producción social del consenso (a la organización de “masa” antes que a la articulación comunicacional del “público”).
La era postmedia es un ensayo cuyo objetivo es proporcionar los más diversos materiales para abordar críticamente la aparición de ese nuevo escenario de la acción creadora y comunicativa que es internet, analizando desde los más diversos aspectos las relaciones entre arte y nuevas tecnologías comunicativas: desde el análisis más puramente teórico a la guía práctica para familiarizarse con los sites dedicados a net.art, desde el seguimiento de las relaciones entre net.artistas, activistas y hackers hasta la propuesta irónica de un antiglosario con el que orientarse en el conocimiento de este nuevo panorama del arte electrónico y su impacto transformador de la experiencia de lo artístico.
Publisher Consorcio Salamanca, 2002
Volume 1 of Argumentos/Centro de Arte de Salamanca Series
ISBN 8495719053, 9788495719058
186 pages
PDF (updated on 2014-8-28)
Comment (0)