Elizabeth Losh: Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · blogging, hypertext, marketing, mass media, p2p, politics, video games, viral marketing, virtual communities
Today government agencies not only have official Web sites but also sponsor moderated chats, blogs, digital video clips, online tutorials, videogames, and virtual tours of national landmarks. Sophisticated online marketing campaigns target citizens with messages from the government—even as officials make news with digital gaffes involving embarrassing e-mails, instant messages, and videos. In Virtualpolitik, Elizabeth Losh closely examines the government’s digital rhetoric in such cases and its dual role as media-maker and regulator. Looking beyond the usual focus on interfaces, operations, and procedures, Losh analyzes the ideologies revealed in government’s digital discourse, its anxieties about new online practices, and what happens when officially sanctioned material is parodied, remixed, or recontextualized by users.
Losh reports on a video game that panicked the House Intelligence Committee, pedagogic and therapeutic digital products aimed at American soldiers, government Web sites in the weeks and months following 9/11, PowerPoint presentations by government officials and gadflies, e-mail as a channel for whistleblowing, digital satire of surveillance practices, national digital libraries, and computer-based training for health professionals.
Losh concludes that the government’s virtualpolitik—its digital realpolitik aimed at preserving its own power—is focused on regulation, casting as criminal such common online activities as file sharing, videogame play, and social networking. This policy approach, she warns, indefinitely postpones building effective institutions for electronic governance, ignores constituents’ need to shape electronic identities to suit their personal politics, and misses an opportunity to learn how citizens can have meaningful interaction with the virtual manifestations of the state.
Publisher MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 0262123045, 9780262123044
416 pages
PDF (updated on 2014-9-14)
Comment (0)Matthew G. Kirschenbaum: Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008)
Filed under book | Tags: · digital forensics, electronic literature, forensics, hypertext, literature, materiality, storage, textuality, writing
“In Mechanisms, Matthew Kirschenbaum examines new media and electronic writing against the textual and technological primitives that govern writing, inscription, and textual transmission in all media: erasure, variability, repeatability, and survivability. Mechanisms is the first book in its field to devote significant attention to storage—the hard drive in particular—arguing that understanding the affordances of storage devices is essential to understanding new media. Drawing a distinction between ‘forensic materiality’ and ‘formal materiality,’ Kirschenbaum uses applied computer forensics techniques in his study of new media works. Just as the humanities discipline of textual studies examines books as physical objects and traces different variants of texts, computer forensics encourage us to perceive new media in terms of specific versions, platforms, systems, and devices. Kirschenbaum demonstrates these techniques in media-specific readings of three landmark works of new media and electronic literature, all from the formative era of personal computing: the interactive fiction game Mystery House, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon: A Story, and William Gibson’s electronic poem ‘Agrippa.’
Drawing on newly available archival resources for these works, Kirschenbaum uses a hex editor and disk image of Mystery House to conduct a “forensic walkthrough” to explore critical reading strategies linked to technical praxis; examines the multiple versions and revisions of Afternoon in order to address the diachronic dimension of electronic textuality; and documents the volatile publication and transmission history of ‘Agrippa’ as an illustration of the social aspect of transmission and preservation.”
Publisher MIT Press, 2008
ISBN 0262113112, 9780262113113
296 pages
PDF (no OCR; some pages missing; updated on 2014-3-5)
EPUB (added on 2018-7-30)
Neil Rhodes, Jonathan Sawday (eds.): The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · history of technology, hypertext, knowledge, memory, print, renaissance, storage, technology
In the fifteenth century the printing press was the ‘new technology’. The first ever information revolution began with the advent of the printed book, enabling Renaissance scholars to formulate new ways of organising and disseminating knowledge.
As early as 1500 there were already 20 million books in circulation in Europe. How did this rapid explosion of ideas impact upon the evolution of new disciplines?
The Renaissance Computer looks at the fascinating development of new methods of information storage and retrieval which took place at the very beginning of print culture. And it asks some crucial questions about the intellectual conditions of our own digital age. A dazzling array of leading experts in Renaissance culture explore topics of urgent significance today, including:
* the contribution of knowledge technologies to state formulation and national identity
* the effect of multimedia, orality and memory on education
* the importance of the visual display of information and how search engines reflect and direct ways of thinking.
Publisher Routledge, 2000
ISBN 0415220637, 9780415220637
212 pages