Platform: Journal of Media and Communication, Vol. 2, No. 2: Collaborative Media and Networked Publics (2011)

PLATFORM: Journal of Media and Communication is a biannual open-access online graduate publication. Founded and published by the Media and Communications Program, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne (Australia), PLATFORM was launched in November 2008.

PLATFORM is refereed by an international board of established and emerging scholars working across diverse paradigms in Media and Communication, and edited by graduate students at the University of Melbourne. It is planned to develop it as an international journal.

A Creative Commons Special Issue: Yes, We’re Open! Why Open Source, Open Content and Open Access
Edited by graduate students at the University of Melbourne.
Guest edited by Dale Leorke
Published by the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Sep 2010
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Australia licence.
ISSN: 1836-5132 online
72 pages

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Geert Lovink, Nathaniel Tkacz (eds.): Critical Point of View: A Wikpedia Reader (2011)

“For millions of internet users around the globe, the search for new knowledge begins with Wikipedia. The encyclopedia’s rapid rise, novel organization, and freely offered content have been marveled at and denounced by a host of commentators. Critical Point of View moves beyond unflagging praise, well-worn facts, and questions about its reliability and accuracy, to unveil the complex, messy, and controversial realities of a distributed knowledge platform.

The essays, interviews and artworks brought together in this reader form part of the overarching Critical Point of View research initiative, which began with a conference in Bangalore (January 2010), followed by events in Amsterdam (March 2010) and Leipzig (September 2010). With an emphasis on theoretical reflection, cultural difference and indeed, critique, contributions to this collection ask: What values are embedded in Wikipedia’s software? On what basis are Wikipedia’s claims to neutrality made? How can Wikipedia give voice to those outside the Western tradition of Enlightenment, or even its own administrative hierarchies? Critical Point of View collects original insights on the next generation of wiki-related research, from radical artistic interventions and the significant role of bots to hidden trajectories of encyclopedic knowledge and the politics of agency and exclusion.”

Contributors: Amila Akdag Salah, Nicholas Carr, Shun-ling Chen, Florian Cramer, Morgan Currie, Edgar Enyedy, Andrew Famiglietti, Heather Ford, Mayo Fuster Morell, Cheng Gao, R. Stuart Geiger, Mark Graham, Gautam John, Dror Kamir, Peter B. Kaufman, Scott Kildall, Lawrence Liang, Patrick Lichty, Geert Lovink, Hans Varghese Mathews, Johanna Niesyto, Matheiu O’Neil, Dan O’Sullivan, Joseph Reagle, Andrea Scharnhorst, Alan Shapiro, Christian Stegbauer, Nathaniel Stern, Krzystztof Suchecki, Nathaniel Tkacz, Maja van der Velden

Editorial Assistance: Ivy Roberts and Morgan Currie
Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, May 2011
INC Reader, 7
Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
ISBN 9789078146131
385 pages

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Clay Shirky: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (2008)

“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)

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