Peter Lunenfeld: The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · blogging, computing, consumption, copyright, cultural production, culture machine, internet, networks, participation, simulation, technology, television, unimodernism, web, web 2.0
“The computer, writes Peter Lunenfeld, is the twenty-first century’s culture machine. It is a dream device, serving as the mode of production, the means of distribution, and the site of reception. We haven’t quite achieved the flying cars and robot butlers of futurist fantasies, but we do have a machine that can function as a typewriter and a printing press, a paintbrush and a gallery, a piano and a radio, the mail as well as the mail carrier. But, warns Lunenfeld, we should temper our celebration with caution; we are engaged in a secret war between downloading and uploading–between passive consumption and active creation–and the outcome will shape our collective futures.
In The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading, Lunenfeld makes his case for using digital technologies to shift us from a consumption to a production model. He describes television as “the high fructose corn syrup of the imagination” and worries that it can cause “cultural diabetes”; prescribes mindful downloading, meaningful uploading, and “info-triage” as cures; and offers tips for crafting “bespoke futures” in what he terms the era of “Web n.0″ (interconnectivity to the nth power). He also offers a stand-alone genealogy of digital visionaries, distilling a history of the culture machine that runs from the Patriarchs (Vannevar Bush’s WWII generation) to the Hustlers (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs) to the Searchers (Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google fame). After half a century of television-conditioned consumption/downloading, Lunenfeld tells us, we now find ourselves with a vast new infrastructure for uploading. We simply need to find the will to make the best of it.”
Publisher MIT Press, 2011
ISBN 0262015471, 9780262015479
219 pages
Review: Jan Baetens (Leonardo Reviews, 2011).
PDF (updated on 2019-11-20)
Comment (0)Patrice Flichy: The Internet Imaginaire (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1990s, arpanet, computing, cyberpunk, cyberspace, freenet, history of communications, history of computing, history of technology, internet, networks, technology, usenet, utopia, virtual communities, virtual reality, web, wired
In The Internet Imaginaire, sociologist Patrice Flichy examines the collective vision that shaped the emergence of the Internet—the social imagination that envisioned a technological utopia in the birth of a new technology. By examining in detail the discourses surrounding the development of the Internet in the United States in the 1990s (and considering them an integral part of that development), Flichy shows how an entire society began a new technological era. The metaphorical “information superhighway” became a technical utopia that informed a technological program. The Internet imaginaire, Flichy argues, led software designers, businesses, politicians, and individuals to adopt this one technology instead of another.
Flichy draws on writings by experts—paying particular attention to the gurus of Wired magazine, but also citing articles in Time, Newsweek, and Business Week—from 1991 to 1995. He describes two main domains of the technical imaginaire: the utopias (and ideologies) associated with the development of technical devices and the depictions of an imaginary digital society. He analyzes the founding myths of cyberculture—the representations of technical systems expressing the dreams and experiments of designers and promoters that developed around information highways, the Internet, Bulletin Board systems, and virtual reality. And he offers a treatise on “the virtual society imaginaire,” discussing visionaries from Teilhard de Chardin to William Gibson, the body and the virtual, cyberdemocracy and the end of politics, and the new economy of the immaterial.
Publisher MIT Press, 2007
ISBN 0262062615, 9780262062619
255 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)
Comment (1)Vito Campanelli: Web Aesthetics: How Digital Media Affect Culture and Society (2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, computing, digital media, internet, media, media culture, memes, networks, new media, remix, spam, subjectivity, technology, theory, virus, web
“We live in a world of rapidly evolving digital networks, but within the domain of media theory, which studies the influence of these cultural forms, the implications of aesthetical philosophy have been sorely neglected. Vito Campanelli explores network forms through the prism of aesthetics and thus presents an open invitation to transcend the inherent limitations of the current debate about digital culture.
The web is the medium that stands between the new media and society and, more than any other, is stimulating the worldwide dissemination of ideas and behaviour, framing aesthetic forms and moulding contemporary culture and society.
Campanelli observes a few important phenomena of today, such as social networks, peer-to-peer networks and ‘remix culture’, and reduces them to their historical premises, thus laying the foundations for an organic aesthetic theory of digital media.”
Publisher NAi Publishers, Rotterdam; in association with the Institute of Network Cultures at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam, University of Applied Sciences, October 2010
Studies in Network Cultures series
ISBN 9056627708, 9789056627706
276 pages
Reviews: Greg J Smith (Rhizome, 2011), Alessandro Ludovico (Neural, 2011), Regine Debatty (We Make Money Not Art, 2011).
Book website
Interview with the author (Geert Lovink)
Interview with the author (Pasquale Napolitano, Digicult)
PDF, PDF (25 MB, updated on 2019-3-24)
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