Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey: Evil Media (2012)

“Evil Media develops a philosophy of media power that extends the concept of media beyond its tried and trusted use in the games of meaning, symbolism, and truth. It addresses the gray zones in which media exist as corporate work systems, algorithms and data structures, twenty-first century self-improvement manuals, and pharmaceutical techniques. Evil Media invites the reader to explore and understand the abstract infrastructure of the present day. From search engines to flirting strategies, from the value of institutional stupidity to the malicious minutiae of databases, this book shows how the devil is in the details.

The title takes the imperative “Don’t be evil” and asks, what would be done any differently in contemporary computational and networked media were that maxim reversed.

Media here are about much more and much less than symbols, stories, information, or communication: media do things. They incite and provoke, twist and bend, leak and manage. In a series of provocative stratagems designed to be used, Evil Media sets its reader an ethical challenge: either remain a transparent intermediary in the networks and chains of communicative power or become oneself an active, transformative medium.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2012
ISBN 0262304406, 9780262304405
235 pages

Review: Nicholas Holm (Media Int’l AU, 2013), Neural (2013).
Evil media on Monoskop wiki

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2024-4-13)
HTML (added on 2015-8-28)

See also YoHa, et al., Evil Media Distribution Centre, 2013.

Thomas P. Hughes: Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (1983)

“A unique comparative history of the evolution of modern electric power systems. Networks of Power not only provides an accurate representation of large-scale technological change but also demonstrates that technology itself cannot be understood or directed unless placed in a cultural context. For Thomas Hughes, both the invention of the simplest devices (like the lightbulb itself) and the execution of the grandest schemes (such as harnessing the water power of the Bavarian Alps) fit into an overarching model of technological development. His narrative is an absorbing account of the creative genius, scientific achievements, engineering capabilities, managerial skills, and entrepreneurial risks behind one of the most commonplace amenities of the modern age.” (from the back cover)

The book was awarded the Dexter Prize by the Society for the History of Technology.

Publisher The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993
ISBN 0801846145, 9780801846144
474 pages

Review (John Neufeld, EH.net)
Review (Barry Barnes, Social Studies of Science)
Review (ZH, Innovation Group CNS UCSB)
Review (Stephen H. Cutcliffe, Technology and Culture)
Review (Mercedes Arroyo, Biblio 3W, in Spanish)

Publisher
Google books

PDF (updated on 2013-9-16 to OCR’d version)

Eva Illouz: Why Love Hurts (2012)

“Few of us have been spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we’re abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged – these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience.

Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. For many, the Freudian idea that the family designs the pattern of an individual’s erotic career has been the main explanation for why and how we fail to find or sustain love. Psychoanalysis and popular psychology have succeeded spectacularly in convincing us that individuals bear responsibility for the misery of their romantic and erotic lives. The purpose of this book is to change our way of thinking about what is wrong in modern relationships. The problem is not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but rather the institutional forces shaping how we love.

The argument of this book is that the modern romantic experience is shaped by a fundamental transformation in the ecology and architecture of romantic choice. The samples from which men and women choose a partner, the modes of evaluating prospective partners, the very importance of choice and autonomy and what people imagine to be the spectrum of their choices: all these aspects of choice have transformed the very core of the will, how we want a partner, the sense of worth bestowed by relationships, and the organization of desire.

This book does to love what Marx did to commodities: it shows that it is shaped by social relations and institutions and that it circulates in a marketplace of unequal actors.”

Publisher Polity, 2012
ISBN 0745661521, 9780745661520
300 pages

review (David Wolpe, Los Angeles Review of Books)
review (Jacqui Gabb, LSE Review of Books)

Publisher

PDF