Pelle Snickars, Patrick Vonderau (eds.): The YouTube Reader (2009)

Over the last few years YouTube has become the very epitome of digital culture. With more than 70 million unique users each month and approximately 100 million videos online, this brand-name video
distribution platform holds the richest repository of popular culture on the Internet. As the fastest growing site in the history of the Web, YouTube promises endless new opportunities for amateur video, political campaigning, entertainment formats and viral marketing – a clip culture seemingly outpacing both cinema and television. The YouTube Reader is the first full-length book to explore YouTube as an industry, an archive and a cultural form. This remarkable volume brings together renowned film and media scholars in a discussion of the potentials and pitfalls of ‘broadcasting yourself’. The YouTube Reader confronts prevalent claims to newness, immediacy or popularity with systematic and theoretically informed arguments. It offers a closer look at both texts accessible via YouTube and policies and norms governing how they are accessed and used. Among the contributors are Thomas Elsaesser, Richard Grusin, Bernard Stiegler, Toby Miller, William Uricchio and Janet Wasko.

Published by the National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, June 2009
Wallflower Press Series
National Library of Sweden Series
Volume 12 of Mediehistoriskt arkiv
ISBN: 978-9-188468-11-6
512 pages
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

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Deibert, Palfrey, Rohozinski, Zittrain (eds.): Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace (2010)

Internet filtering, censorship of Web content, and online surveillance are increasing in scale, scope, and sophistication around the world, in democratic countries as well as in authoritarian states. The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China’s famous “Great Firewall of China” is one of the first national Internet filtering systems. Today the new tools for Internet controls that are emerging go beyond mere denial of information. These new techniques, which aim to normalize (or even legalize) Internet control, include targeted viruses and the strategically timed deployment of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, surveillance at key points of the Internet’s infrastructure, take-down notices, stringent terms of usage policies, and national information shaping strategies. Access Controlled reports on this new normative terrain.

The book, a project from the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a collaboration of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies, Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and the SecDev Group, offers six substantial chapters that analyze Internet control in both Western and Eastern Europe and a section of shorter regional reports and country profiles drawn from material gathered by the ONI around the world through a combination of technical interrogation and field research methods.

Chapter authors: Ronald Deibert, Colin Maclay, John Palfrey, Hal Roberts, Rafal Rohozinski, Nart Villeneuve, Ethan Zuckerman

Editors Ronald Deibert, John G. Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, Jonathan Zittrain
Publisher MIT Press, 2010
Information Revolution and Global Politics series
ISBN 0262514354, 9780262514354
656 pages

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Cristina Venegas: Digital Dilemmas: The State, The Individual, and Digital Media in Cuba (2010)

The contentious debate in Cuba over Internet use and digital media primarily focuses on three issues—maximizing the potential for economic and cultural development, establishing stronger ties to the outside world, and changing the hierarchy of control. A growing number of users decry censorship and insist on personal freedom in accessing the web, while the centrally managed system benefits the government in circumventing U.S. sanctions against the country and in controlling what limited capacity exists.

Digital Dilemmas views Cuba from the Soviet Union’s demise to the present, to assess how conflicts over media access play out in their both liberating and repressive potential. Drawing on extensive scholarship and interviews, Cristina Venegas questions myths of how Internet use necessarily fosters global democracy and reveals the impact of new technologies on the country’s governance and culture. She includes film in the context of broader media history, as well as artistic practices such as digital art and networks of diasporic communities connected by the Web. This book is a model for understanding the geopolitic location of power relations in the age of digital information sharing.

Publisher Rutgers University Press, 2010
New Directions in International Studies
ISBN 0813546877, 9780813546872
Length 229 pages

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