Douglas Rushkoff: Media virus!: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture (1996)

Bold, daring, and provocative, Media Virus! examines the intricate ways in which popular media both manipulate and are manipulated by those who know how to tap into their power. Douglas Rushkoff shows that where there’s a wavelength, there’s a way to “infect” those on it – from the subtly, but intentionally, subversive signals broadcast by shows like “The Simpsons,” to the O.J. media frenzy surrounding the Nicole Brown Simpson murder case, chase, and trial. What does it all mean? Unless you’ve been living in a cave that isn’t cable-ready, you’re already infected with the media virus. But don’t worry, it won’t make you sick. It will make you think.

Publisher Ballantine Books, 1996
ISBN 0345397746, 9780345397744
Length 344 pages

Keywords and phrases
memes, meta-media, Ren & Stimpy, counterculture, smart drugs, Beavis and Butt-head, Negativland, L.A. Law, zines, Futureculture, Swamp Thing, Rodney King, Amy Fisher, Genesis P-Orridge, cyberpunk, Ice-T, flyposters, R. U. Sirius, Willie Horton, NYPD Blue

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Sabrina Alcorn Baron, Brendan Dooley (eds.): The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (2001)

The invention and spread of newspapers in the seventeenth century had a profound effect on early modern European culture and politics. The European pattern for the delivery and consumption of political information provided the model for the rest of the world. However, the transition to printed news was neither rapid nor easy and a greater circulation of news had widely varying effects.

Recent research has revealed much about the origins and development of news publishing in each of its European settings. This book is the first to bring this research together in comprehensive survey. The international contributors to this volume study all of the most important information markets in Europe.

Topics covered include:
* the relation between printed and manuscript news
* role of censorship mechanisms
* effects of politics on reading and publishing
* effects of reading on contemporary politics

What emerges from this research is a new view of political information as an enterprise, and of the products of information as commodities circulating far and wide.

Publisher Routledge, 2001
ISBN 0415203104, 9780415203104
310 pages

Keywords and phrases
corantos, Antwerp, Restoration Newspaper, Pory, Copenhagen, Venice, Marchamont Nedham, Spain, Dutch Republic, Habsburg, seventeenth century, Privy Council, Hamburg, Courante uyt Italien, England, newsbooks, censorship, Mercurius, Ben Jonson, France

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Matteo Pasquinelli: Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (2008)

“After a decade of digital fetishism, the spectres of the financial and energy crisis have also affected new media culture and brought into question the autonomy of networks. Yet activism and the art world still celebrate Creative Commons and the ‘creative cities’ as the new ideals for the Internet generation. Unmasking the animal spirits of the commons, Matteo Pasquinelli identifies the key social conflicts and business models at work behind the rhetoric of Free Culture. The corporate parasite infiltrating file-sharing networks, the hydra of gentrification in ‘creative cities’ such as Berlin and the bicephalous nature of the Internet with its pornographic underworld are three untold dimensions of contemporary ‘politics of the common’. Against the latent puritanism of authors like Baudrillard and Žižek, constantly quoted by both artists and activists, Animal Spirits draws a conceptual ‘book of beasts’. In a world system shaped by a turbulent stock market, Pasquinelli unleashes a politically incorrect grammar for the coming generation of the new commons.”

Published by NAi Publishers, Rotterdam / Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, December 2008.
ISBN 9056626639, 9789056626631
240 pages

Reviews: Luciana Parisi (Mute, 2009), Willem van Weelden (Open, 2009), Jussi Parikka (Leonardo, 2009), McKenzie Wark (Public Seminar, 2015).

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