Michael Mandiberg (ed.): The Social Media Reader (2012)

With the rise of web 2.0 and social media platforms taking over vast tracts of territory on the internet, the media landscape has shifted drastically in the past 20 years, transforming previously stable relationships between media creators and consumers. The Social Media Reader is the first collection to address the collective transformation with pieces on social media, peer production, copyright politics, and other aspects of contemporary internet culture from all the major thinkers in the field.

Culling a broad range and incorporating different styles of scholarship from foundational pieces and published articles to unpublished pieces, journalistic accounts, personal narratives from blogs, and whitepapers, The Social Media Reader promises to be an essential text, with contributions from Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Clay Shirky, Tim O’Reilly, Chris Anderson, Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, and Fred von Loehmann, to name a few. It covers a wide-ranging topical terrain, much like the internet itself, with particular emphasis on collaboration and sharing, the politics of social media and social networking, Free Culture and copyright politics, and labor and ownership. Theorizing new models of collaboration, identity, commerce, copyright, ownership, and labor, these essays outline possibilities for cultural democracy that arise when the formerly passive audience becomes active cultural creators, while warning of the dystopian potential of new forms of surveillance and control.

Publisher NYU Press, 2012
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license
ISBN 0814763022, 9780814763025
289 pages

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Notes from Nowhere (eds.): We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism (2003)

“In 1994, indigenous Zapatista rebels emerged from the rainforest shouting “Ya Basta” in defiance of the birth of the North American Free Trade Agreement. This band of women and men rekindled a radical resistance movement that was to inspire a whole new generation. From urban street reclaimers in London and land squatters in Brazil, to Indian farmers protesting GM crops and the Italian White Overall Movement, spontaneous uprisings found a shared enemy—global capital.

As events swept from Chiapas to Seattle, Genoa to Bangalore, and summits have been wreathed in tear gas, the new movement has matured into a massive political force—flexible, strategic, and able to resist and adapt to increasingly brutal responses by various states. The editors of this celebratory publishing project have been on the frontline of the movement, working as activists and writers, story chasers and documentarians. A mixture of critical analysis and art book, agitprop, inspirational document, and DIY manual, We Are Everywhere combines innovative graphic design and photographs with texts and interviews with activists, creating a lively, polyphonic insight into the ideas and activities of the movements against capitalism.

Notes from Nowhere is an editorial collective: Katharine Ainger, Graeme Chesters, Tony Credland, John Jordan, Andrew Stern, and Jennifer Whitney are activists and writers, designers, and photographers who were variously involved in the actions in Seattle, documenting movements of the Global South, Reclaim the Streets in the UK, and the Indymedia network.”

Publisher Verso, London, 2003
ISBN 1859844472, 9781859844472
521 pages

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Wilma de Jong, Martin Shaw, Neil Stammers (eds.): Global Activism, Global Media (2005)

“Radical political activist movements are growing all the time. To reach a wider audience each organisation has formed networks and websites, exploiting new communications technologies as well as conventional media to get its message across. This is often very successful: activist politics have come to influence ‘mainstream’ politics over fundamental issues such as trade, gender relations, the environment and war. This book brings together activists and academics in one volume, to explore the theory and practice of global activism’s relation to all forms of media, mainstream and otherwise. The contributors examine how global activism is represented in the mainstream press and explain the strategies that activists adopt to spread their own ideas. Investigating Indymedia and internet activism, they show how transformations in communications technology offer new possibilities, and explain how activists have successfully used and developed their own media. Case studies and topics include the world social forums, an example of a campaign from the NGO Action Aid, a campaign strategy from an internet activist, Greenpeace and the Brent Spar conflict, the World Development Movement and representations in the mainstream press, the Independent Media Centre, transgender activism on the net, Amnesty International, Oxfam and the internet.”

Publisher Pluto Press, 2005
ISBN 0745321968, 9780745321967
235 pages

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