Masters of Media

Ito weaves a compelling tale of the dynamic and rapidly changing face of the children’s software industry from the pioneering days of the early 1980s to the late 1990s when she completed her case studies.

Every good scholar and samaritan comes across a new word throughout their life, so we've relied on dictionaries to aid us. Our lexical resources have evolved with our languages, and even in my life I've come to rely on the internet more often than the good old fat little paper dictionaries with their years-old dictionary smells you could flip through...

Designing Universal Knowledge is one of those books you often come back to, not only because of its innovative and universal content, but also because of its original structure and visual attractiveness. Gerlinde Schuller, the author of this piece, is a respected academic which gives lectures and workshops on Information Design in Amsterdam. It is important to add that Schuller is the founder of the famous Dutch Information Design Studio, consisting of academics and graphic/editorial designers. Designing Universal Knowledge exposes the link between the author and her book, presenting how information design and visual journalism melt together forming a masterpiece.

It is hard to imagine life without search engines. Information is everywhere and we seem to need it all the time. So the importance of being able to access all information at any particular time of our choosing cannot be underestimated. This speaks for itself. Or does it?

It’s a hollow exercise publishing a book about new media art. Giving the work the representation it deserves in one picture and a 500-word description leaves readers sampling only a small hint of the original experience and runs the risk of often-laborious descriptions (“and then it lights up when the user mouses over the block!”). But as a necessary archive of this burgeoning scene comes the eponymous hard-back catalogue of the exhibition El Proceso Como Paradigma (Process as Paradigm), curated by Dr Susanne Jaschko and Lucas Evers at the LABoral Art and Industrial Creation Centre in Gijón (23 April - August 2010).

As the fastest-growing website in the history of the Web, Youtube can be see as the figurehead in online-video and an inspiration for all sites to come. Any random visitor of Youtube surfing to the website and uploading the footage of his latest vacation to Italy, watching a video of a giggling baby or commenting on a CNN coverstory

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Proud to be Flesh is an Anthology of Mute Magazine, and consists of a big amount of articles from the magazine’s archives dating from 1994 till 2009. Tho it is an anthology, it’s not written to be a “best off”, but more to give an as broad as possible overview of contemporary culture and politics.

In Netze und Netzwerke, Sebastian Gießmann makes a quiet daring attempt to historically map the rise of grids and networks between 1740 and 1840. He views such as not only rising technologies and methods of scientific research, but also as culturally intertwined practices. By means of examining crucial historical moments in which the concepts of networks first…

In here book, Vismann writes a geneology of the media-technological conditions of files and recording devices with a view to their largest area of application, the law. Files in this geneology are defined as the medium between the authority and administration while three entities; truth, state and subject are under constant modification in the forming of Western institutions. In her…

In the era of New Media, where the multiple identities of social movements find their best way of expression, Stevphen Shukaitis recalls the power of radical and collective imagination giving a new perspective on radical social movements nowadays.

What does it mean to invoke the power of the imagination when it has already seized power (through media flows…

Welcome to Europe shows us  a picture of a painted sun in red, yellow and black colors. This logo was created by the Spanish artist Joan Miró in 1980. This logo, or brand had as main purpose to reposition Spain as a welcoming and vibrant destination for tourists. On the following page we see logo’s of other nation-states which

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Imagine a place where there are no differences among people, everyone is living in a common space where the same language is spoken, borderless communication and free trade is frictionless and the freedom of speech is fully guaranteed. Yes, this could be a sort of paradise and yes, it could have also been the World Wide Web but…

Although porn is very popular and an enormous economic force, contemporary debates about internet mostly rearticulate concerns about the bad effects of pornography on attitudes, believes and behavior. And because today porn is more accessible and mainstream then ever, this concern grows. But despite the level of concern, there’s been a distinctive lack of academic work on online pornography. And that’s exactly what this book is all about.

What do you mean, no internet?! Is a collection of argumentative essays written by 28 3rd year Media Production students . In 2009 over three hundred students wrote these essays to fulfill the requirements of their Media and Society course and the 28 stories that stood out were published. The book deals with many current issues revolving around new media…

Jodi Dean is professor of political science at Hobart an William Smith Colleges. She focus on the contemporary space or possibility of politics. Dean is a blogger herself and in her book she makes some points clear by giving examples of her own blog experiences.

Forgetfulness is more seen as a disadvantage than a virtue, since the human brain tends to forget more than remember. Hence humanity has tried over the course of our existence to try and externalize our memories as far as possible. However, in the digital age where literally anything can be stored with little fear of disappearance of the stored information,…

When Franco “Bifo” Berardi invokes McLuhan in the introduction to Precarious Rhapsody, it gives a strong indication of what to expect in the coming pages. Not necessarily regarding his arguments and theories- Berardi is more clearly aligned with the Marxist school of thought than McLuhan’s technological determinism. But the associative, almost philosophical rhetoric can feel very familiar at times.

Berardi…

In an age where the iPhone and similar devices have become staple accessories of an always connected global citizen, it is high time to track the origins of the mobile phone, its emergence as a crucial tool for economic transactions in developing countries and its ever-growing intersection – even overlap – with digital media. “Mythologie du Portable” [Mythology of the…

 I ‘ve read once a story about a Japanese man who got married to the virtual girlfriend he dated in a Nintendo DS video game called Love Plus- a wedding blessed by a priest and not a virtual one. This is no doubt an eccentric way to declare one’s devotion to a machine. But as

Access Controlled reports on the new normative terrain of internet filtering, censorship of Web content, and online surveillance. The preface and foreword are clear about what the reader can expect per chapter and also give a quick overview of the content. Access Controlled offers six substantial chapters that analyze internet control in both Western and Eastern Europe, like the EU as a whole and Russia as well. The book is the latest report of a recent project by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) and describes how the original character of the global cyberspace is being influenced and changed by mainly recent forms of online control.