In his fourth book, “The Tunign of Place: Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media”, Richard Coyne provides a fundamentally different perspective for examining the new technological advancements and the way they are appropriated by humans and are integrated into the everyday life and the social realm. Rather than reviewing these technologies as part of a wide and complex communication system…
Crisis threatens education millions of children // U.S. schools in ‘category 5’ budget crisis // Crisis fears on university places // Europe's Education Crisis: College Costs Soar // Students Protest Fee Hikes at California Campuses // Education in crisis // Argentina students decry apathy...Can we save our educational system from a decline?
'The Public Domain' - Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, by James Boyle is an attempt to tell the story of the battles of intellectual property law, what happens to the information on the Internet, and what should be done.
Web search engines have become a dominant search technology we have come to deal with on a daily basis. Web searching has become such a part of our routine it has a big impact on our social, cultural, political, legal and informational spheres. This book provides a non technical, multidisciplinary view on online searching.
Globalization is reintroduced to society in David Singh Grewal’s “Network Power”. A volume that contains so much information, it can easily be viewed as a contemporary globalization handbook. Grewal’s perspective is fresh and bold, albeit not empirically substantiated. The lack of empirical evidence is easily overlooked, by the sheer intelligence of Grewal’s arguments, and the historical validity of his…
Book Review – De Digitale Kunstkamer
Harry van Vliet
In the City of Utrecht Archive a film is shown of last century’s street life. All visitors of the archive are scanned by entering and projected into the film. Visitors of the Photo museum can select the photos of the 80.000 digital photo collection…
The outrageous amount of information that we are able to store these days awakes more dilemma’s than just the one about privacy that’s discussed by many. Companies like Google and Facebook can collect data about their users and save it for years on gigantic servers. The alarm bells start ringing at many theorists and freedom fighters around the globe. Joanna…
A fellow MoM’er already wrote a good review on the PhD thesis What You See Is What You Feel by Koert van Mensvoort. Read the MoM review here and download the full book here. I would like to give an extension to this review with my own thoughts.
Although the thesis is done at the Technical University…
What is the relation between new media art and baroque? Is there any connection? According to the book Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (2008) by Timothy Murray there is. Murray states that there are conceptual and historical links between digital art and the baroque. Murray argues that new media art works resonates early modern baroque philosophical concepts…
In Pirate Modernity: Delhi's Media Urbanism, Ravi Sundaram clearly explains the way the new media have affected post colonial Delhi's urban landscape from the 50's onwards. Sundaram is one of the initiators of Sarai, an online platform dedicated to address media issues in South Asia. He focuses particularly on globalism and modernity in India and puts new media at the center if this. He has written multiple articles on technology, media and urban experience and their effect on each other and is also one of the editors of the Sarai Reader series. In 1996 Sundaram gave an interview on the 'Brazilianation of India' where many elements also treated in Pirate Modernity are discussed.
The Dutch blogosphere took off only fifteen years ago, but has experienced more than one will do in an entire lifetime. Frank Meeuwsen, who was there when the first Dutch blogs were born, decided this was the right time to look back on its history and write down the first ten years in a book.
He first of all…
The preface of this book is the most pessimistic and exaggerated one of probably all times.“It’s early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons – automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as a individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. They will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to some person somewhere who happens to resonate with some fragment of what I say. They will be scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams. “
“Communication media are endowed with a nearly sacred capacity for qualitative transformation of human relationships. Many of the limitations of everyday life, especially the trappings of interpersonal communication, are to be alleviated by technological apparatuses that promise seamless and immediate connection.”
The Book of imaginary media: excavating the dream of the ultimate communication medium (2006) explicity deals with imaginary media.…
Rethinking Curating explores the characteristics distinctive to new media art, including its immateriality and its questioning of time and space, and relates them to such contemporary art forms as video art, conceptual art, socially engaged art, and performance art. The book offers curators a route through the hype around platforms and autonomous zones by following the lead of current artists' practice
How have a bunch of nobodies created the world’s largest encyclopedia? In his book, The Wikipedia revolution (2009), Andrew Lih set himself the goal to answer this question. And he has done so quite successfully. He exstensively maps the landscape from which Wikipedia emerged as well as addresses Wikipedia’s own inherent characteristics that have made Wikipedia to…
Every social or cultural change in which we view the world is debatable. Everyone has his or her own opinions on how the world is perceived and which parts are important in that. That is fine, that is interesting, that is what - in the end - makes us all human: We perceive things through our own eyes and we try to make sense of it all and convince other of our ways of thinking. Sometimes people try to write down the things they observe and publish them: Abstract Hacktivism is an example of this.
Reading Digital Folklore is like taking down that shoe-box of old photos from the top shelve and treating yourself to a night of reminiscing. You grimace at how goofy your hairdo looked 15 years ago and laugh at how you used to match pink leggings with animal print and secretly wish you would still lack the self consciousness that…
India has long since been on my list of places I must visit before I die. I’m fascinated by the unknown and India is definitely a country that is completely unknown to me. Aside from cultural references in books, television, movies (Darjeeling Limited, I love you), etc., I can’t say that I have a real understanding of what life is…
Book-review- Open 19: Beyond Privacy. New Perspectives on the Public and Private Domain [Paperback]
Jorinde Seijdel (Editor), Liesbeth Melis (Editor)
ISBN: 978-90-5662-736-,144 pages,
This book is an edition of Open, published by SKOR a foundation of art and public space.
At this time, an information age where information is everywhere and increases daily, the concept of…
Repair is an art and technology festival organized by ARS Electronica, an Austrian platform for digital art and media culture based in Linz. The festival was held this year from September 2 until September 11. The message of Repair is loud and clear. Up until now we homo sapiens have gone out of our way to slowly destroy the…