Peer-to-Peer Protesting: Evading the Police Kettle
Review of the Sukey app: http://www.sukey.org/ Since the WTO protests in Seattle and in particular the 2003 Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) meeting in Miami Florida, police agencies around the world have assembled a set of practices and protocols to constrain and immobilize political protestors. Dubbed the Miami Model of protest policing [...]
The Googlization of Google
Review of Siva Vaidhyanathan. The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry). University of California Press March 2011 280 pp. ISBN: 9780520258822 The literature on Google has exploded in the last few years. To the extend of my overview, much of it falls into two categories. The first treats Google as the paradigmatic [...]
Review of: Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media
Review of, Geert Lovink, Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media Polity Press, London, 2011. Every couple of weeks, when I walk into a bookstore (or rather, click through www.amazon.com), I am confronted with a rather massive amount of new books with keywords in their titles ranging from “network”, “web”, “internet”, “social media”, [...]
Notes from the Digital Underground: Cyber Illegalism and the New Egoists
Review of: Misha Glenny, DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011; ISBN 978-0-307-70055-1 202 pages Joseph Menn, Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet New York: PublicAffairs, 2010; ISBN 978-1-58648-907-6 305 pages Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar [...]
Review of Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile
Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile by Eden Medina MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. November 2011 ISBN 0-262-01649-4 312pages Chile’s Cybersyn project has long needed a thorough, critical history, and now we have one. Eden Medina’s carefully researched book lays out the project’s origins, structure and struggles as a “case study for better understanding [...]
Working Towards a Definition of the Philosophy of Software
review of David M. Berry. The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ISBN 978-0-230-24418-4 200 Pages Everyday life relies heavily on networked technologies that allow for a wide range of actions to take place, from the management of medical devices to the withdrawal of money from [...]
Into more-than-human worlds: feeling wireless environments on the fringes of our perception
Adrian Mackenzie Wirelessness. Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures MIT Press Cambridge, MA & London, UK 2011 225 pages ISBN 978-0-262-01464-9 Introduction “In floating such an awkward term as wirelessness, I would invite readers to attend mostly to the suffix ness. Ness seems to me to do a better job than wireless of capturing the [...]
Review, Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life
Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2011 ISBN 978-0-262-04248-2 xiv+290 pages Last week I bought a bagel and drink from Einstein’s Bagels, a food outlet chain in the United States that specialises in such fare. I handed over my credit card and it was duly swiped – [...]
Empty Internet
Review of Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble, what the internet is hiding from you NY/London: Penguin, 2011; ISBN 978-0670920389 304 pages The Filter Bubble pronounces, in populist terms, the agenda that software studies has been developing since the mid 1990s [1]: everything is governed, enframed and molded by software-mediated processes, while the systems/people creating and [...]
Review: Programmed Visions: Software and Memory
by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun MIT Press, Cambridge, 2011 ISBN-10: 0-262-01542-0 224pages Immateriality earned its scare quotes in media studies. Consider Geert Lovink’s (2004) critique of vapor theory, Lisa Nakamura’s (2008) work on digital racial formations, Matthew Kirschenbaum’s (2008) notion of a medial ideology, Alexander Galloway’s (2004) emphasis on the material substrate of new media, [...]
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