Grokster took a dump this week in the high court.  The cultural forces are indeed clashing.  While corporations are capitalizing on the "free flow" of information and selling it back to us as liberatory, they are making every effort to control that flow for their best interests.  Free navigation through the labyrinth makes money; interactivity […]

Categories: network

Friedrich Kittler argues that "culture cannot be had without technology, and technology cannot be had without culture" ("The Perspective of Print").  This seems like a fairly simply idea, but Kittler makes it complex.  What he’s trying to get at here is that they these two discourses (technology and culture) are always already the same thing.  […]

Categories: network · Kittler · Media Theory

I came across a reference today that put me on edge: post-materialism.  It’s from a book by Pippa Norris called Digital Divide (2001).   Norris’ hypothesis, as told by Barney, is that, "given the demographic profile of internet users (affluent, educated, and young), we might expect that the culture of internet users is particularly postmaterialist in […]

Categories: network

In Darin Barney’s book The Network Society, he breaks the topic into five chapters: network society, network technology, network economy, network politics, and network identity.  Each chapter reads like a lit review of sorts, providing a useful, but rather dry overview of  the topic.  He relies quite heavily on Castells, so much so that it […]

Categories: network

What is the connection between new media and urban design in the twentieth century?  How have the  promises of shape shifting media in fact shifted the shapes of urban areas?    Likewise, the culture of cities shapes the media designed to connect and broadcast the culture.  This book I’m working on will find the points […]

Categories: network