12 - Death by Metadata

Source: https://www.spreadshirt.ie

In the chapter “Death by Metadata” (2016), questions around surveillance and “conduct of contemporary wars” guided Joseph Pugliese toward the understanding of the connections between the United States’ Department of Defense (DoD) and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the “US’s drone kill program” (3).  Pugliese attempt to comprehend NSA’s technologies used in the DoD’s drone program to reveal the use of metadata guiding drones to kill violently, what he called bioinformationalisation of life (4).

11 - Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon.

A massive quantity of information is being produced by people every second around the world, and all this data shapes the so-called Big Data. In the “Critical Questions for Big Data” Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford attempt to point out provocative questions about benefits and harms of analyzing all these traces left by society (662).

10- A Geology of Media

                                                      Source: Cover of "Geology of Media," Jussi Parikka (2015)

In chapter two of “A Geology of Media,” Jussi Parikka (2015) make us a call to overpass the attractiveness of the digital technologies and to look at the geological impact brought by the production of these goods. Parikka concerns are not only restrained to the production of tangible digital technologies damaging the earth, but also the geological harms behind the supposed immaterial services such as cloud data storage (30).

9- Postcript on the Societies of Control

In “Postcript on the Societies of Control” Gilles Deleuze (1992) recapture some concepts developed by Michel Focault about the disciplinary societies to reach the notion of Societies of Control. From eighteenth to twentieth century society was embedded in “environments of enclosure” (3) organized to discipline people’s bodies and minds. Schools, factories, prisons, and hospitals are some of the closed environments which an individual would pass throughout his life according to Foucault. However, Deleuze (1992) argues that after changes brought by Napoleon’s government and after World War II the model of disciplinary society was no longer beneficial to the power in charge and its replacement was made by what he called society of control (4).   

8- Paying attention: towards a critique of the attention economy

In the industrial era, the Frankfurt School concerns surrounded the relations between the media and the consumption need demanded by the producers. In the digital age, according to Patrick Crogan and Samuel Kinsley, the call is to understand how subjective experience and cognitive capacities are being modulated by the bio-political commodification of our senses (2). For the authors, this commodification of our bodies is what leads it to the regulation and subjectivation “…of and through [our] capacities for attention” (2). This combination between economy and attention, and its consequences, resulted in the called attention economy research area. In Crogan and Kinsley’ s editorial, they offer an overview of the discourse of attention economy and its key concepts.

7 - Free Labor – Tiziana Terranova

Arguments about what is work and what is not work within digital media industry had been nurtured by advocates of digital labor for the last decade. For some of them, capital has been weakened by the demand for knowledge and creativity which posits workers in advantage. To others, the profits of companies as Google and Facebook prove that the digital environment of work is not far from the well know Marxists theories (especially from Marx predictions in a few passages of the Grundrisse when he points to the capital dependence of social intellect to improve the machinery (Marx, 1973)). Tiziana Terranova seems to be somewhere between these two theorists groups.

6 - Fragment on Machines - Karl Marx

china1larg.workers.gi

The Fragment on Machines is part of Marx’s Grundrisse. Far more than "sketches" or furtherance of Karl Marx's major work, the Grundrisse originally considered a work in progress of what was to become Marx's central work. It is now known that examining the Grundrisse is like having access to Marx's laboratory of studies in the course of his extensive intellectual activity.