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.

5 - Constituents of a theory of the media

Originally published in 1970, the article “Constituents of a Theory of the Media” shows an author already worried about how electronic media was influencing not only people’s consciousness but social and political structures as well. Hans Magnus Enzenberger points to the mobilizing power of the electronic media considering the way they are being used. For him, media apparatus were working to prevent communication rather stimulate it. The polarization between transmitter and receiver reflects the opposition among producers and consumers (15). The latter is unable to express their opinions since media is controlled by the consciousness industry. 

4 - Re-constructing digital democracy: An outline of four ‘positions’

Source: Banco Mundial

Currently, a lot of definitions of what digital democracy means are being adopted. What Lincoln Dahlberg attempt to do in his article is to outline this diversity in four different positions.  For Dahlberg, a position means the particular positions of people or groups considering some features; rhetoric, practices, identities, and institutions (2). The author made a critical-interpretative approach based on his understandings of digital democracy and drew upon his knowledge the following four concepts; liberal-individualist, deliberative, counter-publics, and autonomist Marxist.

3 - Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri built a genealogy of modern resistance gathering the forms of insurgency and revolt present in recent history. For them, what we have seen over the last few decades is that the legitimation of the global order is based ultimately on war and the efforts made to understand the counterinsurgency to date pose the insurgency responding to it in our understanding of war. We were looking from the counterinsurgency perspective, but for the authors, we should change this logic to recognize the powerful and wanted forms of rebellion and revolution; they proposed to look for resistance first (64). They argue that the understanding of the genealogy of resistance will provide us a new vision of the world and its subjectivities.

2 - How to resume the task of tracing associations

Bruno Latour starts his book with his concerns about the use of ‘social’ as an adjective to nominate assumptions about the nature of what compose social assembling.  Comparable to adjectives like wooden, biological and mental, the social is being used to designate something material, a kind of ingredient within social domain (1). His proposal is to reconstruct the meaning of social by revisiting the roots of this concept.

1 - Williams x McLuhan

Raymond Williams was a scholar, professor, and a prolific writer. Engaged to the challenges of his time, he collaborated in newspapers and magazines, including the influential New Left Review. He wrote influents books that remain references in the areas of history and the sociology of culture. One of his principal works, “Television: Technology and Cultural Form,” was firstly published in 1974. Despite being printed more than 40 years ago, the book is a necessary classic for anyone seeking to understand and study the effects of the media. The text helps to remove the impoverished political-cultural debate on technological determinism from the commonplace and attempts to discuss television by considering the diversity of factors influencing it.