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Review of Nancy Baym’s Personal Connections in the Digital Age

It is often the narcissistic tendencies of academics which alienates a much wider potential readership of their work. A use of language and content that predicates a certain level of cultural capital renders many articles inaccessible to a number...
Book review: Virtually You by Elias Aboujaoude, MD

Book review: Virtually You by Elias Aboujaoude, MD

The humankind is moving online. Our work, relationships, communications, banking and even shopping can be done online today, and where possible we’ll happily take the easy ‘one click away’ shortcut, because it’s faster, more efficient and more convenient. For...

Book Review – Open 20: The Populist Imagination

The Populist Imagination comes in a timely moment. The 20th issue of Open, the cahier on art and the public domain published by NAi, is a collection of essays dealing with “the role of myth, narratives and identity in...
Review: Anne Friedberg’s “The Virtual Window”

Review: Anne Friedberg’s “The Virtual Window”

<strong class=book cover" width="75" />In books&qid=1284842803&sr=8-1" target="_blank">The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (2006, MIT Press), (the late) Anne Friedberg traces the history of the relationship between the window...

Book Review: “Nach Feierabend: Daten” [After work: Data]

Data have an incredible argumentative potential. Data can be produced, filed, saved, evaluated, spread, sold, aggregated, falsified, interpreted, transmitted, protected, processed and combined. Data show relations, support theses and disprove assumptions. Data can also change over the time and...
Book Review: “The World and Wikipedia, How We Are Editing Reality” by Andrew Dalby

Book Review: “The World and Wikipedia, How We Are Editing Reality” by Andrew Dalby

“Take any article on Wikipedia. Who wrote it? Where did it come from? Now take a closer look at those unconvincing, badly written sentences in the middle. Why did someone add them? How long will it be before someone...
Book review: Public Netbase: Non Stop Future/ New practices in Art and Media

Book review: Public Netbase: Non Stop Future/ New practices in Art and Media

“New information technologies have become ubiquitous and thoroughly established in our everyday life. This marks the end of a period of intense experimentations and speculations related to the introduction of global communication systems more than a decade ago. Artists...
Book Review: “BOM” by Rik Van de Walle

Book Review: “BOM” by Rik Van de Walle

Endless rows of audio recordings, video tapes and all kinds of other audio-visual information can be found in archives all over the world. According to UNESCO there is over 200 million hours of audio-visual material on our planet, the...
Book Review: Inherend Vice, bootleg history of videotape  and copyright. By Lucas Hilderbrand.

Book Review: Inherend Vice, bootleg history of videotape and copyright. By Lucas Hilderbrand.

Since I grew up in the eighties, the complete history of videotape which this book starts off with made me visit places I passed a long time ago. At moments the recognition was instantly. For instance I recollect a...
Book review: Repair – Ready to pull the lifeline

Book review: Repair – Ready to pull the lifeline

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...

Book review- Digital Folklore Reader

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...

Book Review: Bloghelden

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...
Book Review: ‘You Are Not a Gadget’ by Jaron Lanier

Book Review: ‘You Are Not a Gadget’ by Jaron Lanier

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...

Review: Eric Kluitenberg, ed. – Book of imaginary media

“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...

Book review: Andrew Lih – The Wikipedia revolution

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...
Book review: John Freeman, “The tyranny of e-mail” – The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to your Inbox

Book review: John Freeman, “The tyranny of e-mail” – The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to your Inbox

I ‘ve read once a story about a Japanese man who got married to the virtual girlfriend he dated in a Nintendo DS video game called Love Plus– a wedding blessed by a priest and not a virtual one....
Book review, Richard Coyne, “The Tuning of Place: Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media”  MIT Press (2010)

Book review, Richard Coyne, “The Tuning of Place: Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media” MIT Press (2010)

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...

Book Review: ‘The Public Domain’ – James Boyle

The Public Domain - by James Boyle'The Public Domain' - Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, by James Boyle is an attempt to tell the story...
Book Review – De Digitale Kunstkammer

Book Review – De Digitale Kunstkammer

Book Review – De Digitale Kunstkammer Cultureel Erfgoed & Crossmedia 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...
Book review “Bioethics in the age of new media” by Joanna Zylinksa (2009)

Book review “Bioethics in the age of new media” by Joanna Zylinksa (2009)

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...
Book review: Business Model Innovation Cultural Heritage

Book review: Business Model Innovation Cultural Heritage

'Business Model Innovation Cultural Heritage' is a result as well a report of a project carried out in Netherlands in 2009 by two Dutch institutions, The DEN Foundation as well as Knowledgeland; and commisioned by the Ministry of Education,...
Blog theory by Jodi Dean reviewed

Blog theory by Jodi Dean reviewed

Jodi Dean is professor of political science at Hobart an William Smith Colleges. She focus on the contemporary space or possibility of politics. Dean is a blogger herself and in her book she makes some points clear by...

Review: Franco Berardi-Precarious Rhapsody

When Franco “Bifo” Berardi invokes McLuhan in the introduction to Precarious Rhapsody, it gives a strong indication of what to expect in the coming pages. Not necessarily regarding his arguments and theories- Berardi is more clearly aligned with the...

Book Review- Imaginal Machines: Autonomy and Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life, by Stevphen Shukaitis

In the era of New Media, where the multiple identities of social movements find their best way of expression, Stevphen Shukaitis recalls the power of radical and collective imagination giving a new perspective on radical social movements nowadays. What...