User:Lidia.Pereira/GPS/LS
Lovink, Geert. "Networks Without a Cause"
- "Networks Without a Cause" is an attempt to bring back critique and social theory to the highly networked landscape of digital media. It aims to go beyond privacy, usability, access and etc. and study the tensions between the internet's enforcement of existing structures and the distribuition of control.
- "Web 2.0 has three distinguishing features: it is easy to use, it facili tates sociality, and it provides users with free publishing and produc tion platforms that allow them to upload content in any form, be it pictures, videos, or text. Search 'n share: the users themselves recom mend more than the professionals. The subsequent focus on profiting from free user-generated content can therefore be seen as a direct response to the dot.com crash."
- "Social media as a buzzword of the outgoing Web 2.0 era is just a product of business management strategies and should be judged accordingly."
Castells, Manuel. "The Rise of the Network Society"
- "The Rise of the Network Society" concerns the characterization of the global economy in the terms of information, communication and capital flow and how that affects society at large by giving those in power magnificent tools for control.
Rose, Nicolas. "Governing the Soul: the Shaping of the Private Self"
- In "Governing the Soul: the Shaping of the Private Self" Nicolas Rose addresses three general problems: the sociology of scientific knowledge, the sociology of subjectivity and the sociology of power. The first general problem concerns the analysis of the social and political role of scientific knowledge. Rose rejects the 'ideology critique' to be found in the majority of sociological studies, where human sciences are perceived as ideologies. Instead, he chooses to focus more on the "productive role of knowledges". The second general problem concerns the social shaping of the human subject. Before, sociology and psychological were not separated entitities. Social thinkers such as Karl Marx and Adam Smith reflected on the relationship between social context and its inhabitant subject. Where they ask how human subjectivities have been socially determined by the surrounding apparatus, Rose asks: "how have persons been shaped by prevailing ways of thinking about human beings and acting upon them?". The third general problem concerns contemporary political power. Here, Rose rejects the view in which psychologists and other social scientists are mere part of the state. He argues, instead, that this sciences have been linked to a rise in a new array of authorities, related in variable ways to political power, however not only not subordinated to it, but even actively shaping its meaning.
Codd, Edgar F. "Relational Database: A Practical Foundation for Productivity"
- The introduction by Edgar F. Codd, in the realm of computation, of relational databases as a substitute to hierarchical databases, was yet another means towards the goal of increasing productivity. Instead of presenting data in a navigation unfriendly hierarchical way, where one's means of addressing data is by position, relational databases present the data and relationships between them in a table format, where information is accessible by value.
Morozov, Evgeny. "The Net Delusion"
- In the post-millenium hangover of the "march for freedom", authoritarian regimes continue to proliferate despite the Western attempts to champion democracy (yes, the same West that promotes and supports authoritarian regimes when in their economical interests). The Internet is seen as a means of opening up such societies, as "did" Radio Free Europe in the Soviet Union. This idea is what Morozov calls cyber-utopianism, for authoritarian countries direct a considerable amount of efforts in surpressing such attempts of free speech.
- "Not only were our strategies failing, but we also noticed a significant push back from the governments we sought to challenge. They were be- ginning to experiment with censorship, and some went so far as to start aggressively engaging with new media themselves, paying bloggers to spread propaganda and troll social networking sites looking for new in- formation on those in the opposition."
- "After all, Internet users can discover the truth about the horrors of their regimes, about the secret charms of democracy, and about the irre- sistible appeal of universal human rights on their own, by turning to search engines like Google and by following their more politically savvy friends on social networking sites like Facebook. In other words, let them tweet, and they will tweet their way to freedom. By this logic, au- thoritarianism becomes unsustainable once the barriers to the free flow of information are removed. If the Soviet Union couldn’t survive a pla- toon of pamphleteers, how can China survive an army of bloggers?"
- "The larger-than-life personalities of fearless dissidents that melted the icy heart of the Stasi officer in The Lives of Others are barely visible to the Internet police, who see the subjects of surveillance reduced to one-dimensional, boring database entries."
Kleiner, Dmytri. "The Telekommunist Manifesto"
- Telekommunisten champions the idea of distributed communism, using a similar topology as peer-to-peer to decentralize and make their community international. Kleiner states the contradictory relationship between capitalist control in the internet and the latter's non-hierarchical structure. The "Telekommunist Manifesto" states the centrality of the economical in the class struggle, where power is only achievable through wealth. Only by uniting can the immaterial workers fight against exploitation.
- "However, a central premise of this Manifesto is that engaging in software development and the produc- tion of immaterial cultural works is not enough. The communization of immaterial property alone cannot change the distribution of material productive assets, and therefore cannot eliminate exploitation; only the self-organization of production by workers can."
Raley, Rita. "Tactical Media"
- Rita Raley defends that the efficacy of street demonstration has changed, subjective view which demands for negotiation in politically engaged new media projects. She argues that activism and creative dissent must, too, enter the network.
- "These projects are not oriented toward the grand, sweeping revolutionary event; rather, they engage in a micropolitics of disruption, intervention, and education."
Kluitenberg, Eric. "Legacies of Tactical Media"
- Kluitenberg starts by stating the ressurgence of street protest, a collective re-approriation of the public space, in contrast to the "electronic isolation". He defends that "the political" must always coincide with the urban public space, it requires physical embodiement. In this sense, Kluitenberg couldn't be further away from Rita Raley's perspective. What changes now is the presence of a camera in the hands of the protestors, who thus document and archive the event. The consequences of "this radical multiplication of electronically mediated singular viewpoints" remain to be seen.
Kluitenberg's goal is self-evident by the title: to trace the legacies of tactical media.
Popper, Karl. "The Open Society and its Enemies"
- In "Foundations of Sociometry", Jacob Levy Moreno aknowledges the importance of informational technologies over networks by observing the distorting effect of the printed page over human spontaneity. Such observation made Moreno realize the effects of the superimposition of a "mechanical-social network" upon a "psycho-social network" in removing society from human control. Sociometric research is all the more accurate the more social atoms participate. Participation entails better tracing of patterns, habits and relations, in this way making social engineering all the more fine-tuned towards general productivity.
Moreno, Jacob Levy. "Foundations of Sociometry"
- In "Foundations of Sociometry", Jacob Levy Moreno aknowledges the importance of informational technologies over networks by observing the distorting effect of the printed page over human spontaneity. Such observation made Moreno realize the effects of the superimposition of a "mechanical-social network" upon a "psycho-social network" in removing society from human control. Sociometric research is all the more accurate the more social atoms participate. Participation entails better tracing of patterns, habits and relations, in this way making social engineering all the more fine-tuned towards general productivity.