"For Geert Lovink, interviews are imaginative texts that help create global, networked discourses not only among different professions but also among different cultures and social groups. Conducting interviews online, over a period of weeks or months, allows the participants to compose documents of depth and breadth, rather than simply snapshots of timely references." "The interviews collected in this book are with artists, critics, and theorists who are intimately involved in building the content, interfaces, and architectures of new media. ... The topics discussed include digital aesthetics, sound art, navigating deep audio space, European media philosophy, the internet in Eastern Europe, the mixing of old and new in India, critical media studies in the Asia-Pacific, Japanese techno tribes, hybrid identities, the storage of social movements, theory of the virtual class, virtual and urban spaces, corporate takeover of the internet, and cyberspace and the rise of nongovernmental organizations."

Victims' Symptom (PTSD and Culture) Victims' Symptom is a collection of interviews, essays, artists' statements and glossary definitions, which was originally launched as a Web project (http: //victims.labforculture.org). Produced in 2007, the project brought together cases related to past and current sites of conflict such as Sre- brenica, Palestine, and Kosovo reporting from different (and sometimes conflicting) international viewpoints. The Victims Symptom Reader collects critical concepts in media victimology and addresses the representation of victims in economies of war.

In this history of new media technologies, leading media and cultural theorists examine new media against the background of traditional media such as film, photography, and print in order to evaluate the multiple claims made about the benefits and freedom of digital media.

Tactical media describes interventionist media art practices that engage and critique the dominant political and economic order. Rather than taking to the streets and staging spectacular protests, the practitioners of tactical media engage in an aesthetic politics of disruption, intervention, and education. In Tactical Media, Rita Raley provides a critical exploration of the new media art activism that has emerged out of, and in direct response to, postindustrialism and neoliberal globalization.

separated by the exigencies of the design life cycle into another compartment, that makes invisible the (prior) technical work of engineers that is not directly pertinent to the application work of practitioners. More recently (and notably after the work of Greisemer and Star) the black box has been opened and infrastructure has been discussed in terms of the social relations of an extended group of actors that includes developers. Ethical and political issues are involved (cf f accountable computing). Writing broadly within this context, Day (chapter 11) proposes that the concept of 'surface' can assist us to explore space as the product of 'power and the affective and expressive role for materials', rather than the background to this. Surfaces are the 'variously textured...sites for mixtures between bodies', and are thus the 'sites for events'. The notions of 'folding' and 'foldability' and 'unfolding' are discussed at length, as metaphors that account for the interactions of bodies in space across time. Some of the contributors to this volume focus on ways in which we may experience multiple infrastructures. Dix and his colleagues, for example, in chapter 12 explore a complex of models - of spatial context, of 'mixed reality boundaries' and of human spatial understanding across a number of field projects that make up the Equator project to explain the ways in which co-existing multiple spaces are experienced.

Unlike previous media-analytic research, Sarah Jurkiewicz's anthropological study understands blogging as a social field and a domain of practice. This approach underlines the significance of blogging in practitioners' daily lives and for their self-understanding. In this context, the notion of publicness enables a consideration of publics not as static 'spheres' that actors merely enter, but as produced and constituted by social practices. The vibrant media landscape of Beirut serves as a selection of samples for an ethnographic exploration of blogging.

In Zero Comments, internationally renowned media theorist and 'net critic' Geert Lovink revitalizes worn out concepts about the Internet and interrogates the latest hype surrounding blogs and social network sites. In this third volume of his studies into critical Internet culture, following the influential Dark Fiber and My First Recession, Lovink develops a 'general theory of blogging.' He unpacks the ways that blogs exhibit a 'nihilist impulse' to empty out established meaning structures. Blogs, Lovink argues, are bringing about the decay of traditional broadcast media, and they are driven by an in-crowd dynamic in which social ranking is a primary concern. The lowest rung of the new Internet hierarchy are those blogs and sites that receive no user feedback or 'zero comments'. Zero Comments also explores other important changes to Internet culture, as well, including the silent globalization of the Net in which the West is no longer the main influence behind new media culture, as countries like India, China and Brazil expand their influence and looks forward to speculate on the Net impact of organized networks, free cooperation and distributed aesthetics.

Where many critics see the Internet as an instrument of corporate hegemony, Michael Strangelove sees something else: an alternative space inhabited by communities dedicated to anarchic freedom, culture jamming, alternative journalism, and resistance to authoritarian forms of consumer capitalism and globalization. In The Empire of Mind, "Dr. Strangelove," the scholar Canadian Business referred to as the "acknowledged dean of Internet entrepreneurs" and Wired called "the Canadian guru of Internet advertising," presents the compelling argument that the Internet and new digital communication technology actually undermine the power of capital, producing an alternative symbolic economy. Strangelove contends that the Internet breaks with the capitalist logic of commodification and that, while television produces a passive consumer audience, Internet audiences are more active, creative, and subversive. Writers, activists, and artists on the Internet undermine commercial media and its management of consumer behaviour, a behaviour that is challenged by the Web's tendency toward the disintegration of intellectual property rights. Case studies describe the invention of new meaning given to cultural and consumer icons like Barbie and McDonald's and explore how novel modes of online news production alter the representation of the world as it is produced by the mainstream, corporate press. In the course of exploring new media, The Empire of Mind also makes apparent that digital piracy will not be eliminated. The Internet community effectively converts private property into public, thereby presenting serious obstacles for the management of consumer behaviour and significantly eroding brand value. Much to the dismay of the corporate sector, online communities are disinterested in the ethics of private property. In fact, the entire philosophical framework on which capitalism is based is threatened by these alternative means of cultural production.

The first comprehensive book on the Australian Internet, Virtual Nation offers a surprising, thought-provoking, and rigorous introduction to a technology that we now can't do without.

"This book presents a comprehensive, integrative, and global view of what has been called the digital divide"--Provided by publisher.