Book: Joss Hands. @ Is For Activism. Pluto Press, 2010. This book offers in-depth reflections on the nature of activism in a ‘digital culture’.
“When I first began working on the project that was to become ‘@ is For Activism’, my motivation was as much for my own curiosity as anything, and that was to try and get a sense of the inherent capacity, or at least potential, for digital communication technology to be democratically directed and to function – at the risk of being overly grand – towards emancipatory ends. The inherent flexibility of the microchip to process information in innumerable ways seems to lend itself to such ends, in particular the capacity for distributed computer-mediated-communication to enable dialogical forms of interaction. However, at the same time there are many thinkers who have understood, not just digital technology, but technology in general, to do precisely the opposite. The notion of modern technology as producing what Martin Heidegger refers to as enframing, broadly entailing a process that captures human beings in an inescapable technological alienation, is just one such theory. While this may be true of an industrial lathe or a Fordist production line it seems to miss the potential of certain individual technologies, the Internet being one such, that have emancipatory potential. So it is that when looking at various different approaches and variants of philosophy of technology, at different ends of the utopian/dystopian binary, one is led, I believe, and I argue in the book, to the conclusion that we need to think about technology as a social product, but also one that has the capacity the shape the social in equal measure – neither utopian nor dystopian but embedded in our deeper social, political and economic practices." more of review: http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/book-of-the-week-is-for-activism/2011/01/23 _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
