Exploring New Configurations of Network Politics

I wrote a short piece for the Guardian to commemorate the fantastic German media theorist Friedrich Kittler who recently passed away. His legacy cannot be easily summed up, even if the terms often used refer to his material and historical emphasis on media culture analysis.
 

ARC Digital (Anglia Research Centre In Digital Culture) will be convening a reading group on 'digital capital' in the Autumn term of 2011. We will meet every other Tuesday from 4 October 2011 between 5.30 - 7.30 PM in the Helmore building on East Rd in Cambridge, room Hel 115.

The plan is to pair up some important readings from Marx with some contemporary critical theory to explore how they speak to each other, and what they have to say about digital culture in the present era of precarity, collapse and neo-liberal accumulation crises. 

The reports of networked riots taking place, of Blackberry fuelled, Twitter fuelled, whatever fuelled, mobs have been widespread since the riots in England broke out a week ago. David Cameron cynically name checked these platforms in his emergency parliamentary address and threatened the temporary shut down of social networks and the exclusion of individuals from them, all for a cheap headline.

Capitalism is sticky – it is able to attach to such a variety of objects, things, practices, and new fields that it almost seems to be productive in itself.

This is how liberation is nowadays framed - data wants to be free and routes around...
 

As part of the project, the Media Ecologies/"Unnaratural Ecologies" special issue is now published in Fibreculture-journal! Edited by Michael Goddard (one of the speakers at Platform Politics as well) and myself, it addresses the practices of media ecologies especially in a political framework. Media ecology becomes less a notion of stability, and more about mobilizations of the interlinkages, relations, dynamics inherent in media practices.

 I've written a piece on the anti-cuts agenda and digital activism for Open Democracy, Our Kingdom - it's informed by the kind of debates going on in the network politics project, the arguments in my book, and touches on the various 26 March protests. find it here