Exploring New Configurations of Network Politics

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.

 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 

I'll be doing this on the 16th of march in Luton at the Research Institute for Media, Art, Design, Performance and English, University of Bedfordshire Room - A107 1pm - 2pm  rimad.wikidot.com/ 

 

Activism in the Network Society: On Power-Laws and Deliberation in Radical Democracy

We're (Joss Hands and Jussi Parikka) having a book launch event at Anglia Ruskin University next week, room 251 at 5PM, for our new books, respectively: @ is For Activism and Insect Media - all are welcome, see more details below. Also if you can't make Cambridge we'll be doing the same thing at Lincoln University the day before, also at 5PM 

 

 

 

 

Here are some more comments on digital activism and my book I wrote for the peer to peer foundation wiki, reproduced from here

 

This is the text of an interview I did on digital activism with James Quinney of the New Left Project, reproduced here from their website.

 

 

There’s often a lot of hype surrounding the potential of new technologies. How significant do you think computer mediated communication has really been for activists?

During the French general strike on 7 September 2010 the slogan ‘Je Lutte Des Classes’ could be seen and heard throughout the massive protest marches.
 

 

This is the catalogue entry for my book, @ is for Activism: Dissent, Resistance and Rebellion in a Digital Culture, should be in the Pluto Press Autumn catalogue, just the slight matter of finishing it in the next week...! 

 

@ is For Activism examines the transformation of politics in and through digital media (including digital television, online social networking, mobile computing). 

 Research Studentships