Uncanny Networks: Dialogues with the virtual intelligentsia
Geert Lovink
£18.50/$27.95 MIT
COMMENTARY about the Net has been in general so dominated by Silicon
Valley that it's easy to forget there are other points of view. Many of
these are represented day in and day out on the Nettime mailing list,
which carries an unusual mix of postings about art, local politics, and
media theory from all over the world. The list, which is "slightly
moderated", has a very high proportion of valuable discussion.
In Uncanny Networks, Geert Lovink, who co-founded Nettime in 1995,
has put together a series of online interviews with the same overall feel
to it. The interviews were conducted online, which Lovink believes gives
people a chance to think more thoroughly and deeply about what they say
than when they're speaking off the cuff. Many people might disagree,
feeling that at least you can't copy and paste from previously written
material when you're speaking, but these interviews do come across as
both natural, like speech, and thoughtful, like writing.
Few of the interviewees are from the business and technical press.
Instead they range from German media theorist Dietmar Kamper and the
philosopher Michael Heim to Gayatri Spivak, an Indian specialist in
postcolonial studies. Probably the most well known is Paulina Borsook,
author of Cyberselfish, a critique of libertarianism.
Wendy M. Grossman is author of Net.Wars (New York University Press,
1998)
Wendy M. Grossman
http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opbooks.jsp?id=ns23894
