Image by David Holmes the missing attendee.

I am in the middle of attending a master class with Geert Lovink at Melbourne University titled ‘Web 2.0 Studies // Critical Internet Theory’. The summary of the workshop:

In relation to the current Internet, there is an obvious need to move beyond cultural studies approaches to fandom, where active consumption is simply recast as participatory culture without any assessment of the economic and technological forces driving usergenerated content. Rather than relying on the Jenkins-style models of convergence and the notion of collective intelligence, this workshop will encourage participants to consider the alternative possibilities and theoretical problems facing a materialist understanding of network culture.

For instance, to what extent can software studies move from engineering issues and technologically-focused specifications to outline a broader analytics of power? What sort of creative concepts are available for understanding the everyday practices of blogging? How can organized networks transform their dependence on free labor to reach greater economic sustainability?

Readings:

Geert Lovink, ‘The Society of the Query and the Googlization of our Lives’, Eurozine, September 2008, originally published in German, in Lettre International 81, Berlin, 2008, translated into Italian, Swedish, Dutch, Danish.

Geert Lovink, ‘Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse,’ Eurozine, January, 2007, originally published in German, in Lettre International 73, Berlin, 2006, translated into French,Swedish, Italian, Danish, Swedish.

Geert Lovink and Anna Munster, ‘Distributed Aesthetics, Or, What a Network is Not’, Fibreculture Journal 7 (2005)

Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, ‘The Dawn of Organised Networks’, Fibreculture Journal 5 (2005).

Matteo Pasquinelli, ‘The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage’ (2008),