Studies in Network Cultures

This book series, edited by Geert Lovink, is a collaboration between the Institute of Network Cultures (INC) and NAi Publishers.

This book series investigates concepts and practices special to network cultures. Exploring the spectrum of new media and society, we see network cultures as a strategic term to enlist in diagnosing political and aesthetic developments in user-driven communications. Network cultures can be understood as social-technical formations under construction. They rapidly assemble, and can just as quickly disappear, creating a sense of spontaneity, transience and even uncertainty. Yet they are here to stay. However self-evident it is, collaboration is a foundation of network cultures. Working with others frequently brings about tensions that have no recourse to modern protocols of conflict resolution. Networks are not parliaments. How to conduct research within such a shifting environment is a key interest to this series.

Delusive Spaces

Second book in the series:
Delusive Spaces: Essays on Culture, Media and Technology by Eric Kluitenberg.

The formerly open terrain of the new media is closing fast: market concentration, legal consolidation and tightening governmental control have effectively ended the myth of the new media networks as the home of the free. The object of this book is not simply to critique these conditions.

Organized Networks

First book in the series:
Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions by Ned Rossiter.

The celebration of network cultures as open, decentralized, and horizontal all too easily forgets the political dimensions of labour and life in informational times. Organized Networks sets out to destroy these myths by tracking the antagonisms that lurk within Internet governance debates, the exploitation of labour in the creative industries, and the aesthetics of global finance capital.