Cultural Studies: My Creativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries
My favourite piece in My Creativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries -a collection of essays edited by Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter- is Annelys De Vet’s Creativity is not About Industry:

I have nothing smart to say about the creative industry. This might be because I’m in the middle of it myself, not being able to see it clearly anymore. But most of all creativity can’t be compared with industrial principals.
It’s not about production, it’s about reflection.
It’s not about security, but about experiments.
It’s not about output, but about input.
It’s not about graphs, but about people.
It’s not about similarities, but about differences.
It’s not about majorities, but about minorities.
It’s not about the private domain, but about the public domain.
It’s not about financial space, but about cultural space.
Creativity has nothing to do with the economy, or with bureaucracy. It’s about cultural value, trust, autonomous positions and undefined spaces.

For the whole review go to the Media/Culture website.

INC’s research intern Dennis Deicke wrote his second book review, of
Stefan Weber’s Das Google-Copy-Paste-Syndrome: Wie Netzplagiate Ausbildung und Wissen gefährden. Heise Verlag, Hannover: 2009.

The Google-Copy-Paste-Syndrome: How Web-Plagiarism endangers Education and Knowledge, written by Stefan Weber, deals with the influence of the ever-increasing internet use on the prevalent culture of knowledge. Austrian media scholar Weber states that the soaring spread of the new media results in a „text culture without brains.“ Stefan Weber decided to become a plagiarism-scientist after he discovered that a theologian from Tübingen has written off 90 sites of his own dissertation. Since that he has collected 14 folders with over 60 cases of plagiarism which build the base of his work. Internet enhances plagiarism in schools, journalism, the arts and especially at universities. Weber criticizes current media and cultural studies programs which ignore the augmented emergence of plagiarism due to an exaggerated optimism towards new media, thereby enhancing the problem by spreading their infinitely technophile theories.
The review can be found here.
Or visit the Society of the Query website for more search engine theory book reviews: http://www.networkcultures.org/query/.

As the INC is preparing for a conference on search engines, titled The Society of the Query, research intern Dennis Deicke is delving deep into search engine theory. His book reviews can be read on the preliminary conference site www.networkcultures.org/query. Dennis has published his first review, which covers David Gugerli’s Suchmaschinen, Die Welt als Datenbank. The review can be read here.