by Shirley Niemans

On monday March 1, Dutch newspaper NRC Next devoted two pages to articles on Google. One article by Peter Teffer, ”Maakt het internet ons dommer?” (does the Internet dumb us down?) features an interview with Geert Lovink. The other article is an experiment by two NRC reporters, Teffer and Pfauth, who attempted to live and work without the use of any Google service for a week. The article and report (both in Dutch) are online here.

In the last week of January, an NYU graduate class conducted a similar experiment, see an earlier blog post on it here.

By Urte Jurgaityte

Just released in Spanish with contributions from Igor Sádaba [Ed.], Michel Bauwens, Geert Lovink, Fernando Carbajo, César Rendueles and Rubén Blanco, Dimino Abierto.

The texts in this booklet show different perspectives about transformations of cooperative forms of creation, dissemination and access to culture.

In recent years, the cultural debate has been revitalized by the analysis of the new cooperative forms of creation and dissemination of objects and processes, artistic, scientific or social. Either explicitly or tacitly there is a widespread community of users and creators of cultural products not only in content but also on how the partnership can help their social development and distribution.

In the artistic field, users of P2P networks and the development of platforms where developers offer their works with non-restrictive licenses are above the unavoidable rise of social tools of cultural cooperation of Web 2.0 features. In the field of dissemination of knowledge, the Wikimedia Foundation or the open-access digital repositories are already consolidated realities that are transforming the way of disseminating scientific advances, not to mention the free software revolution, which has significantly altered the perception traditionally competitive technological innovation.

Faced with diagnosis of emergency – catastrophic or utopian – the supporters and detractors of these changes need frameworks for discussing about new partnerships in social, cultural and scientific environments.

More information about the book can be found here:
http://www.circulobellasartes.com/ag_ediciones-libros.php?ele=85

Geert at Newport beach (Photo: Garnet Hertz)

INC’s founding director Geert Lovink spent the first week of February 2009 at the Critical Theory Emphasis graduate program at UC Irvine, where he gave four talks. Liz Losh, Writing Director of the Humanities Core Course at U.C. Irvine, blogged all of his lectures. Thanks Liz!
Check out the blog posts:

Geert Lovink began a three-day series of lectures today as part of the Critical Theory Emphasis graduate program at UC Irvine with a lecture on “Understanding Global Internet Culture” that argued that “theory has lost grip on its object.”
http://virtualpolitik.blogspot.com/2009/02/empirical-turn.html

Geert Lovink’s second lecture for the UC Irvine Critical Theory Emphasis on “Tactical Media Strategies” opened by acknowledging the contributions to his thinking by his collaborator David Garcia, with whom he authored the “ABC of Tactical Media.”
http://virtualpolitik.blogspot.com/2009/02/networks-and-organizations.html

Appearing before UC Irvine’s Workshop on Networking Knowledge, Geert Lovink asked if “networked knowledge was possible,” since it might be “almost a contradiction,” because “networks are eroding institutionalized knowledge production.”
http://virtualpolitik.blogspot.com/2009/02/stop-searching-start-questioning.html

In Geert Lovink’s final lecture for the the Critical Theory Emphasis at UC Irvine the topic was “Net Criticism in the Web 2.0 Age.”
http://virtualpolitik.blogspot.com/2009/02/nihilism-decay-and-place-of-theory.html

Geert Lovink’s most recent book ‘Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture’ (Routledge 2007) has now also been translated into German!
Left: Zero Comments: Teoria Critica di Internet. Bruni Mondadori, 2008.
Right: Zero Comments: Elemente einer kritischen Internetkultur. Transcript Verlag, 2008.
Read more about this on Geert’s blog.