Teaching at the European Graduate School

P6180022This week I taught a class on critical internet research at the European Graduate School, high up in the Alps in Saas-Fee. It was the third time (after 2007 and 2009), this time as an EGS professor. After Hendrik Speck, Friedrich Kittler, Bruce Sterling and Lev Manovich it was my turn. The topics we covered ranged from the ‘neurological turn in internet criticism’, the theory of real-time, media activism in the age of Web 2.0, the politics of open knowledge production (Wikipedia), the cultural logic of search to the Web and the Self. I wrapped up the class with an evening lecture for all classes on the critique of ICT for development, humanitarian aid in the work of Linda Polman, Dambisa Moyo and Renzo Martens’ Enjoy Poverty. I related this controversial film on the Western emergency aid system to the rise of mobile phone use in Africa and the fight over strategic resources such as Coltan and Tantalum in the same region of central/eastern Congo in which Martens’ film is set.

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