Dear all,

I haven’t been very actively posting on my blog lately but hopefully that’s going to change now. Late April I submitted the final version of my next book called Networks Without a Cause–A Critique of Social Media that Polity Press is going to publish. There is no publication date available yet but we’ve been working hard to have it out before the years’ end of 2011. Hopefully I will be able to announce more details on this fourth study on critical internet culture shortly, here on this blog.

Straight after this Deadline of Deadlines I participated in two Wikileaks events, one in Toronto (first time there!) and at the PEN festival in New York (with David Rieff, Ian Buruma, chaired by Tom Keenan). The debate around Wikileaks/Openleaks and the anonymous whistleblowers online submission movement is by no means over and I am still part of it on a daily basis.

Otherwise it has also been a very productive and busy time at the Institute of Network Cultures. First of all we had the Video Vortex #6 event in March, with the launch of the second Video Vortex reader (in which Rachel Miles played a big role). Then we had to submit an extension application at our own Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences in April. And in May we co-hosted the Unbound Book event, which saw two book launch in which I was involved: The I Read Where I Am compilation (together with Mieke Gerritzen and Minke Kampman, published by Valiz) on new reading cultures due to rise of e-readers. The other one was the release of Critical Point of View, the INC #7 reader on global critical Wikipedia research on which heaps of people worked such as Johanna in Siegen, Nishant in Bangalore, Nate in Melbourne, and Ivy and Morgan here in Amsterdam as copy editors.

Now I am taking a bit of a break, reorganize my Gutenberg archive in my office and new archive website (schon freigeschaltet!), ship books, do some reading and prepare for new projects. The whole month of August I will travel in Australia before classes start again, here in Amsterdam, where around 80 (!) students have been submitted to our Masters of Media one-year new media masters program at the University of Amsterdam (which we started five years ago with a group of 8 students).

The main project over the next months will be the proper launch of our Theory on Demand series. Margreet Riphagen at INC has been working on this in between so many other jobs and did an amazing job, producing seven titles. Over the next period we will work with Morgan Currie, Lily Antflick and Silvio Lorusso to upgrade and enlarge the series, which started off as a free downloadable pdf plus print-on-demand offer (via lulu.com).