I am high up in the Swiss Alps, in the car-free village of Saas Fee, to teach a class for three days to PhD students of the European Graduate School, invited by Wolfgang Schirmacher and Hendrik Speck (who are also teaching here). I was here for the first time in June 2007 (the public lecture then is on YouTube). Before me Bruce Sterling, Lev Manovich and Friedrich Kittler taught the same group. The impressive mountains at times look like a surreal VR 3D wallpaper surrounding. After my arrival I went out for a first hike with Henry Warwick (Toronto), a friend and copy-editor of my work, who is here in his capacity as student and technical assistant. The master classes I give are becoming more frequent: Melbourne and Perth in December, Irvine and Madrid in February. A next one is planned for Prague, late October.

The master class format is intense and different from giving a class at university or a one-off lecture. Given the relentless pace of change in internet culture, it is challange to both deal with new platforms and their specific techno-social configurations and the urge to reflect and produce untimely theory that can withstand the seductions of real-time media. In such a situation it’s tempting to withdraw into history or trying to give an overview of where we are. It’s also my ambition to showcase that critics can make future interventions without making speculative predictions. It’s essential to put ‘new media’ in their post-world war II context of military research, cybernetics and post-industrial libertarian free market belief systems.

Here at EGS I am discussing my recent research on multilingualism and global shifts in internet culture, blogging, online video (the Video Vortex project), activism in the age of Web 2.0 (after tactical media) and the fate of media theory & education and the failed synergies of media studies. These are all topics of my upcoming book that I recently started. As some of you might know, the announced booklet on Blog Theory, that I planned to write with Jodi Dean somehow fell through. Instead, I submitted my own proposal at Polity Press. The good news is that I drew up a table of content and started working on different chapters. More news on this soon.