German translation of Zero Comments out now

By Geert Lovink, August 9, 2008

I am proud to announce that the (integral) German translation of my last book Zero Comments (Routledge, 2007) has just been published by the Bielefeld publishing house Transcript Verlag. More info in German here. The German title is Zero Comments, Elemente einer kritischen Internetkultur. Thanks a lot to Andreas Kallfelz and his team who did [...]

Gail Pool, Faint Praise, The Plight of Book Reviewing in...

Review of Gail Pool and her Plight of Book Reviewing in America

By Geert Lovink, June 16, 2008

Gail Pool, Faint Praise, The Plight of Book Reviewing in America, Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 2007, reviewed by Geert Lovink. For a long-term reader of the New York Review of Books like me it came as a surprise to read about the decline of book review culture in America. Of course, in the Land [...]

One of my ambitions was to become a ‘fashion philosopher’,...

Beyond the Wearable: Interview in Social Fabrics

By Geert Lovink, June 15, 2008

One of my ambitions was to become a ‘fashion philosopher’, to write in Vogue about (media) theory with the aim to overcome Roland Barthes’ semiotics legacy. Maybe one is never too old to enter this glamorous field of knowledge, so it could still happen! My involvement did not go further than a few encounters with [...]

In the Dutch NRC Handelsblad newspaper of Friday May 23...

Internet vs. Safe Haven for High Culture (on Roger Scruton)

By Geert Lovink, May 29, 2008

In the Dutch NRC Handelsblad newspaper of Friday May 23 2008 Maartje Somers interviewed UK conservative philosopher Roger Scruton. He was in Amsterdam recently for the book launch of the translation of Culture Counts. Let’s not discuss the headline here: “The World Can’t Do Without Snobs.” What’s more relevant are his remarks about internet. I [...]

Network theorist Ulises Mejias is in Amsterdam for a three...

Network theorist Ulises Mejias is in town

By Geert Lovink, May 28, 2008

Network theorist Ulises Mejias is in Amsterdam for a three months period and visits various new media initiatives and reports about it on his blog in a series called Conversation Below Sea Level. Here an interview he did with me. Ulises Mejas was one the speakers at the Amsterdam New Network Theory conference that our [...]

Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, from Edison...

Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch — A Review

By Geert Lovink, May 26, 2008

Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2008. Review by Geert Lovink US Internet critic Nicholas Carr managed to write a second bestseller. Similar to Does IT Matter? in which Carr posed that IT investments have lost their (competitive) strategic value because everybody is [...]

Again, I received a list of seven interesting questions via...

Interview for node: Blogs, Theory and other German Issues

By Geert Lovink, May 22, 2008

Again, I received a list of seven interesting questions via email, this time from Germany. It’s my habit to get rid of these email interviews immediately. Here it is. This time Jan-Peter Wulf of the Node trend watchers newsletter raised the issues of my specific blog theory, the relatively skeptical response in Germany to the [...]

In the May 12 2008 edition of the Brazilian weekly...

Interview for ÉPOCA (Brazilian weekly, in Portuguese)

By Geert Lovink, May 20, 2008

In the May 12 2008 edition of the Brazilian weekly Epoca there is a two page interview with me, conducted via telephone from Sao Paolo by Peter Moon. You can find it on their website too but I saved a copy on my pages, in case Epoca takes it down. Epoca looks a bit like [...]

The Danish journalist Stirne Bjerre Herdel (www.kontrabande.com) sent me some...

Interview for Højskolebladet on politics and social media

By Geert Lovink, April 18, 2008

The Danish journalist Stirne Bjerre Herdel (www.kontrabande.com) sent me some questions. He is writing an article about the “development in political dialogue in social media on the web.” It is for the Højskolebladet magazine (meaning hogeschool/hochschule/polytechnic). SBJ: When it comes to politics the parties seem to loose members but people haven’t lost interest in politics. [...]

On Monday March 31 I gave at the Future of...

Future of the Internet in Bled

By Geert Lovink, April 3, 2008

On Monday March 31 I gave at the Future of the Internet conference, organized by the European Commission. As Slovenia is holding the EU presidency in this term, the event took place in Bled, the Northern part of country, on a picturesque lake in the Alp region. The conference hall was packed with 250 officials, [...]