La lotteria a Babilonia
Il rapporto media-utenti-realtà nell'evoluzione delle teorie della comunicazione
di Luca Tateo

La communication research ha elaborato differenti modelli del rapporto tra media, utenti e società fino ad ipotizzare una società dei bites la cui realtà sono i messaggi stessi, e non gli esseri umani, le città o le nazioni. La smaterializzazione della realtà è un processo significativo, [...] in cui le entità materiali vengono progressivamente sostituite dal loro valore e infine dal simbolo del loro valore all'interno di un sistema di simboli, che sia esso economico, culturale o informatico. Questo studio ripercorre brevemente la storia delle teorie sulla comunicazione fino a raggiungere il periodo dello sviluppo delle tecnologie multimediali e telematiche che hanno completamente rivoluzionato le dinamiche di comunicazione ed il concetto stesso di realtà, rendendo obsoleti i modelli tradizionali.

The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique
by Brian Holmes

The flexible personality represents a contemporary form of governmentality, an internalized and culturalized pattern of "soft" coercion, which nonetheless can be directly correlated to the hard data of labor conditions, bureaucratic and police practices, border regimes and military interventions. [...] The study of coercive patterns, contributing to the deliberately exaggerated figure of an ideal type, is one way that academic knowledge production can contribute to the rising wave of democratic dissent. In particular, the treatment of "immaterial" or "aesthetic" production stands to gain from this renewal of a radically negative critique. [...] The flexible personality is not a destiny. And despite the ideologies of resignation, despite the dense realities of governmental structures in our control societies, nothing prevents the sophisticated forms of critical knowledge [...] from connecting directly with the new and also complex, highly sophisticated forms of dissent appearing on the streets. In the process, "artistic critique" can again rejoin the refusal of exploitation.

The Napsterisation of Everything
by Richard Barbrook

Unlike earlier forms of youthful rebellion, peer-to-peer computing is a direct threat to the economics of the music industry. Despite the rapid changes in musical tastes over the decades, the fundamentals of its business structure have remained the same. Musicians are contracted to make recordings. Music is sold on bits of plastic to consumers. Copyright laws ensure that no one can distribute recordings without paying their owners. Everyone supposedly benefits from this arrangement. Fans are offered a wide choice of many different types of music. Musicians are able to earn a living - and a few can become seriously rich. Small companies can survive by selling niche styles of music. Large corporations can own profitable music companies as part of their multi-media empires. Having recuperated successive cultural revolutions, this business structure appeared to be immutable. It took the arrival of P2P to prove otherwise.

Privacy and freedom of choice
by Ana Viseu

The general discourse over technology usage is one of freedom of choice. You chose to adopt or not to adopt a technology, to use or not to use it. This argument allows for only two explanations: One, you choose not to use it because you don't like/want it (e.g., it poses too many risks, takes too much time, etc); or, second, you choose to use it because you like/want it (i.e., you think it is helpful, saves time, etc). In both cases it is assumed that the individual is making a clear and aware choice about the usage and characteristics of a technology. [...] This "freedom of choice" discourse is deceiving. It assumes at least three things that cannot be taken for granted. First that one is indeed free to choose; second, that one is aware of the dangers; and third, that the context in which one chooses will remain stable over time.

Essay About History and Futurism of the net.art Story
by Dunja Kukovec

Net.art is not the only art on the World Wide Web and is actually just a tiny part of cyberspace. Art history would describe it as a movement, while other artistic approaches still wait for their history to be written. Once art history is logically extended into the history of visual concepts - a general history of visualised concepts, net.art 1994-1998 will become part of the visual heritage of the Internet. And an embodiment of the concept of art as proposed by A.C. Danto in 1967. First art on the Internet - the net.art - is just like the art one can see in galleries, but obeying the rules of cyberspace, instead. One has to be familiar with the life and the ways of cyberspace to interpret it correctly and properly understand it. At this point one should ask perhaps how net.art changed art in the material world. And if it actually did, how exactly did it change? Were video art and painting affected? One thing we can be sure of is that net.art has offered a strong impulse for the shifting of our perception of other media and the world.