Dark Fiber; Tracking Critical Internet Culture

Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xi, [2], 382, [6] pages. Notes. Bibliography. This is one of the Electronic Culture, History, Theory, Practice series. Geert Lovink (born 1959, Amsterdam) is the founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, whose goals are to explore, document and feed the potential for socio-economical change of the new media field through events, publications and open dialogue. As theorist, activist and net critic, Lovink has made an effort in helping to shape the development of the web. Lovink is a Research Professor of Interactive Media at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam (HvA) and a Professor of Media Theory at the European Graduate School. From 2004-2013 he was an Associate Professor of New Media at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). Lovink earned his master's degree in political science at the University of Amsterdam, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne and has been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Queensland. In Dark Fiber, Lovink combines aesthetic and ethical concerns and issues of navigation and usability without ever losing sight of the cultural and economic agendas of those who control hardware, software, content, design, and delivery. He examines the unwarranted faith of the cyber-libertarians in the ability of market forces to create a decentralized, accessible communication system. He studies the inner dynamics of hackers' groups, Internet activists, and artists, seeking to understand the social laws of online life. Finally, he calls for the injection of political and economic competence into the community of freedom-loving cyber-citizens, to wrest the Internet from corporate and state control. The topics include the erosion of email, bandwidth for all, the rise and fall of dot-com mania, techno-mysticism, sustainable social networks, the fight for a public Internet time standard, the strategies of Internet activists, and collaborative text filtering. He stresses the importance of intercultural collaboration.