New Book

Just got a copy of Graham Harman's Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (2012, Zero Books) because I promised to write a paper on Lovecraft and Deleuze that's due next Fall. Harman's argument is that Lovecraft's work has presented a particular body of inspiration to the Speculative Realist philosophers. So it will be interesting to see what Harman makes of Lovecraft. I will be doing other things with Lovecraft, but that's all well and good. I actually began to realize that I really liked Deleuze and Guattari when I starting finding all the Lovecraft references in Mille Plateau.

New FlowTV column on Google Glass

My third, and final, column for FlowTV is now online:
http://flowtv.org/2013/04/re-framing-google-glass/

It's a return to the discussion of Glass, but in particular I wanted to look at the narrative about Glass presented by their recent public relations video. It's not about the possibilities of Glass itself, but how these media texts seem to be emphasizing certain features over others.

New books

Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory

Rob Shields and Eric Vallee, Demystifying Deleuze: An Introductory Assemblage of Crucial Concepts

Stanislaw Lem (trans J. Zylinska) Summa Technologiae

Nikolas Rose and Joelle M Abi-Rached, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind

Ulrik Ekman (ed) Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing

Rich Ling, Taken for Grantedness: The Embedding of Mobile Communication Into Society [Just set this as one of the texts for my fall grad class in Comm and Tech]

Cara Wallis, Technomobility in China

I should give more information, like publishers, summaries, and such, but I ain't got time.

New Visualities, New Technologies

My book, co-edited with Hille Koskela at the University of Finland, is now out! New Visualities, New Technologies: The New Ecstasy of Communication. Ashgate.

http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409403579

Contents: Introduction: ecstatic assemblages of visuality, J. Macgregor Wise; Ecstatic updates: Facebook, identity and the fractal subject, Mark Nunes; Mapping Narbs, Ananda Mitra; Will the real digital girl please stand up?: examining the gap between policy dialogue and girls’ accounts of their digital existence, Jane Bailey and Valerie Steeves; Vision, inertia, and the mobile telephone: on the origins of control space and the spread of sociopolitical cybernetics, John Armitage; 'Right to the image’: images of dignity, representations of humiliation, Hille Koskela; Frames of discontent: social media, mobile intimacy, and the boundaries of media practice, Larissa Hjorth; Creativity on display? Visibility conflicts or the claim for opacity as ethical resource, Ursula Anna Frohne; Performative pictures: camera phones at the ready, Brooke A. Knight; Mobile snapshots: pictorial communication in the age of tertiary orality, Dong-Hoo Lee; Sex, spectatorship, and the ‘Neda’ video: a biopsy, Theresa M. Senft; Index.

Geek Cred

1984: Behind the Scenes

Interesting article in the Telegraph on the biographical connections in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

New books

Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance (2013, Polity)

Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Things (2012, Wiley)

McKenzie Wark, Telesthesia: Communication, Culture and Class (2012, Polity)