Citizen Marketers – When People are the Message, by by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba
(From the Inside Flap)
The woman sitting next to you at Starbucks focused intently on her laptop may just be determining the next big thing.
In coffee houses, offices, homes, dorm rooms, and airport lounges around the world, millions of people use laptops and cell phones to become today’s new publishers and broadcasters. Armed with only a broadband connection, these regular citizens are exercising enormous influence on culture and what we buy.
Who are they? What motivates them? In their provocative new book, Citizen Marketers, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba explore the ramifications of today’s burgeoning social media. As everyday people increasingly create content on behalf of companies, brands, or products—to which they have no official connection—they are turning traditional notions of media upside down. Collaborating with others just like themselves, they are forming ever-growing communities of enthusiasts and evangelists using videos, photos, songs, and animations, as well as the “user-generated media” of blogs, online bulletin boards, and podcasts. From the rough to the sophisticated, their creations are influencing companies’ customer relationships, product design, and marketing campaigns—whether the companies participate willingly or not.
Whether freeing Fiona Apple, building buzz for Snakes on a Plane, or denouncing Dell Hell, citizen marketers are democratizing traditional notions of communication and marketing, even entire business models. Citizen Marketers examines some of the early winners and losers in this new culture of business, as well as some of its most noted constituents.

Digital Formations: IT and New Architectures in the Global Realm, Edited by Robert Latham and Saskia Sassen
(Via P2P Panarchy Guy Paul B. Hartzog)
Computer-centered networks and technologies are reshaping social relations and constituting new social domains on a global scale, from virtually borderless electronic markets and Internet-based large-scale conversations to worldwide open source software development communities, transnational corporate production systems, and the global knowledge-arenas associated with NGO networks. This book explores how such “digital formations” emerge from the ever-changing intersection of computer-centered technologies and the broad range of social contexts that underlie much of what happens in cyberspace.

Networked Politics: rethinking political organisation in an age of movements and networks, by Hilary Wainwright, Oscar Reyes, Marco Berlinguer, Fiona Dove, Mayo Fuster I Morrell and Joan Subirats (eds)
(Abstract from the Transnational Institute)
Networked Politics is the product of a collaborative research process for rethinking political organisation in an age of movements and networks. In a world where the traditional institutions of democratic control have been weakened by an unconstrained global market and superpower military ambitions, it uncovers diverse forms of resistance with the potential to create new institutions for social change. The authors set out the principles upon which such transformations should be based, and the challenges that stand in the way of their realisation.
The discussion is then pursued along four interrelated lines of inquiry. These examine social movements, including their development of new forms of knowledge and organisation; progressive political parties, and attempts to bring about transformative forms of political respresentation; the dangers and opportunities facing the development of political institutions in a network society; and the potential of new techno-political tools for facilitating and reconceiving political organisation. A series of case studies are also offered, drawing critical lessons from the experience of the German Green Party; the 2006 French mobilisation against the controversial CPE employment law; and an extended discussion on ‘open source as a metaphor for new institutions’.

Download the reader as a single file networkedpolitics.pdf (7650 Kb) or by chapters (below). Download the reader as a single file (7650 Kb)

Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day, by Gina Trapani
(From Steve Rubin’s MicroPersuasion)
Lifehacker is divided into several chapters that address a specific topic, such as freeing mental RAM, firewalling your attention, taking your data to go and more. Each chapter features a series of hacks.
Some of Gina’s hacks – like using a command to track your to-do’s in a text file – are above what most people will need. However, others, like working with virtual desktops (Windows and Mac) are outstanding and game changers. The book is cross platform, covering hacks for Windows and Mac. I run both operating systems so I loved how the hacks addresses everyone. It’s really handy for anyone who uses a computer to enhance their work or personal lives.
Believe it or not, I also found it handy to have Lifehacker in book form, even though pretty much the entire content of the tome can be accessed online for nada. Pick up a copy today. Your life will thank you.

Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture, by Michael Thomas Joyce
(Via Eastgate: Serious Hypertext)
Following on his influential collection of essays, Of Two Minds, Michael Joyce’s Othermindedness is suffused by Joyce’s lyrical intensity and intellectual depth. This challenging volume contains Joyce’s latest arguments on hypertext, MOOs, Web literature, and other manifestations of network culture.
In addition to much new material, Othermindedness collects Joyce’s indispensible essay, “Nonce upon Some Times: Rereading Hypertext Fiction” — a previously hard-to-find study that is one of the foundations for the study of hypertext patterns. Other chapters include:

• MOO or Mistakenness
• Neyond Next before You Once Again: Repossessing and Renewing Electronic Culture
• On Boundfulness: The Space of Hypertext Bodies
• Paris Again or Prague: Who Will Save Lit from Com?
• Portrait of the Artist as a Search Engine Entity

Michael Joyce is the author of afternoon, a story, the classic (and best-selling) hypertext fiction that remains “the most widely read, quoted, and critiqued of all hypertext narratives” (New York Times Book Review).

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