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Hello,<br>
Davin kindly mentioned my book in a post this week and Trebor has asked
me to follow up with an introduction, which I am happy to provide. I've
been lurking on this list for some time now and have learned a great
deal from the conversations in the last few months in particular. After
the IPL conference, I was particularly struck by the discussion of
Ayhan Aytes's paper on Mechanical Turk and decided to invite him up the
coast to UC Santa Barbara to present his research to a social media
seminar I am teaching this term:
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="http://engl147.ning.com/page/schedule-1"><http://engl147.ning.com/page/schedule-1></a>. So I've been
benefiting from the list and it seems time to seed. <br>
<br>
My book, <i>Tactical Media</i>, emerges in part from my long-term
interest in disciplinary formations. Tactical media is often regarded
in an academic context as a movement and practice that emerged and then
expired in the 1990s, a discursive appraisal that seemed to me
contravened by the ongoing political investment in tactics by the
artists themselves. At the same time, I thought that claims made for
the efficacy of tactical media were too large, the rhetoric too
overblown, so one of the things I was interested in doing was using
Paolo Virno to think through issues of technique and thereby recoup
what I considered to be a more legitimate claim for the political
content of these practices and individual works. My guiding questions
were these: Are there successful protests in a networked or
computational
environment that have methodologies, tactics, and techniques
structurally different from those reliant on print and televisual
media? Are these models traditional but just made more efficient and
ubiquitous through, for example, DDoS scripts? My conclusion was that
tactical media pursues a micropolitics of disruption and a mode of
immanent critique within the field of cultural production. <br>
<br>
More information on the press website:<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/R/raley_tactical.html">http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/R/raley_tactical.html</a><br>
<br>
---------------------------<br>
Rita Raley<br>
Literature.Culture.Media Center<br>
Department of English<br>
University of California, Santa Barbara<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://lcm.english.ucsb.edu/">http://lcm.english.ucsb.edu/</a><br>
<br>
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