¿Quién hace la crítica de las redes? ¿Quién habla de las infraestructuras de la redes? Se pregunta Geert Lovink, uno de los teóricos del internet contemporáneos más puntuales. A diario, millones de usuarios actualizan sus timelines, actualizan fotos, documentan su bienestar o malestar y lo comparten en sus redes sociales. Somos usuarios tentados a no abandonar nunca estos espacios, aunque en el fondo reneguemos de la lógica absorbente de dichas redes. ¿Qué necesitamos para librar esta batalla con la imperante necesidad de actualizarnos o declararnos activistas en la red en épocas de flujo perpetuo ? Esa misma red que también implica lógicas de vigilancia, mercado y control. Este libro reúne una serie de ensayos telúricos que nos lleva a pensar en el trabajo, la economía, las redes organizadas, los algoritmos, la vigilancia y la urgente necesidad de construir redes sostenibles para el intercambio de ideas y que no sean no únicamente espacios marcados por los intereses de unos cuantos.
Culture of the Selfie is an in-depth art-historical overview of self-portraiture, using a set of theories from visual studies, narratology, media studies, psychotherapy, and political principles. Collecting information from various fields, juxtaposing them on the historical time-line of artworks, the book focuses on space in self-portraits, shared between the person self-portraying and the viewer. What is the missing information of the transparent relationship to the self and what kind of world appears behind each selfie? As the ‘world behind one’s back’ is gradually taking larger place in the visual field, the book dwells on a capacity of selfies to master reality, the inter-mediate way and, in a measure, oneself.
Ulus Baker (1960 – 2007) was a Turkish-Cypriot sociologist, philosopher, and public intellectual. He was born in Ankara, Turkey in 1960. He studied Sociology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, where he taught as a lecturer until 2004. Baker wrote prolifically in influential Turkish journals and made some of the first Turkish translations of various works of Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, and other contemporary political philosophers. His profuse and accessible work and the novelty of the issues he enthusiastically introduced to Turkish-speaking intellectual circles, earned him a widely spread positive reputation in early age. He died in 2007 in Istanbul.The text in this edition is edited from essays and notes Ulus Baker wrote between 1995 and 2002. In these essays, Baker criticizes the sociological research turning into an analysis of people’s opinions. He explores with an exciting clarity the notion of ‘opinion’ as a specific form of apprehension between knowledge and point of view, then looks into ‘social types’ as an analytical device deployed by early sociologists. He associates the form of ‘comprehension’ the ‘social types’ postulate with Spinoza’s notion of ‘affections’ (as a dynamic, non-linguistic form of the relation between entities). He finally discusses the possibilities of reintroducing this device for understanding our contemporary world through cinema and documentary filmmaking, by reinstating images in general as ‘affective thought processes’.Baker’s first extensive translation to English provides us with a much-needed intervention for re-imagining social thought and visual media, at a time when sociology tends to be reduced to an analysis of ‘big data’, and the pedagogical powers of the image are reduced to data visualization and infographics.
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