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1 Taking Things Apart to Convene Micropublics
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Micropublics, Convene |
| Abstract | Thinking through digital media highlights collaborative and participatory aspects of media practice to convene critical micropublics, yet it also highlights the potential for control and surveillance. One of the primary objectives of the hacker ethos of “taking things apart” is to understand the invisible and inaudible aspects of digital media as well as the larger networks that shape social interactions and productions of knowledge along with state and corporate structures that seek to contain them. Hacking and pirating draw upon Marxist theories about the materiality of media as well as the political economies of its production, circulation, and meaning. Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, for example, theorized photographic and cinematographic possibilities like the close-up and slow motion that could reveal what the human eye, trained by conventions of everyday life, overlooks. Benjamin hoped that “the work of art” would counter the rise of fascism; Kracauer believed film could bring about the “redemption of physical reality.”1 Hacking and prirating offer comparable strategies to make visible—in this case, propiatary locks on creativy and innovation. Transnational corporations, such as Apple, market and promote a discourse of do-it-yourself (DIY) that suggests that anyone and everyone can control the means of both production and distribution. These economies of desire have changed little since the era of classical cinema when Benjamin and Kracauer wrote with the surplus meaning of fan magazines that promised to reveal secrets behind Hollywood’s invisible style. At the same time, these corporations enforce copyright in ways that can stifle creativity and innovation. Although maligned in commercial media, especially Hollywood films, hacking and pirating engage democratic potentials of digital media and networks. Steven Levy defines a hacker ethic as (1) an unlimited and total access to computers with a imperative of “taking things apart, seeing |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://page-one.springer.com/pdf/preview/10.1057/9781137433633_2 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
