Exploring the politics of networks through and beyond social media

Organized networks are an alternative to the social media logic of weak links and their secretive economy of data mining. They put an end to freestyle friends, seeking forms of empowerment beyond the brief moment of joyful networking. This speculative manual calls for nothing less than social technologies based on enduring time. Analyzing contemporary practices of organization through networks as new institutional forms, organized networks provide an alternative to political parties, trade unions, NGOs, and traditional social movements. Dominant social media deliver remarkably little to advance decision-making within digital communication infrastructures. The world cries for action, not likes.

Organization after Social Media explores a range of social settings from arts and design, cultural politics, visual culture and creative industries, disorientated education and the crisis of pedagogy to media theory and activism. Lovink and Rossiter devise strategies of commitment to help claw ourselves out of the toxic morass of platform suffocation.

Organization after Social Media by Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter

PDF available freely online: http://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/organizationaftersocialmedia-web.pdf.

Ordering Information: Available direct from Minor Compositions now for the special price of £10: http://www.minorcompositions.info/?page_id=16.

Book launch on September 17, 2018 5 PM, Spui 25, Amsterdam.

Official release to the book trade in Winter 2018.

182 pages, 5.5 x 8.5, UK: £16 / US: $24 — ISBN 978-1-57027-338-4

Released by Minor Compositions, Colchester / Brooklyn / Port Watson

Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and the revolutions of everyday life. Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia

www.minorcompositions.info | minorcompositions@gmail.com

Geert Lovink is a media activist and theorist, internet critic and author of Uncanny Networks (2001), Dark Fiber (2002), My First Recession (2003), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012) and Social Media Abyss (2016). He is the founder of the Institute of Network Cultures at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) and teaches at the European Graduate School in Saas Fee/Malta.

Ned Rossiter is Professor of Communication in the Institute for Culture and Society with a joint appointment in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University. He is the author of Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions (2006) and Software, Infrastructure, Labor: A Media Theory of Logistical Nightmares (2016).