Click Read More for the Politics Essay from the upcoming Networked Publics book and... leave your comments!

curated by Steve Anderson, Merlyna Lim, Marc Tuters

Americans, so the argument goes, are largely disaffected from their political system, numbed by multi-million dollar election campaigns, bewildered by statistics and ultimately apathetic and ineffectual when it comes to direct political action. At the same time, recent years have witnessed the rise of a participatory culture that is enabled and promoted by computer networks, remix tactics and growing resistance to the war in Iraq. As media consumers increasingly acquire the tools and skills necessary to act as producers and distributors of their own work, an expanded range of voices has begun to contribute to a widely disseminated sphere of networked political discourse. The Political Remix program highlights a variety of these productions, each of which defies some aspect of the conventional wisdom regarding the fundamentally apolitical nature of postmodern culture. At stake in this investigation is an emergent understanding of the ways media practitioners are enacting new forms of networked community and political discourse that is specific to a participatory, recombinant, DIY authoring mode.

Saskia Sassen spoke to the Networked Publics Group at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California on on March 23, 2006

Video from the lecture is available here
Video for Apple Video iPod only is here (right click on the link, then download it or save to disk)
Audio of the lecture is available here

My article entitled "Cyber-Urban Activism and Political Change in Indonesia" has just been published in Re:Activism issue of the Eastbound. Eastbound, a peer reviewed journal published in print and online, aims to create an international platform for Western and Eastern European researchers engaged in the multidisciplinary field of media and cultural studies. It features articles, reviews and interviews dealing with social and political implications of the rise of entertainment media and mediated popular culture, the appearance of global media players, and the spread of new forms of politics and information technologies.

The Re:Activism issue is actually a selection of papers followed up from Re:Activism conference held last year in Budapest.

My own article deals with the politics of space and spatiality of politics by looking at the interaction between cyberactivism and urban activism and how cyber-networks are extended to social networks in urban setting.

If you're interested to download my article or the whole issue, just go online. All articles are published under creative-commons license.

I've posted some news at my research blog about how the US government is using the highly centralized nature of world telecommunications for eavesdropping. Read more here.

During my residency at the Annenberg Center for Communication (ACC) I wish to do comparative research on the Internet and political networks of dissent.

The New York Times carries an an article on how repressive regimes such as the military-run state of Myanmar use off-the-shelf technology from Sunnyvale, California based Fortinet to filter out dissenting Internet content.

In the mid-1990s, the growth of the Internet revitalized the democratic imagination. Within a few years, however, theorists and advocates of digital democracy exhibited a tendency to view civic volunteers, amateur participants, and populist majorities as uninformed, impulsive, and materialistic. Even progressive promoters of digital democracy demonstrated distrust for the demos.