Organization After Social Media

Organization after Social Media
Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter

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.

Bio: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).

Continue reading →