Blogwatch: Geert Lovink
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
INC was founded by Geert Lovink, a renown media theorist in social critique of network- and ciber-culture. Lovink’s research homes on in the use of media tools and technologies to openly distribute ideas outside of the official channels. He is an internet activist and scholar particularly interested on Tactical Media, as means to achieve participation thus becoming part of the dominant media.
Lovink’s participatory discourse might be partially bounded to that of Jenkins, although each has a cultural perspective absolutely different. As Jenkins’, his view is sympathetic to the mass media, the digital media production tools are for liberation and not instruments for alienation. For Lovink our task as artist, developers, designers, and researchers is to tackle the dominant media in an open dialogue to the free circulation of ideas. For Jenkins that already happens in grass-roots media without the need of artists, designers and so on. Both see the Internet as the plateau that fulfils all the conditions for active media participation.
By the mid 1990s he co-founded the famous mailing list <nettime> a vast repository of discussions in media theory in different languages, most of the key figures in our field(s) are filed there.
