A reminder and some more information about my upcoming lecture for Universiteit Utrecht’s Studium Generale. That is, September 7 – 20:00 – 21:30 Aula van het Academiegebouw – Universiteit Utrecht (admission is free of course).

The presentation will be on Obama’s successful presidential campaign. I will talk about the current debate on healthcare a bit as well but mostly discuss the use of social media (Facebook, email, Youtube etc) for political communication.

My talk will be the very first in this year’s Studium Generale series, which is kinda flattering. I very much look forward to it. There is plenty of information about the lecture series, called “Plug in – De belofte van de netwerkmaatschappij, van Obama tot Overvecht”. I added some more background information, so if you’re interested in this topic, take a look at their website. My presentation is titled: “Nieuwe media & politiek – Obama’s campagne. Tussen hoop en hype”. The lecture will be broadcasted online (live!) and will be recorded as well.

Studium Generale is meant to disseminate academic knowledge to a broader audience, so I’ll do my best to provide an accessible talk, not so much on strategies and specifics but more on the broader picture. If you are interested in a more business oriented analysis of the Obama08 campaign, take a look at the KREM Social Politics Workshop (8 september), but more on that later.

Even though book reading season might be over for many of us, Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games seems essential reading for those scholars interested in war & games. As blogged below, the book is available at Amazon or at the publisher’s homepage. For Dutch/Europeans, Bookdepository.co.uk, as always, has the best deal, 21.50 euro for the paperback (free shipping), I have good experiences with them.

There’s more official info at the publisher’s webpage. I contributed the third chapter. The table of contents is after the break.

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I am very humbled and proud to present “Wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos”. An article I co-authored with my professor José Van Dijck, it appeared in New Media & Society (vol 11, no. 5). It is an article (and an argument) I deeply care about, it took some time (two years) to get published but now it’s finally here. I think I am allowed to share the proofs. Here’s the abstract:

‘Collaborative culture’, ‘mass creativity’ and ‘co-creation’ appear to be contagious buzzwords that are rapidly infecting economic and cultural discourse on Web 2.0. Allegedly, peer production models will replace opaque, top-down business models, yielding to transparent, democratic structures where power is in the shared hands of responsible companies and skilled, qualified users. Manifestos such as Wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams, 2006) and ‘We-Think’ (Leadbeater, 2007) argue collective culture to be the basis for digital commerce. This article analyzes the assumptions behind this Web 2.0 newspeak and unravels how business gurus try to argue the universal benefits of a democratized and collectivist digital space. They implicitly endorse a notion of public collectivism that functions entirely inside commodity culture. The logic of Wikinomics and ‘We-Think’ urgently begs for deconstruction, especially since it is increasingly steering mainstream cultural theory on digital culture.

Joystick Soldiers: The Politics of Play in Military Video Games has got its own Amazon page, a groovy book cover and a new shipping date. The book will not be out this month (August), but probably October. What’s the book about?

Joystick Soldiers is the first anthology to examine the reciprocal relationship between militarism and video games. War has been an integral theme of the games industry since the invention of the first video game, Spacewar! in 1962. While war video games began as entertainment, military organizations soon saw their potential as combat simulation and recruitment tools. A profitable and popular relationship was established between the video game industry and the military, and continues today with video game franchises like America’s Army, which was developed by the U.S.Army as a public relations and recruitment tool.