My chapter outline (attached)

have now had a look at your chapter overview. In this overview format it seems to make perfect sense. a lot will hinge on chapter 3 I guess, "investigating info capitalism". I am very curious how you construct the theoretical framework for chapter 3, not at least because in this area we have quite a bit of overlap. I have a chapter about media art in the 1980s and 1990s, when the term became used and the genre institutionalised itself. In shorthand, what I need to show is that Information capitalism produced both elements of base and superstructure which gave legitimacy to the claim that interactive digital art was the highest or best possible artistic expression of that age because it used the most advanced material, according to the gurus of digital art. then I need to show why that is wrong and why that motivated me to do the waves exhibition. when I wrote that chapter as part of my long transfer paper, I became aware of two things, first, that I feel quite safe in my intuitive analysis, but second, that I need to find much more literature to underpin my analysis. otherwise I might look like a lone voice who is complaining that nobody understands him;-)

Also read the notes of your supervisor, confirms the good impression, and feel flattered that you appear to have passed on some of my comments to which he responded.

after having done the literature review I now need to do the real literature review, thus, really fixing the grid of those publications which support the backbone of my argumentation. don't know what you found but really good critiques of information capitalism are relatively thinly spread - too much cultural theory.

for me the Marx influence is not so much a specific theory or theoretic content in Marx' work, but Marx more as a tool or methodology... of course there are also specific passages in Marx' work which are relevant for my thesis, but what is the most important part is more basic: that the world constantly re-produces itself and that the ideas that people have are strongly influenced by the world they live in. I don't think that the base determines the superstructure, but that it has a very strong influence - whereby of course the duality of base and superstructure is also problematic.

this duality is only sort of a verbal crutch for saying there is the realm of the political economy, the political organisation of the economic life, and there is the world of culture and intellectual production. somehow influenced by internet layers i see base and superstructure much more in a layered model, and not just two categorically separated realms. in that respect Latour was helpful, as he also uses the network to overcome the subject-object dichotomy. yet apart from some moments of genius i also find Latour not very pleasant to read, he is always so excited by his own ideas, so talkative, so ...

maybe i should develop my layers model more as i have not described it very clearly and stopped trying to as I ran into so many problems when trying to think it through.

yet back to the key point: a materialist methodology means not just to fight cultural theory with another cultural theory, but show how those theories came into being by people conditioned to some degree to think like that. ever since the late 1960s gurus and futurologists have been trying to convince us that information society will be the next big epoch, a third wave of industrialisation. my literature research now turns increasingly towards economic and historic fact finding missions, things such as the history of the transistor or the microchip, as well as the notion of Post-Fordism, for example: how did the structure in the industry in leading countries really change? what was the level of outsourcing of manufacturing? how did the class composition change? in which way was that maybe connected to the rise of the financial markets? etc.

maybe in the end i will have to make intersecting timelines with political and economic events and cultural theory books written.

to make a long story short, maybe we can exchange some tips on books to read in this area, put some of these into biblio and keep also posting notes.

I am almost through Hobsbawm's Age of extremes, a history of the 20th century and will write up notes soon. I have also been thinking how to do that best - linking the biblio entries with the excerpted notes, yet have not come to a satisfying result, also because i need to reduce a bit the time spent on tnl feature development and crank up the research effort

yet what have i done instead of getting on with the hobsbawm or focault, i have spent the morning speed reading mayombe, an angolan novel about the liberation struggle by an author called pepetela. heart breaking and sometimes very well written ...