This book, edited by Christiane Paul, is a veritable tome in the positive sense, a book of more than 600 pages which will define media art, digital art for some time to come. It assembles a collection of the best authors on the subject matter, in well structured chapters. Unfortunately I could not find a blurb online, so I wrote a short text describing just my contribution.

Contains my article: Shockwaves in the New World Order of Information and Communication. In this text, I start with a reflection of the new geopolitical order created by the rise of telecommunications media, networks and satellites during the 1970s, which led to the McBride Report of UNESCO, first official document to express the idea of the need for communicatrions justice between rich and poor. Starting from such a framework of the political economy of information, I first discuss emancipatory video work of the 1970s; from there I move on to the countercultural free media scene of the 1980s, squatter pirate radios in Amsterdam and television art by Rabotnik TV, Ponton and alike. I then cast a critical look at the discourse created by the tactical media festivals Next Five Minutes, and discuss the emergence of a new global networked civil society which galvanized around support for the Zapatistas in the Chiapas context, and went on to create new froms of networked protest adequate to the new political subject of the multitudes. The last subchapter engages with the combination of the discourse on the digital commons and new media ecologies of the 2000s. 

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