Archive for May 2014

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[ecrea] new book The Leisure Commons: A Spatial History of Web 2.0

Wed May 21 21:10:48 GMT 2014




Hope all is good on your side! I want to share some good news with you (esp for those who are not on fb). My book, 'The Leisure Commons: A Spatial History of Web 2.0' has just been published by the Routledge Science, Technology & Society Series.
http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415887113/

Some of you might know this. I had the idea for this book way back in my New York days but decided not to pursue it as I think one dissertation was all I could handle :-) When I came to Holland, I was fortunate to win this two-year grant that gave me time and space to write this up. It has been tremendous fun working on this as it has taken me to such different disciplines and scarily, made me an expert on every possible type of park you can think of! So yeah, in case you saw me hanging out in the park during work, I swear it was for research :-)

So here's the blurb below.
About the book: There is much excitement about Web 2.0 as an unprecedented, novel, community-building space for experiencing, producing, and consuming leisure, particularly through social network sites. What is needed is a perspective that is invested in neither a utopian or dystopian posture but sees historical continuity to this cyberleisure geography. This book investigates the digital public sphere by drawing parallels to another leisure space that shares its rhetoric of being open, democratic, and free for all: the urban park. It makes the case that the history and politics of public parks as an urban commons provides fresh insight into contemporary debates on corporatization, democratization and privatization of the digital commons. This book takes the reader on a metaphorical journey through multiple forms of public parks such as Protest Parks, Walled Gardens, Corporate Parks, Fantasy Parks, and Global Parks, addressing issues such as virtual activism, online privacy/surveillance, digital labor, branding, and globalization of digital networks. Ranging from the 19th century British factory garden to Tokyo Disneyland, this book offers numerous spatial metaphors to bring to life aspects of new media spaces. Readers looking for an interdisciplinary, historical and spatial approach to staid Web 2.0 discourses will undoubtedly benefit from this text.

Indeed, at this point, it is insanely expensive but fortunately, the paperback comes out soon which is for the mere mortals :) For those who are interested in reviewing it, you can get a free copy from Routledge:
http://www.routledge.com/resources/complimentary_exam_copy_request/






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