[Commlist] New book - Hacked Transmissions: Technology and Connective Activism in Italy

The University of Minnesota Press is pleased to announce the publication 
of /Hacked Transmissions: Technology and Connective Activism/ in Italy 
by Alessandra Renzi

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/hacked-transmissions

/Hacked Transmissions/ is a pioneering exploration of how social 
movements change across cycles of struggle and alongside technology. 
Weaving a rich fabric of local and international social movements and 
media practices, politicized hacking, and independent cultural 
production, it takes as its entry point a multiyear ethnography of 
Telestreet, a network of pirate television channels in Italy that 
combined emerging technologies with the medium of television to 
challenge the media monopoly of tycoon-turned-prime minister Silvio 
Berlusconi.

Street televisions in Italy represented a unique experiment in combining 
old and new media to forge grassroots alliances, fight social isolation, 
and build more resilient communities. Alessandra Renzi digs for the 
roots of Telestreet in movements of the 1970s and the global activism of 
the 1990s to trace its transformations in the present work of one of the 
network’s more active nodes, insu^tv, in Naples. In so doing, she offers 
a comprehensive account of transnational media activism, with particular 
attention to the relations among groups and projects, their modes of 
social reproduction, the contexts giving rise to them, and the 
technology they adopt—from zines and radios to social media. /Hacked 
Transmissions/ is also a study in method, providing examples of 
co-research between activist researchers and social movements, and a 
theoretical framework that captures the complexities of grassroots 
politics and the agency of technology.

Providing a rare and timely glimpse into a key activist/media project of 
the twenty-first century, /Hacked Transmissions/ marks a vital 
contribution to debates in a range of fields, including media and 
communication studies, anthropology, science and technology studies, 
social movements studies, sociology, and cultural theory.


Reviews:

Arising out of the author’s own political engagement in Telestreet, a 
network of pirate TV channels aiming to challenge Berlusconi’s control 
over the Italian media, this book’s analysis of social movements in 
terms of how they change the composition of the neoliberal geopolitical 
landscape is an intriguing and enabling proposition. It boldly reclaims 
the studies of political activism, and of leftist political activity in 
particular, from narratives and feelings of loss, failure, and melancholia.

—Joanna Zylinska, Goldsmiths, University of London

With this deep dive into the creative collective spirit of early 
twenty-first-century media activists, Alessandra Renzi gives us the 
neglected histories of the activist internet while situating current 
corporate social media in a genealogy of radical grassroots DIY 
innovations. /Hacked Transmissions/ is an instant classic for social 
movement media studies.

—Jack Z. Bratich, author of /Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality 
and Popular Culture/

Alessandra Renzi's exquisite account draws on a decade of research and 
collaboration with Italian media activists and hackers to shake up and 
put to rest all too simplistic theories around social movements and 
media. /Hacked Transmissions/ is an intellectual tour de force, sure to 
hit the reader with delightful waves of methodological, theoretical, and 
political insights, all relevant across time, place, and case.

—Gabriella Coleman, author of /Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The 
Many Faces of Anonymous/
/
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