Timothy Jordan, “Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society” (Pluto Press, 2015)

Struggles over information in the digital era are central to Tim Jordan‘s new book, Information Politics: Liberation and Exploitation in the Digital Society (Pluto Press, 2015). The book aims to connect a critical theoretical reading of the idea of information with the architectures and practices surrounding information. The text begins by setting out how information is not separated from contemporary struggles over liberation and exploitation and points towards the principles of information politics that guide the reader through an engagement with contemporary theories, including the work of Haraway and Deleuze. These principles then inform theories of networks, recursion and the affordances of technologies that are used, in turn, to account for the platforms and battlegrounds of informational politics. The book does not offer up information as a new master discourse for political struggles, but rather shows, through examples including Facebook, the ICloud, the iPad, online gaming, and hacktivism, how information can be connected to, and can shape, other areas of social contestation. The text will be of interest to anyone using the internet, in particular those concerned with who is control of that space and how it might be reimagined.

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