Michael Strangelove
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| Michael Strangelove | |
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| Born | 1962 |
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| Occupation | Writer, lecturer (University of Ottawa) |
| Website www.strangelove.com |
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Michael Strangelove is a lecturer in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa and author of The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement (University of Toronto Press, 2005), which was nominated for a Governor General's Award for English non-fiction in 2006. The book has been described as a "provocative and incisive corrective to contemporary cultural theory."[1]
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[edit] A Pioneer in Internet-Publishing
In the early 1990’s Strangelove used Listserv, FTP, and Gopher to archive and disseminate articles, bibliographies, and dissertations. One of Strangelove's Internet-based publications was The Religious Studies Publications Journal - CONTENTS[2] (ISSN 1188-5734) which published one of the first online dissertations.[3]
In 1991 Michael Strangelove and Diane Kovacs coauthored The Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists (Association of Research Libraries). This was the first print directory to document scholarly Internet resources.[4]
In the Spring of 1993 Strangelove launched The Internet Business Journal (IBJ), a newsstand magazine about the commercialization of the Internet. Its first issue was published a year before the World Wide Web made its debut. IBJ ran for three years, May 1993 to September 1996. [5]
In April 1993 Business Week told its readers about IBJ's "futuristic subject matter."[6]
Contributors to IBJ included Dr. Vinton Cerf, Christopher Locke, Jim Carroll, Dr. Susan Hallam, Michel Bauwens, Dr. Norman Coombs, Ann Okerson, Kevin Savetz, Dr. Hawley Black, Martha Siegel, Laurence Canter, and Dr. Leslie Regan Shade.[citation needed]
In 1994 Strangelove self-published the first book to describe Internet advertising techniques, How to Advertise on the Internet. [7]
In 1998 Strangelove's entire Ph.D., dissertation, Redefining the Limits to Thought within Media Culture: Collective Memory, Cyberspace and the Subversion of Mass Media, was made freely available on the Internet at www.strangelove.com, at a time when only a handful of doctoral dissertations were freely available on the Web.[citation needed]
[edit] Concepts
- Electric Gaia
Writing in the Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine (1994) Strangelove invoked the concept of electric Gaia[8] as a metaphor to explain the extension of human intelligence across the globe via the Internet,
"Confronted with the inaccessibility of our physical frontiers, my generation has turned inward and discovered two new immanent and infinite frontiers. These new frontiers of the next millennium are the uncensored, distributed self, and cyberspace -- the location of the virtual self/community -- Electric Gaia."[9]
In a posting to the Humanist listserv in 1993 Strangelove described the concept of electric Gaia in the following terms:
'[electric Gaia is] the gradual convergence of two separate systems and conceptual worlds. These "systems" are Gaia, as understood in popular terms as a self-regulating biosphere (and, by extension, universe); and the Net (or Matrix), the emerging global "virtual community" of computer networks, from BBSs to Free-Nets, to the Internet itself. As these conceptual worlds gain ground and combine in the popular imagination, will we witness the emergence of what I have named "Electric Gaia" - the technologically-facilitated growth of a new form of global consciousness or self/group identity that could be said, in a metaphorical sense, to give consciousness to Gaia itself.[10]
Strangelove's subsequent book, The Empire of Mind explored the implications of an emergent electric Gaia that fostered the development of the uncensored self.[11]
[edit] Books authored
- 1991 - Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists, 1 Edition (American Association of Research Libraries), coauthored with and Diane Kovacs.
- 1992 - Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists, 2 Edition (American Association of Research Libraries), coauthored with and Diane Kovacs.
- 1993 - Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists, 3 Edition (American Association of Research Libraries), coauthored with and Diane Kovacs.
- 1994 - How to Advertise on the Internet (Strangelove Press), coauthored with Aneurin Bosley.
- 2005 - The Empire of Mind: Digital Piracy and the Anti-Capitalist Movement (University of Toronto Press).
[edit] References
- ^ Hope For Networked Society, Review by Michael Truscello, Canadian Literature
- ^ The initial board of advisors for The Religious Studies Publications Journal - CONTENTS included a number of pioneers in early Internet publishing: Ann Okerson, Peter Scott, Jean-Claude Guédon, Sandra Woolfrey, David J. Reimer, Michael Neuman, Gord Nickerson, Larry Hurtado, Jim Marchand, Robert Kraft, William Adler, Philip R. Davies, James J. O'Donnell, Robin Cover. See 'Teaching and Learning via the Network,' Coalition for Networked Information.
- ^ Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 6, No. 0538. Thursday, 18 Feb 1993. This online posting documents the announcement of the online publication of Lester J. Ness' doctoral dissertation, Astrology and Judiasm in Late Antiquity (Miami University, 1990).
- ^ Ann Okerson, 'Are We There Yet? Online E-Resources Ten Years After,' Library Trends, Vol. 48, No. 4, Spring 2000, pp. 671-693. 'In 1991, the first-ever directory of electronic journals was published by the Association of Research Libraries in Washington, DC, building on the earlier work of Michael Strangelove of the University of Ottawa and Diane Kovacs of Kent State University. The Directory belonged to its time in that it covered both journals and scholarly network discussion lists, and it continues irregular publication to this day under AlU’s aegis. When it appeared in July 1991, the slim desktop-published volume of that first edition comprised twenty-seven electronic magazines and journals.'
- ^ Mary J. Cronin, Doing More Business on the Internet, 1st Edition, (New York: Wiley, 1994), 246.
- ^ How to Get a Handle on Internet, SGML NEWSWIRE
- ^ Marketing and the Internet, Thesis by Michelle Lynn Butler, The University of Texas at Austin, 1995
- ^ James W. Marchand, 'The Computer in the Humanities, Friend or Foe?' Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 30, No. 2, Special Issue: Distinguished Humanities Lectures II (Summer, 1996), pp. 157-171.
- ^ Strangelove 'The Internet, Electric Gaia and the Rise of the Uncensored Self,' Computer-Mediated Communication Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 5, 1 September 1994, 11.
- ^ Strangelove, Electric Gaia? Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 6, No. 0578, 12 Mar 1993.
- ^ Strangelove, Electric Gaia? Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 6, No. 0578, 12 Mar 1993. Here Strangelove also wrote of electric Gaia in terms of 'the possibility of an existential schizophrenia, unique to the individual who participates in Electric Gaia, that might arise in light of two radically different experiences of time/space and the "other".'
