[Air-L] Book Announcement: Configuring the Networked Self

Julie Cohen jec at law.georgetown.edu
Sun Jan 8 12:04:16 PST 2012


[apologies for cross-posting]

I¹m delighted to announce the publication of Configuring the Networked Self:
Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice (Yale University Press,
http://www.amazon.com/Configuring-Networked-Self-Everyday-Practice/dp/030012
5437/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1324427962&sr=1-2.

Please see below for a short abstract and table of contents.

All best,
Julie

Julie E. Cohen
Professor of Law
Georgetown University Law Center


Abstract

    Configuring the Networked Self explores the relationships between
copyright, creativity, and culture, between surveillance, privacy, and
subjectivity, and between network architecture and social ordering, and
through those explorations develops a unified framework for conceptualizing
the social and cultural effects of legal and technical regimes that govern
information access and use. The book asks the sorts of questions with which
law traditionally has concerned itself (what regime of information rights is
just, and why), but it emphasizes a set of considerations that legal
thinking about those issues has tended to marginalize. It argues that legal
scholarship on the networked information society has gone astray by positing
simplistic models of individual behavior derived from the commitments of
liberal theory, rather than from reality. A wise regime of information law
and policy should focus, instead, on the ordinary rhythms and routines of
everyday practice. In particular, it should pay special attention to the
connections between everyday practice and play and to the ways in which
culture and subjectivity emerge from the interactions between the ordinary
and the unexpected. Finally, the book identifies a set of reform principles
for information law and policy that moves beyond ³access to knowledge² to
include two additional principles. A just regime of information law and
policy should guarantee an adequate level of operational transparency about
the ways that networked information processes and devices mediate access to
information and services. In addition it should promote regulatory and
technical architectures that are characterized by semantic discontinuity, in
order to create and preserve spaces within which the play of everyday
practice can move.


Contents
 
Acknowledgments

Part One. Locating the Networked Self
 1. Introduction: Imagining the Networked Information Society
 2. From the Virtual to the Ordinary: Networked Space, Networked Bodies, and
the Play of Everyday Practice

Part Two. Copyright and the Play of Culture
 3. Copyright, Creativity, and Cultural Progress
 4. Decentering Creativity

Part Three. Privacy and the Play of Subjectivity
 5. Privacy, Autonomy, and Information
 6. Reimagining Privacy

Part Four. Code, Control, and the Play of Material Practice
 7. ³Piracy,² ³Security,² and Architectures of Control
 8. Rethinking ³Unauthorized Access²

Part Five. Human Flourishing in a Networked World
 9. The Structural Conditions of Human Flourishing
 10. Conclusion: Putting Cultural Environmentalism into Practice

Notes
Bibliography
Index





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