First, I'm a participant in the seminar. If there were to be another edition, I'd suggest to Mark and Esa, that they or we preface, with clear intro materials, given the intervening time.
Otherwise, I think this "book" is very misunderstood, at least, in the reviews I see above. In many ways, it is not a book in the traditional sense, unless you are thinking of Joyce. It is not meant to follow the conventions of academic writing, nor to be aimed at the academy, which it considers largely isolated from, and irrelevant to, our society and world.
In some ways, in 2012, we might take seriously, that it presaged what is being termed, somewhat sillily, "the end of the book."
This book is a very serious effort, to put our ideas and thoughts on media, communication and society, onto paper in brief form, that might be read by many, not in the narrow and often irrelevant halls of academia.
It is also a record of our Symposium, after all-- a Socratic exercise. The series of email letters which are interspersed, are not incidental, but artifacts of that event, to be read and interpreted if you choose-- an interpretive challenge, a mental challenge, a challenge in the Socratic method.
And as much of this book which is an anti-book, a challenge to the current practices of writing books, an exploration of alternative practices of writing, a book, which might excite Dialogue.
And of course, the email record between Esa and Mark and some of us, is but a subset, of the messages which went back and forth between the continents, among we students, padeia, intense Dialogues, the experiment in international education, our struggle to understand each other across distances.
One might well reflect, that Plato wrote the Dialogues, at a distance in time, from the actual conversations. That they are set, at Athen's port, the boundary point, of exchange between nations.
Otherwise, the materials in the anti-book, and how they are presented, are scattered, hypertextual, readable at any entry point, interspersed, non-linear and anti-linear. They present the complex materials we discussed, and the ideas of many authors, in a format that may be accessible to and engage, the many, not just the readers of academic philosophy. They are "queer;" they challenge the "straight" line, the tradition of linear, analytic interpretation.
This was done, in an effort to say something that might be relevant to the global conversation, mean something to actual people, to our lives, and quite in the face of the trivocracy of current academia. This book, does not aim to be yet another inaccessible, academic tract read by few. It does not argue, and does not want to argue. It invites, to a conversation.
It dares, to explore, to be a travelogue of the journey, rather than a pointless academic display of precision and wit and needless expertise. It is written from deep hope and love, of our world, in Hannah Arendt's sense.
Many of the academic "reviewers" here seem to have missed that, or to be responding with naive gut hostility. In opposition to them, I thus offer my recommendation-- and invitation-- to our Great Conversation.
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