Felix Stalder

media researcher , Austria

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Abstract

I'm am currently dividing my time between Vienna and Toronto, between working as an independent media researcher and as a managing partner for Openflows Networks Ltd., which I co-founded with Jesse Hirsh in 2000.
Here you find mainly material relating to media research, but the fact that this site is hosted by Openflows indicates that the latter is still a vital concern, as you can see from looking around the Openflows website as a whole.

But back to media research. In the most general terms, I'm interested in how new technologies contribute to the changing cultural, social, political and economic dynamics of the present. By new technologies I mean primarily the Internet, this conglomerate of machines and people, held together by standards and social practices.
I've been researching and publishing in this area for the last 8 years, first as part of doing a Ph.D. at the University of Toronto (finished in 2001), then as a post-doc with the Surveillance Project, a transdisciplinary research initiative based in the Department of Sociology,Queen's University in Kingston, ON, Canada (completed in 2002).
Of particular interest are three areas, that I see as interrelated but for the time being treat separately. Open Source as social principle; privacy and identity; and media as environments, or, as Manuel Castells put it, the "Space of Flows."
Some of these themes feature prominently in a conference I've been heavily involved in organizing: "OpenCultures: Free Flows of Information and the Politics of the Commons" (Vienna, June 5&6, 2003)
Also keeping me busy is the nettime mailing list which I have been co-moderating for the last couple of years.

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