Evil Media develops a philosophy of media power that extends theconcept of media beyond its tried and trusted use in the games of meaning, symbolism, and truth. Itaddresses the gray zones in which media exist as corporate work systems, algorithms and datastructures, twenty-first century self-improvement manuals, and pharmaceutical techniques.Evil Media invites the reader to explore and understand the abstractinfrastructure of the present day. From search engines to flirting strategies, from the value ofinstitutional stupidity to the malicious minutiae of databases, this book shows how the devil is inthe details.
The title takes the imperative "Don't be evil" and asks,what would be done any differently in contemporary computational and networked media were that maximreversed.
Media here are about much more and much less than symbols, stories,information, or communication: media do things. They incite and provoke, twist and bend, leak andmanage. In a series of provocative stratagems designed to be used, Evil Mediasets its reader an ethical challenge: either remain a transparent intermediary in thenetworks and chains of communicative power or become oneself an active, transformativemedium.
