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(More customer reviews)For a title that uses a 'honeycomb' design as the cover motif, and which advertises itself as an "archaeology of animals and technology," the actual discussion of insectoid-technological relationships is quite thin on the ground. The forays into entomological research are particularly limited (the example of von Frisch's "dancing bees" is the only one I can remember Parikka discussing), and after reading a chapter or two you'll begin to realize that the author is just using a colorful and emotionally resonant insect metaphor to resurrect media theory tropes that are already familiar. That is to say, this is another one of "those" academic books wherein a sexy premise of hitherto unforeseen correspondences and connections is used to bait the reader into reading a catechism of radical thinkers' thoughts on tangentially related matters. As with other titles in that vein, the best thing that a non-academic reader can do with it is to just read it backwards: head directly to the index, look for unfamiliar names and concepts, check out the interesting things they have to say personally (most of the material in this book that I highlighted was from the author's sources, rather than Parikka himself), then track down their own material and spare yourself another tiring journey into the simultaneously baroque and sterile verbiage utilized here.It's not that Parikka has nothing interesting to discuss, and no valid points of his own to make (although, regarding the latter, the constant use of Deleuze-Guattari as a life preserver is too predictable for someone who has clearly absorbed a massive amount of written information.) Still, it would be better if this book was marketed and sold as a series of loosely connected essays bonded together by a wholly different thesis point- that would go some way towards rectifying it since, again, the discussions of animality and ethology seem like no more than ornamentation for broader discussions of digital-age phenomenology- put simply, they never convincingly become the driving engine of those discussions, even when Parikka closes chapters with conclusive self-referential paragraphs about what we learned.That last point brings me to another amusing quirk of the text- Parikka often bookends individual chapters with disclaimers about what he intends to discuss and with end-of-chapter de-briefings. It's done to a conspicuously greater degree than what I'm used to, and it leads me to believe that a.) he is not confident enough to let his writing "speak for itself" and b.) he is content with having the work appreciated by a solely academic audience, who would be the only ones requiring such textual formalities. I certainly had a laugh-out-loud moment when, well after the introductory phases of the book ended, phrases such as "my intent with this book is to...." appeared anew.Now, I hate to use this space to launch an attack on academic publishing in general, but so much of this book serves as an example of why this community continues to sever itself from a not insignificant reading public of self-educated individuals. There are fine specimens here of the academic conviction that saying something synonymous - 'translated' into field jargon - is akin to saying something radically new. On page 163, this tendency is taken to its logical conclusion and a statement taken from a secondary source is merely repeated outright: "the neighborhood of every boid was designed as a spherical zone of sensitivity [...] hence the boid was governed by a zone of sensitivity." You don't say! Other readers than myself may recoil at the re-packaging of easily observed, simply intuited facts like "people are social animals" as something that has revelatory consequences for "posthuman" thought. This insane project of over-complicating the universe needs to stop, especially since its "posthumanist" wing now claims to be allied with non-human life that seems pretty disinterested in finding other, more difficult ways to do things it already knows how to do. I think that Parikka will truly soar as a writer when he no longer feels compelled to lend this project his support.My final criticism, while it again applies to this book in particular, also applies to something that's becoming a depressing trend within university press-issued titles: is it really asking too much for endnotes sections to be reserved for citations and other ephemeral asides, rather than forcing the reader to continually shuttle back and forth between the endnote section and the main body of the text, both of which contain equally relevant information? I'm sorry, but when single endnotes begin to take up entire pages of a book, that I have to wonder if there wasn't some way to better integrate them into the main text. If anyone at University of Minnesota's editorial department reads this, please know that this annoying convention of academic publishing will prevent me from buying any books released by you in the future.
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Since the early nineteenth century, when entomologists first popularized the unique biological and behavioral characteristics of insects, technological innovators and theorists have proposed insects as templates for a wide range of technologies. In Insect Media, Jussi Parikka analyzes how insect forms of social organization-swarms, hives, webs, and distributed intelligence-have been used to structure modern media technologies and the network society, providing a radical new perspective on the interconnection of biology and technology.
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