Søren Pold takes up the task to deconstruct the present cultural moment when the effects and ways of operating of social systems, as discussed by Johanna Drucker in her recent book, are becoming central interfaces to a broad range of lived reality. Pold’s offers a valuable effort at understanding the complex mechanisms of production of such systems via investigation of rhetorical and software aspects of networked media. With the focus on artistic research installation, The Oracle of Selphie by Jakob Fredslund and Malthe Stauning Erslev in collaboration with Pold and coupled with his own installation platform The Poetry Machine, Pold interrogates to what extent Drucker’s arguments allows for a critical approach to reading patterns in social media. Doing so, he simultaneously offers models of distracted reading grounded in the propositions by Michel de Certeau, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Olga Goriunova, demonstrating that “lurking” and other forms of inattentive reading can be exploited and turned into profit in the age of the platform capitalism. Such an observation calls for further research that would better grasp the nature of networked reading practices enabled (and more often forced) by our contemporary social media platforms.

A post-humanist critique of Rockwell and Berendt's all too Humanist essay, in the vein of Donna Haraway’s “Keeping with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene” (2016) and Patricia MacCormack’s “Posthuman Ethics” (2012).

Gregor Baszak parses Nagle's celebrated, and "overdue" reconsideration of the internet, and social media in particular as a battlefield for politics.

If you're under the impression that Americans are wealthy, check out the capital city of Latvia.

David Nobes on the World Summit on the Information Society and the failure of some of its visionaries to see beyond tame and regimented applications of the Internet.

Dave Ciccoricco returns to Stuart Moulthrop, considers Operation Enduring Freedom (2003) in light of Operation Desert Storm (1991), and consults the annals of World War II for a likely source of "Victory Garden," the title of Moulthrop's 1991 network fiction on the Gulf War.

Tim Keane reviews Genet's republished Prisoner of Love, a 'mirror-memoir' in which Genet sees Palestine from the inside in an attempt to see himself from the outside.

In the triad of Verso pamphlets on 9/11, Nick Spencer sees a convergence of postmodern critique (against the capitalist culture of postmodernity).

Sue Im-Lee reviews Reciting America by Christopher Douglas.

Claire Rasmussen on geography and the social theory of Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Mike Davis, and Edward Soja.

Steffen Hantke on Tom LeClair's and Richard Powers's novelistic imaginations of terror.

Linda Brigham sees Zygmunt Bauman's Globalization: The Human Consequences as a provocative introduction to our current environmental and economic predicament.

Perloff comes back with an alternative line of 'evolution' from the modern epic - one leading to language poetry, rather than the magical realist novel.

Franco Moretti responds to the review of his Modern Epic by Marjorie Perloff.

Vladislava Gordic writes from Novi Sad to a friend in London (1998).

A media parable by Novica Milic.

Florin Popescu introduces Western readers to a national literature whose modern humor and archaic spirituality affront postmodern sensibilities

Ivan Callus skims the surface of Pavic's print hypertext.

The Internet Nation thread, which the editors hope to develop substantially in the coming years, was introduced in the winter of 98/99, following a trip to Novi Sad by ebr editor Joseph Tabbi a few months before that city would be bombed by NATO troups.

Poet Nina Zivancevic translates and comments on poetry by the founder of Modernism in Yugoslav literature