"If Ballard invited the twentieth-century viewer to witness their own mass atrocity exhibition, we now have the update for the twenty-first century: Jodi Dean's demolition job of the internet as we know it. With Blog Theory we can finally terminate the hype of blogging and seriously engage the deeply distracted condition of the networked present."

Geert Lovink, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam

"Blog Theory is refreshingly free of received ideas about the wonderful new world of media. Jodi Dean manages the difficult art of being critical of new media without becoming a cranky curmudgeon. She clears the way for imagining the politics of media by other means."

Mckenzie Wark, The New School University

"What happens to politics when there is no one in charge? The answer Jodi Dean gives, in this coruscating, rock n' roll ride through new political and media theory, is communicative capitalism - the obligation to communicate in a world turned into a market for communications. Dean's radical call for a new media politics will challenge political scientists, communication theorists, and media activists to sever the ties, and create an unforeseeable, dramatically material future."

Sean Cubitt, University of Melbourne

Blog Theory develops a critical theory of contemporary media. Advancing her account of communicative capitalism, Jodi Dean explores how new media practices like blogging, friending, and texting capture their users in networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance. Her wide-ranging and theoretically rich analysis extends from her personal experiences as a blogger, through media histories, to newly emerging social network platforms and applications.

Dean details the ways networked media undermine oppositional politics by inducing users to highlight communication and awareness and neglect organization and revolt. Set against the background of the economic crisis wrought by neoliberalism, the book defends the provocative thesis that complex networks are best understood via the psychoanalytic notion of the drives. The "newness" of new media is less a matter of technology than of the capture of political energies in ever-intensifying circuits of exploitation and submission. Dean contends that reading networks in terms of the drives reveals their real, human dimension in the feelings and affects that make our submission automatic, obvious, and fun. A polemic against Web 2.0 and participartory media fantasies, Blog Theory exposes our underlying entrapment in the media net.