Scott Evans reports on the sometimes surreal, relentlessly commercialised drive to ‘get out the vote’ in this year’s US election

Pauline van Mourik Broekman peers into the open mind of Surf’s Up

With its fading grandeur and hard hats, it was a strangely appropriate location, said first speaker Malcolm Garrett of 1892, the old Victorian school turned loft heaven playing host to digital networking bonanza Surf's Up. The new media industry was, after all, still very much under construction.

The concept of ambient has come a long way since Brian Eno’s Music for Airports in 1978. With its successful seepage into the world of art and advertising, its ubiquity has resulted in it becoming a fully-grown cultural logic in its own right.

James Flint reports back from the playgrounds of Chicago

From Aaron Lynch’s Thought Contagion to Seth Godin’s Idea Virus, the proliferation of interest in media spin-cycles, viral marketing, corporate memetics and cultural contagions suggests that the infective model has itself become a craze.

Chris Wilcha’s lo-budget documentary The Target Shoots First follows a post-punk rock-loving twenty-two year-old into the murky world of a large record company. Chris Darke compares his findings to those of Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, and to the criticism of the new American cultural order collected in the anthology Commodify Your Dissent.

No Logo charts the rise of global super-brands (Nike, The Gap, Starbucks et al) and attempts a critical account of contemporary corporate strategy. Whatever else it is good for, this wide ranging, detailed and up to the minute survey will no doubt prove invaluable to savvy youth marketers the world over.

Oh no! It's another Apple Crash! by Ian Betteridge

In one sense at least Apple have finally overtaken Microsoft. In this year's Clash of the Launches (Microsoft's OfficeParty 97 versus AppleParty 97) the Jobs-machine has out innovated the Gates-machine: while OfficeParty was trying (in time honoured manner) to sell the media a product - the Office 97 software suite - AppleParty was trying to sell it a concept.