Mercedes Bunz

Mercedes Bunz (2011)

Mercedes Bunz (born November 16, 1971 in Magdeburg) is a German art historian, philosopher and journalist.

Life

After passing her final exams at the Celtis-Gymnasium secondary school in the German town of Schweinfurt in 1991, Bunz studied philosophy and history of art at the Freie Universität Berlin. In 1997 together with Sascha Kösch, Riley Reinhold, and Benjamin Weiss she founded the Berlin music monthly De:Bug, becoming its co-editor and editor-in-chief from 1999 till 2001.

She was awarded a scholarship by Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, enabling her to graduate at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar with Joseph Vogl, writing about the history of the internet between the 1950s and the 1980s. Her dissertation thesis was published as a non-fiction book in 2008. This was also used by Melih Bilgil in his 2009 animation "History of the Internet".

Having worked as a freelance journalist for a period, Bunz became a lecturer at Bielefeld University. In that same year she also began working for Berlin city magazine zitty before running the on-line business of the German daily Tagesspiegel.

In 2009, she joined the London newspaper The Guardian as a media and technology reporter. Bunz stayed with The Guardian until the beginning of 2011, most notably following events in on-line journalism and Social networking websites.

In 2010 Bunz was awarded the Fachjournalisten-Preis by the German association of specialist editors, or Deutscher Fachjournalisten-Verband. In 2011 she held the Impakt Fellowship of the Centre for the Humanities from the Utrecht University. Bunz has written for the German internet magazines Telepolis and Carta.

Her book on the impact of algorithms on society was published by Suhrkamp in 2012. An updated version of "The Silent Revolution: How Digitalization Transforms Knowledge, Work, Journalism and Politics without Making Too Much Noise" was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014.

Writings

• Mercedes Bunz: The Silent Revolution: How Digitalization Transforms Knowledge, Work, Journalism and Politics without Making Too Much Noise. Palgrave Macmillan, London 2014, ISBN 978-1-137-37350-2.
• Mercedes Bunz: Die stille Revolution – Wie Algorithmen Wissen, Arbeit, Öffentlichkeit und Politik verändern, ohne dabei viel Lärm zu machen. Suhrkamp Verlag, edition unseld 43, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3518260432.
• Mercedes Bunz: Logik der Technik. Das Denken und die Digitalisierung. In: FAZ.NET. 24 January 2011, retrieved 11 June 2011.
• Mercedes Bunz: Vom Speicher zum Verteiler – Die Geschichte des Internet. Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86599-025-9.

External links

• Literature by and about Mercedes Bunz in the German National Library catalogue
• Mercedes Bunz – Homepage and blog
• Mercedes Bunz – Old blog
• Mercedes Bunz über das Internet als Waldspaziergang. In: Video podcast Elektrischer Reporter. No. 27. 23 April 2007. Retrieved 11 June 2011 (an interview in which Bunz unfolds part of her thinking on the electronic media; in German).
• Her intervention at RSLN: "Algorithms will never replace journalists".