Mercedes Bunz

Mercedes Bunz
Bunz in 2011.
Born	Mercedes Bunz (1971-11-16) November 16, 1971 Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany
Occupation	Art historian, philosopher, journalist
Known for	Founder of De:Bug

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

Biography

Early career

Bunz studied philosophy and art history at the Freie Universität Berlin, after passing her final exams at the Celtis-Gymnasium secondary school in the German town of Schweinfurt in 1991. Together with Sascha Kösch, Riley Reinhold, and Benjamin Weiss she founded the Berlin music monthly De:Bug in 1997, becoming its co-editor and editor-in-chief from 1999 until 2001.^[1]

She was awarded a scholarship by Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, enabling her to graduate at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar^[2] 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.^[3]

Journalism career

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^[4] before running the on-line business of the German daily Tagesspiegel.^[5] In 2009, she joined the London newspaper The Guardian as a media and technology reporter. She stayed with The Guardian until the beginning of 2011, most notably following events in on-line journalism and Social networking websites.^[6][7]

In 2010 Bunz was awarded the Fachjournalisten-Preis by the German association of specialist editors, or Deutscher Fachjournalisten-Verband.^[8] In 2011 she held the Impakt Fellowship of the Centre for the Humanities from the Utrecht University. She has written for the German internet magazines Telepolis^[9] and Carta.^[2]

Her book on the impact of algorithms on society was published by Suhrkamp in 2012.^[10] 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.^[11]

Writings

• Mercedes Bunz and Graham Meikle: The Internet of Things. Polity Press, London 2018, ISBN 978-1509517466.
• 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].
• Mercedes Bunz: Vom Speicher zum Verteiler – Die Geschichte des Internet. Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86599-025-9.

References

External links

• Literature by and about Mercedes Bunz in the German National Library catalogue
• Official blog