This is about the fourth Olympics that’s been trumpeted as the first one to embrace social media and the Internet — just as, depending on how you figure it, it’s about the fourth U.S. election in a row that’s the first to go digital. It may be in the nature of new technologies that we […]
There has been some excitement about the idea of using technology to address the problems of the Mexican Drug War. As someone involved in technology, I find it inspiring that other techies are trying to do something to end the conflict. However, I also worry when I read ideas based on flawed assumptions. For example, […]
It’s interesting to read the contrasting articles by Venkatesh Rao and Kurt Eichenwald. In both articles, they offer differing views on why exactly Microsoft experienced a “lost decade.” That is, both articles tried to explain why Microsoft fell so far behind the innovation curve during this past decade to Google and Apple. Eichenwald extensively interviews many, I […]
My book, Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama, was just published by Oxford University Press in the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics series edited by Andrew Chadwick. I am honored to share my first excerpt with Culture Digitally, because so many of the people here were […]
When I first began studying Anonymous, I used to alias it. In the first talk I gave after Anonymous became so prominent and widely covered in the popular press that there was no point in aliasing the group anymore, someone said, “What possible alias can you give something that is already called ’Anonymous?’” Good question. […]