Today the worlds of technology and finance collide yet again in the first day of public trading of Facebook stock. Facebook is not the first online social networking site (Remember Myspace? Or for that matter TheSquare?). Nor is it the first overhyped IPO. What Facebook does teach us, though, is that even in a weakened […]
My new book, Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice, will be published by Polity Press this month. It contains my best shot at making sense of various aspects of the transformations that digital media are generating, so I’ll be very interested to hear what Culture Digitally folks think. Here’s the abstract: Media are fundamental to our sense […]
I stumbled upon this interesting post about BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic. This is a striking example of what Henry Jenkins would call participatory culture. It seems that prior to local servers coming online players in the Pacific Rim devised a way of creating unofficial “servers within servers” using the in-game guild system. By […]
It seems that the pot is starting (or have already started) to boil over. The role of academic publishing houses in the dissemination of knowledge has attracted the attention of people outside academia. And, certainly, it has attracted the attention of our blog. Mary Gray, Chris Boulton, and Zachary McDowell have chimed in with some important ideas about the philosophical […]
Several weeks ago, the popular message board Reddit announced that it was making a policy change to ban all “suggestive or sexual content featuring minors.” Owned by Advanced Publications, Reddit has made a name for itself in part by its hands-off, pro-free-speech, let-the-users-decide, and self-police approach. In fact, before the policy change, the only rules of […]