This is an essay about technology, power relations and basic dignity. It is about the commercialization of online platforms and the difficulties of retaining individual power and autonomy online. It is about the gentrification of the internet. When I call the internet gentrified, I’m describing shifts in power and control that limit what we can do online. I’m […]
I’m excited to announce the publication of a special issue of Digital Journalism that I guest-edited around the theme “Journalism in an Era of Big Data: Cases, Concepts, and Critiques.” I was fortunate to work with a terrific set of contributors. Their work sheds important light on the implications of data and algorithms, computation and quantification, for journalism as practice and […]
Glad to circulate a new essay from Culture Digitally co-founder Hector Postigo, it’s an excellent read. It is now available in the “online first” section of New Media & Society. Hector Postigo, “The socio-technical architecture of digital labor: Converting play into YouTube money.” New Media & Society (2014) This article uses the case of video […]
John Carter McKnight and Adam Fish This past weekend, two prominent socio-technical critics have given us radically different versions of the future of capitalism in the age of social media. Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, argues in an op-ed for FT for a dystopia of toothbrush analytics, trash bin […]
Ray and Charles Working on a Conceptual Model for the Exhibition Mathematica, 1960, photograph. Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress (A-22a). Click here to see original image. “Certainly the cost of living has increased, but the cost of everything else has likewise increased,”[1] H.G. Burt, the President of the Union Pacific Railroad, asserted to […]