“Perhaps we should understand the digit as an openly imitable and probabilistically imperfect index of any thinkable world, including this world, with which there can be no final convergence.” The following is a draft of an essay, eventually for publication as part of the Digital Keywords project (Ben Peters, ed). This and other drafts will be circulated on […]
“…much of the discussion around the relationship between digital information and communication technologies and democracy has focused too little on the question of what connections exists between digital technologies and actually existing, minimalist-vision democracy and too much on extensive discussion of the possible connections that might potentially be established between digital technologies and alternative, maximalist […]
Last month, Twitter announced the acquisition of Gnip, one of the main sources for social media data—including Twitter data. In my research I am interested in the politics of platforms and data flows in the social web and in this blog post I would like to explore the role of data intermediaries—Gnip in particular—in regulating […]
“It seems fair to say that a rapprochement between culture and technology has been achieved. Yet, this says little about what culture signifies today. How has the term’s growing proximity to technology, particularly digital computational tools, affected the range of meanings and practices with which it’s associated?” The following is a draft of an essay, eventually for publication as part of […]
With permission from The MIT Press, I have the pleasure of circulating another essay from our 2014 volume, Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Sociality, this one from Chris Kelty, titled “The Fog of Freedom.” Here’s his abstract: This essay explores the relationship between the concept of freedom and the historical path that the design of computer technology has taken […]