“What we are really concerned with when we invoke the “algorithmic” here is not the algorithm per se but the insertion of procedure into human knowledge and social experience. What makes something algorithmic is that it is produced by or related to an information system that is committed (functionally and ideologically) to the computational generation […]
“…the material, technical and organizational elements of prototypes are always also potentially symbolic. Advocates within an engineering firm or a political campaign can turn them into stories. Outsiders such as journalists can also take them up and turn them into the elements of national or even global memes. In each case, particular sociotechnical configurations become […]
“…increasingly ubiquitous digital data storage has had a profound effect on contemporary practices of history and remembrance – and even on the way humans construct and perceive their identities. Discussions of a ‘modernity that forgets’ or an ‘Internet that remembers’ …risk conflating individual cognitive memory, collective and cultural memory, history, storage media, and the archive. ” […]
“While events are essential for individuals, societies and media, they are not the sweet hearts of media scholars. Events are like ill-behaved teenagers: they are hard to fit in any rigid system of thought. Many events are idiosyncratic, contour-less and quite resistant to typification, while others are too often repeated to attract scholarly attention.” […]
“Certainly, in popular discourse, terms like cyber-activism, online activism, and digital activism are used to mean so many different things that they lose their specific meaning. In this way, they can be used conveniently by critics and proponents alike for whatever purposes they want them to serve.” The following is a draft of an essay, eventually […]