“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 […]
A few days ago I came across a selfie of US Vice President Joe Biden on one of my news feeds. He was posing with President Obama, marking the occasion of his first ever selfie to be posted on Instagram. I study self expression and politics online, so this was one instance when these two, […]
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 […]
Fixation: The fixing process is important to me theoretically because it’s a cross cutting term. Fixing suggests that capture is not just a matter of direct representation but of representation in a particular way. So, in so much as platforms, or networks of platforms, capture and fix, they do so with a certain plan. In as […]