tboellst@uci.edu
“Sitting Here in California”: Introduction On February 16, 2017, Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg published an unprecedented 5,732-word post, “Building Global Community.” Observers—many of whom appropriately termed Zuckerberg’s missive a “manifesto”—soon noted troubling aspects of his vision for Facebook’s role in the world. In this essay, I add to that response by discussing, in […]
Yesterday was a surprising, difficult day for a lot of us. For many of us based in the U.S., amidst whatever political feelings we were having, it spurred us to think hard about our own work and research agendas, and how they should shift to face new political realities. So some of us spent the day […]
The Background: “Dead and Buried” At the end of 2013, a flare-up involving the work of Daniel Miller and his colleagues revealed a complex set of tensions regarding how digital culture scholars, journalists, and others in the technology sector address public engagement, prediction, and ethnographic methods. In this essay I use these tensions to investigate […]