Below is an excerpt from Casey O’Donnell’s book, Developer’s Dilemma: The Secret World of Videogame Creators (MIT Press, 2014). – How to Play (Use) This Game (Book) – The structure of this book is performative. It imitates the level structure of the Nintendo Entertainment System game Super Mario Bros. (SMB) to highlight the importance that games and […]
Below is the preface to Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) In the late the 1980s, my mother, sister, and I lived in Japan for four years. Stationed on a military base, we received a steady stream of U.S. programming via the military […]
Since 2009, the Slender Man has been growing in popularity as an emergent, groundbreaking Internet horror myth. It entered the broader popular consciousness in May 2014, when two twelve year old girls led a third girl into a wooded area and stabbed her numerous times. The Slender Man takes on important cultural meanings in the […]
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 […]
At the invitation of Culture Digitally and with the permission of my publisher, MIT Press, I am thrilled to provide the introduction of my just-out book, Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism. (With bonus pictures not in the book!) Though the book is centered on FM radio activism, issues of digitality loom large. […]