In the past year I have been preoccupied by the politics and globalization of cultural production. This might come from being located in Ireland where the European headquarters of Google, Facebook, eBay, Gala Networks and Activision-Blizzard et al. are located. It also links to our discussions on this blog about who gets to construct the […]
Culture Digitally’s Andres Monroy-Hernandez spoke a week or so ago at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, on “Designing for Remixing: Computer-supported Social Creativity,” focused on his Scratch Online Community. The video is now available at Berkman’s site. Here’s the abstract, to tempt you: In this talk I present a framework for the […]
The president, secretary, and immediate past president of the International Mathematical Union released a statement, February 8, 2012, challenging academic publishing giant, Elsevier, to rethink their approach to (some might say monopoly stranglehold on) access to academic scholarship. You can find their statement here: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/a-more-formal-statement-about-mathematical-publishing/ Even though the signatories represent themselves as individuals, rather than […]
For close to two years now I’ve been blogging about “algorithmic culture” — the use of computational processes to sort, classify, and hierarchize people, places, objects, and ideas. Since I began there’s been something of a blossoming of work on the topic, including a recent special issue of the journal Theory, Culture and Society on […]
Jonathan Franzen, dubbed the Great American Novelist by TIME magazine, isn’t a fan of ebooks—nay, he sees them as corrupting our values, undermining all that’s good and holy about the printed word and its place in society. But what caught my attention about this report on his comments at a writing festival recently wasn’t so […]