The algorithm, Tarleton Gillespie argues in this terrific essay, stands as a complex administrator of modern life. In it Gillespie demystifies the many uses of the recent keyword algorithm, on loan from Arabic. It is at once a trick of the trade for software programmers, a synecdoche standing in for entire informational systems and their […]
Christopher Kelty’s broad-minded and brilliant essay on participation is a welcomed participant in the Digital Keywords volume. It both intellectual broadens as well as analytically tightens the contemporary understanding of that classic concept and near constant discussion of it online. Marshaling together insights ranging from Parmenides to Polanyi, he offers insights such as how participation […]
In this definitive essay, Gabriella Coleman critiques the stereotype of a hacker as a white male libertarian. In its place, and through a rich history of its varied sources and expressions, she uncovers an underlying hacker commitment to what she calls “craft autonomy,” or the freedom to do technical work that motivates contemporary classes of […]
The popular opposition between “analog” and “digital,” to put it in a nutshell, is wrong. Two essays in the Digital Keywords volume—Jonathan Sterne’s “Analog” and my own “Digital”—frame this fundamental point: the analog and the digital are not a pair (itself a rehearsal of that tired digital binary, 0 and 1). Nor are they necessarily […]
Major events of national importance reverberate throughout many levels of social life. They are discussed in the corridors of formal power, and in conversations by the water cooler. They also inspire an intensification of activity on social media. One of these activities is unfriending. Unfriending is a relatively under-researched social media practice, but it would […]