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 […]
Capture, Fixation and Conversation: How The Matrix Has You and Will Sell You, Part 3/3
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 […]
Capture, Fixation and Conversation: How The Matrix Has You and Will Sell You, Part 2/3
For businesses building digital platforms capture is both a technical and social problem and invitation is one way of addressing it. How do you build technologies that efficiently allow any user (young, older, in North America or in Africa) to capture various facets of social life? The technological answer to the problem is not necessarily […]
Capture, Fixation and Conversation: How The Matrix Has You and Will Sell You, Part 1 of 3
When I was in graduate school in STS we read Langdon Winner’s Do Artifacts Have Politics, an excerpt from his book, The Whale and The Reactor. If you’re not familiar with it, the piece is often remembered for its analysis of bridges, or more accurately overpasses along the way to Jones Beach NY. Langdon’s telling […]
Indie/dependent: Incubating Indies in Dublin and Montreal
This post offers an introduction to a new comparative research project being conducted by Aphra Kerr and Tamara Shepherd, which started with discussions at Culture Digitally workshops and continued through a Dobbin Scholarship funded research visit by Tamara to Dublin in February 2014. Aphra and Tamara are investigating how policy measures and incubators have impacted […]