I thought it might be fun to open with a little blast from the past. Pictured below is the first page of my notebook from my first collegiate communication course. I was an eighteen year-old beginning my second semester at the University of New Hampshire, and I had the good fortune of enrolling in Professor […]
Fighting for Fair Use and Author Rights + The Open Access Alternative
Fighting for Fair Use and Author Rights – Christopher Boulton Over the last four years, I’ve sparred with three academic publishers over copyright and permissions policies, once with Pearson and twice with Taylor & Francis. The results were mixed, ranging from hard-fought victory to stalemate and withdrawal. So, in the interest of recruiting allies, I […]
The 2012 Obama Campaign, the Technological Sublime, and the Limits of Big Data
It is election season, and the stories of technological innovations being game changers are upon us. Many of these accounts are articulating the technological sublime around the Obama campaign’s data practices. This sublime response is marked by the wonder, and dread, towards the technological dazzle that seemingly has the power to reinvigorate the incumbent’s supporter base. […]
Julie Cohen’s New Book: Configuring the Networked Self
Julie Cohen recently published her book Configuring the Networked Self with Yale University Press. It’s a great synthesis of copyright and privacy policy situated in a varied number of literatures. Drawing on disciplines such as STS and cultural studies, she makes compelling connections between the two policy domains and questions traditional epistemological perspectives on them. […]
Top of the pops
As the red carpets, champagne flutes, and stressed out assistants are rolled, boxed, and…well, rolled…from the Grammys to the Academy Awards, it might be a good time to reflect on our award culture. I am particularly interested in our propensity to pile awards upon those whom we’ve already rewarded. For example, at the Grammys, the […]