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 […]
Math world pushing back on Elsevier
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 […]
What is an Algorithm?
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 […]
And deliver us from distraction: Understanding resistance to media life
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 […]
Media Life Is A Threat To Social Order
Media can reinforce and support agencies of socialization and agents of control – such as parents, educators, the state. At the same time, media can be viewed as potentially disrupting, undermining or otherwise threatening the established way of doing things in society. This fundamental premise – outlined most clearly in Denis McQuail’s unparalleled work on […]