Software developers have been playing an increasingly crucial, if unseen, role in anti-SOPA/PIPA protest activities. According to data compiled by Fight for the Future, “super easy to use” WordPress plugins like Simple Stop Sopa (written by Brooke Dukes) may have been employed by as many as 40% of the 115,000+ sites participating in Wednesday’s blackout. […]
Defining Online Community Management
New technologies make new economies, and new economies make new jobs. As a response to this, some of the most forward-thinking academic programs aim to prepare students for jobs that don’t yet exist, and more programs should follow their lead. Students of strategic communication–a catch-all term that includes public relations, advertising, integrated marketing communication and […]
Affordances, technical agency, and the politics of technologies of cultural production
a dialogue between Gina Neff, Tim Jordan, and Joshua McVeigh-Schulz (This is the first of Culture Digitally’s “dialogues.” Spurred first by comments by Gina Neff at the March 2011 workshop, and then by one of her blogposts, I asked if we could use an excerpt of that post as the opening salvo in a dialogue about […]
Two kinds of piracy
Just a quick follow up on the discussion of SOPA; people keep asking me what kind of legislation would be more appropriate than SOPA and PIPA, and that might have a better chance of gaining the support of the technology industries, users, and Congress. I’m not in the business of writing laws, but as a […]
SOPA and the framing of contested facts
The recent attention to SOPA and PIPA has gotten me thinking about the role that contested facts have played in how mainstream journalism represents public debate. Case in point, the media has been calling attention to the MPAA’s estimates of the amount of money the entertainment industry supposedly loses due to piracy. The pattern seems to […]