I’m trying to keep abreast of this whole Carrier IQ kerfuffle and it struck me. What does this mean for a digital society? Isn’t this, yet another, form of micro-surveillance that seems to be a reoccurring theme in our present day and age? Is this a type of resistance that “new media” affords us? And, is this […]
The Periods Between Large-Scale Protest Events
NPR aired a wonderful story yesterday about Occupy Chicago activists’ organizing of protests in advance of the simultaneously held NATO and G8 summit meetings in May. The story is interesting because so much of both journalistic and scholarly attention to movements and protest events happens during and after moments of contentious politics. By contrast, the NPR story […]
Upcoming conference on the “nonhuman turn”
Considering some of the interests of this group, and the “dialogue” on tehcnical agency between Gina Neff, Tim Jordan, and Josh McVeigh-Schultz (that will be published here soon, I promise!), this conference call looked particularly interesting. The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies May 3-5, 2012 Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee […]
The idea of memes on the Internet, and do they mean anything for cultural production
I’ve never been a big fan of Richard Dawkins’s notion of memes. Yet, I’ve noticed that people have used this idea quite often on the Internet. At least, the word meme. Memes mean a very particular thing. Because of that, does the adoption of the idea of memes into everyday conversation on the Internet tell […]
The Biopower of Facebook
Here’s an article on NPR’s website about Facebook’s new default “opt-in” policy. According to the article, Facebook is changing its default privacy setting from one where users must “opt-out”–manually increase their security settings– to make their profile private. With this new “opt-in” policy, Facebook profiles are public by default. Who you are, quite literally, is for sale. […]