I just came across a notice for two new books, both of which seemed relevant to the ideas that get discussed on this blog. Thought I would pass them along. Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet Olga Goriunova http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415893107/ Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies In this book, Goriunova offers a critical […]
Dismantling Change
Tarleton and Hector generously invited me to contribute to Culture Digitally, and I am thrilled to be here. I wanted to share and invite feedback on an in-progress work that grows out of my forthcoming book, which tells the history of Democratic online campaigning from Howard Dean’s run to the 2008 Barack Obama campaign. At […]
Ubuntu, Unity, and Identity: How governance and lack of consensus affects cultural production
I’ve been quite interested in the kerfuffle that Ubuntu has taken since the introduction of Unity. To put it mildly, it’s been controversial. Before I start with my observations, I should make a disclosure of why I am so interested in the commotion. First and foremost, you may have noticed that the fonts we use here at […]
Mobile sexism?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWTJvjLbPEc] Increasingly, smartphones have become an important way that we keep connected to the digital world. So, what does it mean when a smartphone is labeled as a “female” phone? Granted, HTC’s new smartphone, called Rhyme (available on Verizon), is never billed explicitly as a “female” phone. Yet, the online chatter surrounding the device suggests […]
LibreOffice: time to reconsider Open Source and power?
[Cross-posted from DSC@KCL Blog] Having been a longtime OpenOffice.org user I was a little surprised recently when installing the Ubuntu flavour of Gnu/Linux to find that something called LibreOffice was the default office suite. It looked remarkably similar to OpenOffice.org (which I noticed because I knew exactly where the place to turn off autocompletion of […]