As reported by the Wall Street Journal last Thursday, Google faces a potential civil antitrust investigation from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for practices that include privileging certain search results based on how much a company is willing to pay for such ‘advertising.’ This lack of transparency in Google’s advertising business practices, along with the […]
Information War?: Lulzsec, Anonymous, Wikileaks and Stuxnet
Just after Wikileaks was being refused services from corporations like Mastercard and Amazon, following the leaking of thousands of USA State department documents, the group Anonymous rocketed into public view as it attacked back. Co-ordinating denial of service attacks against many who were refusing services previously provided to Wikileaks, Anonymous came into worldwide prominence. In […]
Culture Digitally: An Introduction Pt. 2
We face an increasingly complex ecology of digital technologies and cultural production outlets: blogs, video games, Facebook, wikis, media platforms, Twitter, etc. And we are finding that they present substantive challenges to our ways of understanding the workings and implications of cultural production. We are witnessing the establishment of digital culture, not just as a novelty […]
Culture Digitally: an introduction
Those of us who study cultural production in the digital age for a living face a number of distinct challenges: how to gain some perspective on the technologies and practices in which we are immersed; how to resist the seductive claims of revolutions and catastrophes that new media are sure to spark; how to convince […]