John Carter McKnight and Adam Fish This past weekend, two prominent socio-technical critics have given us radically different versions of the future of capitalism in the age of social media. Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, argues in an op-ed for FT for a dystopia of toothbrush analytics, trash bin […]
In May, Adobe prompted me reflect on the “Cloud.” Adobe announced that it’s widely used “Creative Suite,” which includes things like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat and many other software products would be transitioning to a subscription-based, web-based and cloud-based product, the “Creative Cloud.” My first (and clearly cynical) thought was, “Well, at least I don’t […]
In this Culture Digitally dialogue, we discuss Thomas Streeter’s book The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet (New York University Press 2011), part of the “Critical Cultural Communication” series edited by Sarah Banet-Weiser and Kent A. Ono. This dialogue emerged out of an Author-meets-Critics session at the Eastern Sociological Society Meetings in Boston in […]
“The internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the internet so that all companies could make money off the internet.” US President Barack Obama, at a rally in Roanoke, Virginia, July 13, 2012 Suddenly, in the wake of President Obama’s untimely but ultimately non-fatal but non-optimal grammar, the question of who made […]
Today the worlds of technology and finance collide yet again in the first day of public trading of Facebook stock. Facebook is not the first online social networking site (Remember Myspace? Or for that matter TheSquare?). Nor is it the first overhyped IPO. What Facebook does teach us, though, is that even in a weakened […]