There’s lots to like about Lawrence Lessig’s book, Code 2.0—particularly, I find, the distinction he draws between “East Coast Code” (i.e., the law) and “West Coast Code” (i.e., computer hardware and software). He sees both as modes of bringing order to complex systems, albeit through different means. Lessig is also interested in the ways in […]
Manti Te’o has been in the news a lot these past few days because Notre Dame’s star linebacker and inspirational leader was apparently pranked. He had captured football fans’ hearts throughout the season, leading his team to an undefeated record and to the national championship game despite the fact that his grandmother and his girlfriend […]
For weeks now on one of the most populated role-playing realms in World of Warcraft, a user has been hanging out and repeating explicit sexual scenarios in the trade chat channel, which is the conversation channel that has the largest number of participants. What this looks like is a paragraph of text describing a scenario. […]
In a recent post over at Microsoft Research’s “Social media Collective” blog, danah boyd posed a query to her readers: she’s in the midst of a project with Henry Jenkins and Mimi Ito, a back-and-forth meant to advance their thinking on the idea of “participatory culture.” They are trying to pose their different ideas on […]
This is about the fourth Olympics that’s been trumpeted as the first one to embrace social media and the Internet — just as, depending on how you figure it, it’s about the fourth U.S. election in a row that’s the first to go digital. It may be in the nature of new technologies that we […]