Here, as promised, is a list of 250 candidate keywords–the result of our previous call and the Digital Keywords appendix: 250 Digital Keywords (A Working Resource) Just glancing over this list–both a tiny fraction of relevant digital discourse as well as precisely ten times the (bolded) keywords covered in this volume–leaves me awestruck at the potential […]
Culture is a keyword among keywords for Raymond Williams, who contributed to the founding of cultural studies in the 1960s and 1970s. It is among the most common ways to talk about how we talk. In the essay below, one of Williams’ most careful readers, Ted Striphas, offers a sensitive update to Williams and a wide-ranging intellectual […]
The algorithm, Tarleton Gillespie argues in this terrific essay, stands as a complex administrator of modern life. In it Gillespie demystifies the many uses of the recent keyword algorithm, on loan from Arabic. It is at once a trick of the trade for software programmers, a synecdoche standing in for entire informational systems and their […]
Christopher Kelty’s broad-minded and brilliant essay on participation is a welcomed participant in the Digital Keywords volume. It both intellectual broadens as well as analytically tightens the contemporary understanding of that classic concept and near constant discussion of it online. Marshaling together insights ranging from Parmenides to Polanyi, he offers insights such as how participation […]
In this definitive essay, Gabriella Coleman critiques the stereotype of a hacker as a white male libertarian. In its place, and through a rich history of its varied sources and expressions, she uncovers an underlying hacker commitment to what she calls “craft autonomy,” or the freedom to do technical work that motivates contemporary classes of […]