President Trump’s tweets charging that Google search results are biased, against him and against conservatives, are the loudest and latest version of a growing attack on search engines and social media platforms. It is potent, and it’s almost certainly wrong. But it comes at an unfortunate time, just as a more thoughtful and substantive challenge […]
In the summer of 2011, in the midst of the Cablegate affair (the leaking of some 250,000 diplomatic cable transmission between the US State Department and American embassies by WikiLeaks), at a time of far-reaching changes in the regimes of Tunisia and Egypt, and while public demonstrations against existing social order swept various places in […]
I’m really excited to share my new essay, “The Relevance of Algorithms,” with those of you who are interested in such things. It’s been a treat to get to think through the issues surrounding algorithms and their place in public culture and knowledge, with some of the participants in Culture Digitally (here’s the full litany: Braun, Gillespie, Striphas, Thomas, […]
Technology writers and media philosophers alike have spent time considering a rather candid remark by Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt, made in an August, 2010 interview. Discussing the future of the search giant, Schmidt said the following to the Wall Street Journal: We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is […] I mean that in a […]
I thought it might be fun to open with a little blast from the past. Pictured below is the first page of my notebook from my first collegiate communication course. I was an eighteen year-old beginning my second semester at the University of New Hampshire, and I had the good fortune of enrolling in Professor […]