I’m pleased to announce the publication of my new book, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. I’m able to share the first chapter here with the Culture Digitally community, and am very much hoping to hear your thoughts. Chapter 1: Introduction Today we find ourselves surrounded by […]
“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 […]
Kevin Driscoll published a paper exploring some of the key events in the history of databases in society. Here’s the abstract: Since the diffusion of the punched card tabulator following the 1890 U.S. Census, mass-scale information processing has been alternately a site of opportunity, ambivalence and fear in the American imagination. While large bureaucracies have […]