At the invitation of Culture Digitally and with the permission of my publisher, MIT Press, I am thrilled to provide the introduction of my just-out book, Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism. (With bonus pictures not in the book!) Though the book is centered on FM radio activism, issues of digitality loom large. […]
I’m thrilled to announce that our anthology, Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by myself and Pablo Boczkowski and Kirsten Foot, is now officially available from MIT Press. Contributors include Geoffrey Bowker, Finn Brunton, Gabriella Coleman, Gregory Downey, Steven Jackson, Christopher Kelty, Leah Lievrouw, Sonia Livingstone, Ignacio Siles, Jonathan Sterne, Lucy Suchman, and Fred Turner. One essay from the collection […]
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 […]
Inspired by an exchange between Zizi and Tom that began just after our first workshop in 2011, I asked if we could use Zizi’s idea (itself built on Bourdieu’s work) of the “habitus of the new” as the opening salvo in a dialogue about how to think the “state of permanent novelty” that seems to […]
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 […]