Connected, but alone? Sherry Turkle argues in her TED talk, “Connected, but alone?” that too much texting is bad for us: she anticipates the unpopularity of the talk because this isn’t something people or companies want to hear. People are more comfortable with machines, which enable interaction without real emotional risk. But, they also can’t […]

Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda This analysis sought to examine the media ecosystems during the 2016 election cycle that led to Trump’s ascendance using “hyperlinking patterns, social media sharing patterns on Facebook and Twitter, and topic and language patterns in the content of the 1.25 million stories.” The study points to social […]

Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination In 2002, Tim Wu proposed broadband discrimination as an alternative to open-access to reach the ultimate goal of network neutrality, and lays out why he believes this should be legislatively regulated as opposed to letting the market self-regulate. Wu describes a neutral network as “an Internet that does not favor one application (say, […]

Beyond the Mirror World Philip Agre’s “Beyond the Mirror World” largely deals with the question of representing the real world with quantitative data. He gives examples of data use that seem to demonstrate the Capture Model he proposed in “Surveillance and Capture, Two Models of Privacy” and examines Gelernter’s idea that “the progress of computing […]

Postscript on the Societies of Control Deleuze’s essay, “Postscript on the societies of control,” did not seem to me to completely contradict Foucault’s chapter on the Panopticon from Discipline and Punish. Instead of control, conformity, and discipline being enforced by institutions, the larger system develops the mechanisms of control that reflect its values. We are […]

concept I want to use information from the political party time API to create a web or physical experience with information about legislators’ campaign fundraisers. One idea for a physical result would be to create a glitter snow globe based on how many fundraising events a state or legislator has in a particular day or week. I […]

Foucault examines the idea of the panopticon as it relates to social control, a metaphor of the architectural design that Bentham proposed as an efficient surveillance structure and “enlightened” solution for hierarchical/authoritarian institutions like prisons, hospitals, schools, and workplaces. For the guards, doctors, teachers, and employer, there could perhaps be some relief in the utilizing the threat of surveillance […]

A declaration of the independence of cyberspace is some kind of techno-libertarian-utopian fantasy text about a virtual world outside of government intervention, written in response to the Telecommunications Reform Act. Barlow’s ideology seems to disallow any kind of nuance, but his privilege allowed him a platform for an impetuous response anyway. As a critique of legislation, […]

What if the student list, itp help, all the alumni networks, and something like the media lab’s resume book existed for just ITP? For this week I made a super-low fidelity ITP craigslist to try it out. I checked out the craigslist model and html but significantly pared this down. It also occurred to me […]

McLuhan’s passage about Napoleon’s acute understanding of media and communications technologies struck me as analogous to Trump’s understanding of the American media landscape–namely his use of TV and twitter. National leaders acknowledge the important effects of broadcast media and journalism on their ability to lead, and of course this is one of the reasons a free […]