Tag
Communication
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What’s on Top of TikTok?
The videos of TikToks can easily reach billions. But because the app won’t share what’s popular, we don’t know just what the world is watching.
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Public Thinker: Siva Vaidhyanathan on Facebook and Other “Antisocial” Media
Siva Vaidhyanathan has built a career as a media studies and communications … [none-for-homepage]
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The Future of the Global University
Great universities seek to erase the borders that confine intellectual exchange. The aspiration is at once scholarly and political: policies informed by research will topple …
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Shoptalk: Overheard at ICA
This May over three and a half thousand scholars descended on Prague for the International Communications Association Conference. In between the thousands …
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Reading with Strangers
On a visit to Bogotá in 2006, riding on the then new TransMilenio bus rapid transit system, I discovered that it sponsored Libro al Viento (Books on the Wind), a series of free publications distributed at bus stops, markets, and municipal services offices.1 In 2007, I learned that 50,000 Chileans had submitted entries to the…
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What Is It Like to Be an Elephant?
Why did Harambe become a meme? In a post-election landscape that demands we acknowledge Internet trolling as a practice with world-historical consequences …
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The Politics of Networking a Nation
In 1981, one year before his death, the Soviet cybernetician and computer pioneer Victor Glushkov published the book What Is the OGAS? OGAS was the Russian acronym for All-State Automated System for Gathering and Processing of Information for the Accounting, Planning, and Governance of the National Economy, USSR—a good illustration of the Soviet tendency toward…
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Being Data
In 1966, Der Spiegel interviewed Martin Heidegger: SPIEGEL: And what takes the place of philosophy now? HEIDEGGER: Cybernetics.1 Even before the mass production of personal computers, Heidegger saw the writing on the wall for the humanities. Today, STEM funding far outpaces institutional investment in philosophy, history, or literature departments. To some, the “digital humanities” offer…
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From Bartleby to Scrivener for iOS
From the earliest typewriters to Google Docs, writing devices have never been built for novelists. Instead, they are designed for office use, with creative writing of all sorts seen as a marginal-at-best side market. Determining what difference these repurposed office technologies make to writing is difficult, though, since no simple hypothesis about the effects of…
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A Brief History of Women Accepting Oscars
From the comfort of the couch, the Academy Awards hold a perverse attraction. What will fall flat more often: the dreadful jokes, or the award recipients as they clamor up the stairs to claim their prize? How far will the host go in biting the hand that feeds? How bright the teeth, how lofty the…
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Paying Attention Like Primo Levi: An Interview with Ann Goldstein
Stuart Woolf, a British historian and the first English-language translator of Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir If This Is a Man, wrote that Levi’s “interest in the translation of his books was exceptional.”1 This comes as no surprise, given that translation is a fundamental aspect of Levi’s writing, and that he considered it a vital tool in…
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“Sharing” the Israeli Occupation
In April of 2014, an Israeli combat soldier from the Nahal Brigade named David Adamov was captured on camera violently threatening a Palestinian teenager in Hebron. After a video of the event posted on YouTube went viral, Adamov was suspended by the military. His suspension instigated a social media protest, with soldiers from his unit…
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Speaking in Science
Some of today’s most provocative scientific tools are being built to do science themselves. IBM’s Watson, for instance, is being developed to sift through data at volumes far exceeding the capability of any one human researcher. While we tend to accept what our computers say about data in numerical or other easily computable form, the…
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The Dress Has Always Been News
As “the dress” befuddled the Internet’s hive mind, our newsfeeds swelled. Tumblr and Buzzfeed, recognizing the viral power of a garment that appears gold and white to some but blue and black to others, got the freight train rolling. Soon, bastions of journalism such as the New York Times and Washington Post hopped on board. Experts in cognition assured us that…
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Writing Technology
Read my blog, please, but don’t dare peek into my diary. Even though these two genres employ some of the same conventions—a diurnal relation to time, a preoccupation with subjective experience—one is a product of social media, while the other is not meant to be read by others. Donald Winnicott, the influential British psychoanalyst of…
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The Democratic Surround: A Conversation Between Fred Turner and Clay Shirky
Last December, Public Culture senior editor Fred Turner sat down with Clay Shirky, the author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age and Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, to talk about Turner’s new book, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties. A prequel to the influential From Counterculture to Cyberculture which…
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Don’t Throw Anything Out
First, a disclaimer. I am too old to review this book. It aims to address media scholars, communication professionals, as well as active and curious members of the new participatory culture. I belong in the first category, but I hardly qualify as part of the third. I decided to continue nevertheless, because the book proposes…
