Hi SMC friends! Just a quick post to announce a new book, out this month from UC Press. In researching craigslist for an earlier project, I started thinking about changing digital culture as a form of gentrification. With this book, I wanted to think in more depth about how the internet is gentrifying, with the …
Continue reading New book excerpt: The Gentrification of the Internet
I'm delighted to share that my new book, An Internet for the People: The Politics and Promise of craigslist, is out now from Princeton University Press. This book considers the vision of a single platform as instructive for thinking about the future of the web: craigslist. Over its 22 year history, craigslist has grown into …
Continue reading An Internet for the People – First Chapter Preview
Of the many reactions to Trump’s election in 2016, one was an embrace of online tools for increased privacy. Interest in encryption soared, from email clients like Protonmail to messaging apps like Signal. Crypto parties – workshops where tech experts teach interested rookies how to use privacy tools – popped up across the United States. …
Continue reading Information wants to be free (maybe) – but do we want it to be leaky?
This past month, I organized the Queer Internet Studies Workshop with my longtime friend and collaborator, Jack Gieseking, and Anne Esacove at the Alice Paul Center at UPenn. This was the second QIS (the first was in 2014 at Columbia), and our plan was to organize a day long series of conversations, brainstorming sessions, panels, …
(This post is a slightly-tweaked version of a talk I gave as a respondant to Gabriella Coleman’s recent talk at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm grateful to DCC for inviting me, and to Biella Coleman for provoking these ideas.) There is something both over and under-determined about the word “hacker.” On the one hand, “hacker” …
Like most people who read this blog, I spend a lot of time thinking about the internet. I've come to realize that there isn't really one internet, there are many, and these many internets are the result of the different practices and workarounds that individuals and communities have developed to make the internet meet their needs. As part …
Continue reading The internet(s) as metaphor, the internet(s) as craft
As someone who does work on online communities and spatial informatics, I’m very much aware of the extent to which we tend to use spatial metaphors to talk about web-based technologies. I asked around the Social Media Collective (including our mighty network of esteemed colleagues) for favorite critiques of the intertwining of space and the …
Continue reading Spatial metaphors of the internet: Resources
This post is in response to hearing Tarleton Gillespie’s AoIR plenary talk on SNS’ responses to trolling. First, a nod to Lisa Nakamura’s point that when we talk about discriminatory acts as trolling, it potentially deescalates the real harm engendered by racist, sexist and demeaning behaviors. This in fact reminds me of boyd and Marwick’s …
Continue reading An Anarchist Ethic for the Treatment of Trolls
Earlier this week, I caught Molly Crabapple’s talk at the Berkman Center, where she gave a determined defense of the value of art, and particularly activist, hand-drawn art, in the midst of participatory media. In particular, I was struck by her comment that camera phones enable protestors to rob authority figures of anonymity, for example, …
In the wake of so many news stories related to issues of surveillance and privacy, it’s perhaps particularly important to note that tomorrow, the FCC will consider an action that has the potential to reshape access to ICTs for one of the most heavily surveilled populations in the world – those who are incarcerated. While …
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