Just a quick follow up on the discussion of SOPA; people keep asking me what kind of legislation would be more appropriate than SOPA and PIPA, and that might have a better chance of gaining the support of the technology industries, users, and Congress. I'm not in the business of writing laws, but as a …
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SOPA and the strategy of forced invisibility
Since I supported the blacking out of the MSR Social Media Collective blog to which I sometimes contribute, and the blacking out of Culture Digitally, which I co-organize, in order to join the SOPA protest led by the "Stop American Censorship" effort, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reddit, and Wikipedia, I though I should weigh in …
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Promo video for Microsoft Research New England
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3gdqNQ6cw0&list=UUV7zhPAJ8A4GXXDROkBYtzQ&index=1&feature=plcp
This is a really nice intro to the lab, the variety of work being done there, and how social media fits into all of it. Cameos by SMC members throughout, as well as many of the awesome 2011 summer interns.
In Defense of Friction
There is no doubt that technology has made my life much easier. I rarely share the romantic view that things were better when human beings used to do the boring tasks that machines now do. For example, I do not think there is much to gain by bringing back the old telephone operators. However, there …
3.75 Million Lawbreaking Parents
The Department of Justice would like the authority to put millions of American parents in prison. Don't believe me? Read on. A House Judiciary Committee hearing today considered the federal computer crime statute, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, known to its friends as the CFAA. Among other things, the Act punishes anyone who "exceeds …
Internet memes and networked individualism: A perfect couple?
Memes are conceptual troublemakers. While academics have been debating over their theoretical usefulness ever since Richard Dawkins coined the term back in 1976, internet users speak of memes daily, as uncontested givens. Recently, I’ve been thinking of ways to bridge the yawning gap between academic and popular discourses on memes. I agree with some of …
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Can an algorithm be wrong? Twitter Trends, the specter of censorship, and our faith in the algorithms around us
The interesting question is not whether Twitter is censoring its Trends list. The interesting question is, what do we think the Trends list is, what it represents and how it works, that we can presume to hold it accountable when we think it is "wrong?" What are these algorithms, and what do we want them to be? …
Why the Occupy Movements Do Not Lack Leadership
Despite the (not undeserved) hype about the role of social media in various occupy movement, I first heard about Occupy Wall Street from a traditional face-to-face encounter with my roommate. Bryce gave me the basics (Adbusters-instigated, Twitter-facilitated protest in Zoccotti Square) and suggested we check it out. If I'm honest, my first encounter with the …
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Cyborgs are for lovers!
Confession: I love cyborgs. I first read Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" as an undergraduate (in Anna Joy Springer's experimental writing class, a course that has had lingering impacts on me, my writing and my reading ever since) and although I didn't understand all that much of what Haraway was saying, I loved it. It was …
My summer internship: On finding gender
I showed up at NERD with a set of questions about the relationship between making physical things, producing information, and being part of a community of peers that I thought I could answer by looking at food blogs. I knew only a little about food bloggers so I decided I had better start with macro-level …
Social Media Collective 