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
(or, interactive art & entertainment: a short tour) OK, dear readers, it's time for some BuzzFeed-style content here on the Social Media Collective. You want to understand digital media, right? You occasionally like to play a game, right? I'm pleased to revisit and refresh my list of games that quickly demonstrate what is possible in digital gaming. Sort …
Several years ago, I introduced a class at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism which was designed to encourage scholars in training to think more deeply about the public-facing dimensions of their work. I wanted to call the class, "How to Be a Public Intellectual," but this is a university, …
Continue reading my latest syllabus: “Public Intellectuals: Theory and Practice”
Watch Mary Gray's talk at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society where she discusses her findings from a two-year collaborative study on crowdwork --“the process of taking tasks that would normally be delegated to an employee and distributing them to a large pool of online workers, the ‘crowd,’ in the form of an open call." In …
My collaborator, Siddharth Suri, and I have spent nearly 2 years studying a nascent but rapidly expanding piece of the platform economy that we call “crowdwork.” Right now, crowdwork — millions of people around the world working in concert with programmers issuing tasks to an API — fuels automation of the internet. This work requires people to contribute responses, …
This post originally appeared on Cyborgology as part of its "Small Town Internet" issue. Since I was thinking about several SMC members' research while writing this, and worked on this post while co-writing with Jessa Lingel, I thought it apropos to post it here as well. There's a lot more to be said about rural …
Continue reading My First Year On The Rural Side of the Digital Divide
Nick Seaver and I have put together a list we wanted to share. It is an attempt to collect and categorize a growing critical literature on algorithms as social concerns. The work spans sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, geography, communication, media studies, and legal studies, among others. Our aim was to catalog the emergence of “algorithms” as …
On September 9, 2015, the Data & Society Research Institute hosted Platformation, a one-day summit that brought together a diverse group of stakeholders to discuss platform economies and the labor that fuels them. Participants included platform business leaders, researchers, labor organization representatives, policy experts, and those contributing labor to this growing sector. You can read the full …
Continue reading Platformation: Greetings from the future of work!
Earlier in the month, the new Sage journal Social Media & Society announced a special issue curated and written by Culture Digitally scholars. SMC's own Tarleton Gillespie edited and wrote the issue's Introduction along with Hector Postigo, and the two collaborators blogged about the special issue here, here, and here. A number of articles in this issue grapple with new ways of understanding the relationship between technology …
The Pacific Standard magazine has been running a series where academics, business leaders, technologists and labor leaders have contributed to the discussion on the most consequential changes in labor and the future of work. We invite you to read the contributions from members of our SMC family. "Caring for the Crowdworker going at it alone" …
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