I'm thrilled to announce that our anthology, Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by myself with Pablo Boczkowski and Kirsten Foot, is now officially available from MIT Press. Contributors include Geoffrey Bowker, Finn Brunton, Gabriella Coleman, Gregory Downey, Steven Jackson, Christopher Kelty, Leah Lievrouw, Sonia Livingstone, Ignacio Siles, Jonathan Sterne, Lucy Suchman, and Fred Turner. We’ve secured permission to share the …
Tag: algorithms
Reddit, Mathematically the Anti-Facebook (+ other thoughts on algorithmic culture)
(or, Are We Social Insects?) I worried that my last blog post was too short and intellectually ineffectual. But given the positive feedback I've received, my true calling may be to write top ten lists of other people's ideas, based on conferences I attend. So here is another list like that. These are my notes …
Continue reading Reddit, Mathematically the Anti-Facebook (+ other thoughts on algorithmic culture)
Tumblr, NSFW porn blogging, and the challenge of checkpoints
After Yahoo's high-profile purchase of Tumblr, when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said that she would "promise not to screw it up," this is probably not what she had in mind. Devoted users of Tumblr have been watching closely, worried that the cool, web 2.0 image blogging tool would be tamed by the nearly two-decade-old search giant. One population of Tumblr …
Continue reading Tumblr, NSFW porn blogging, and the challenge of checkpoints
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? …
Guilt Through Algorithmic Association
You're a 16-year-old Muslim kid in America. Say your name is Mohammad Abdullah. Your schoolmates are convinced that you're a terrorist. They keep typing in Google queries likes "is Mohammad Abdullah a terrorist?" and "Mohammad Abdullah al Qaeda." Google's search engine learns. All of a sudden, auto-complete starts suggesting terms like "Al Qaeda" as the …
Social Media Collective 