Information & Culture just published (paywall; or free pre-print) an article I wrote about “night modes,” in which I try to untangle the history of light, screens, sleep loss, and circadian research. If we navigate our lives enmeshed with technologies and their attendant harms, I wanted to know how we make sense of our orientation …
Tag: technology
Beyond bugs and features: A case for indeterminacy
In 1979, Harvard professors Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin identified what they saw as a shortcoming in American and English evolutionary biology. It was, they argued, dominated by an adaptationist program.[1] By this, they meant that it embraced a misguided atomization of an organism’s traits, which then “are explained as structures optimally designed by …
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New anthology on media technologies, bringing together STS and Communication perspectives
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 …
Challenges for Health in a Networked Society
In February, I had the great fortune to visit the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as part of their "What's Next Health" series. I gave a talk raising a series of critical questions for those working on health issues. The folks at RWJF have posted my talk, along with an infographic of some of the challenges …
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Addressing Human Trafficking: Guidelines for Technological Interventions
Two years ago, when I started working on issues related to human trafficking and technology, I was frustrated by how few people recognized the potential of technology to help address the commercial sexual exploitation of children. With the help of a few colleagues at Microsoft Research, I crafted a framework document to think through the …
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Reflections on Fear in a Networked Society
I've been trying to work through some ideas on how fear operates in a networked society. At Webstock in New Zealand, I gave a talk called "Culture of Fear + Attention Economy = ?!?!" Building on this, I gave a talk at SXSW called "The Power of Fear in Networked Publics." While my thinking in …
Social Media Collective 