Sublime

I am going to make the argument that the predominant form of the social web — that amalgam of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, forums, Reddit, Instagram — is an impoverished model for learning and research and that our survival as a species depends on us getting past the sweet, salty fat of “the web as conversation” and on to something more timeless, i... See more

(My 93-year-old mother has kept her subscription to the Washington Post strictly because she loves the crossword puzzles. I have shown her websites teeming with crossword puzzles, but she remains unmoved. My mother wants her bundle, and belongs to the last generation to do so.) Information sought a less grandiose, less industrial level of circulati

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Shifts in media distribution are changing society. I, like many, am concerned about the consequences. Our dialog was more civil and the country was easier to govern in before times. We will look back at the era of mass media nostalgically for sure. It feels like a fork in the road, either we find a set of rules to better govern this decentralized s... See more

Beyond international affairs, the theory of American exceptionalism also has implications for a political theory of networks. In contrast to Lovink, we maintain that in recent decades the processes of globalization have mutated from a system of control housed in a relatively small number of power hubs to a system of control infused into the materia

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The introduction of the “feed” in modern social media has been controversial. At its core, “algorithmic curation is ultimately about power — about who controls what we see and how we see it.” As our lawmakers now discuss this question on Capitol Hill, most of the discussion is centered around how we can “fix” the feed. However, our political and te... See more

It sounded like utopia to me, before I remembered that a key part of our digital infrastructure is run similarly. Wikipedia remains one of the most-visited sites on the web, and it is owned and managed by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation. It shows. Wikipedia has never tried to become more than it is. It never pivoted to video or remade itself&nbs

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In a speech delivered years ago, Ev Williams used agriculture as a metaphor to understand what’s possible on the Internet.

Agriculture was a tremendous invention – it got people fed and freed them to do many things. But agriculture – taken to the extreme in the pursuit of profit leads to a sick and obese population and industrialized farms with lit... See more

The information balance of power has changed, of course. A generation ago, the public could exist only as a passive audience. Information was dispensed on the industrial model: top down and one to many. That was the great age of the daily newspaper and famous anchormen on the model of Walter Cronkite. The advent of digital platforms, in a sense, cr

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