The feeble belly of internet Lately, digital activist, American scholar and journalist Ethan Zuckerman complained about his past as supporter of what he defines the “Internet' s original sin”, namely exploitation of advertising as business model to start and manage online services. Although he had many fellows, the present director of MIT Center for Civic Media has a point to blame himself. In 1995 Zuckerman worked and implemented the so hated ad pop-ups, those web pages full of advertising messages that, during our browsing, suddenly occupy all our vision …
Long Thoughts
The jobs conundrum
Labour crisis and technological unemployment The social and economic changes have always animated modern era, and, since the half of Seventeenth century, they often were so radical we used the term "revolution" to evidence the need of a deep existential readaptation for people life. The problematic relationship between jobs and technological innovation, that cyclically arises when a relevant crisis affects production and consumption models, is also an old story. The American economist John Maynard Keynes thought of it as inescapable phenomenon, coining the term …
The digital re-mediation of sociability
danah boyd and the adolescent probes Describing the socio-cultural context in which communication technologies are situated and used is an evident merit of danah boyd, a very polyedric American social researcher, herself digital native, scholar and professionist - at moment Principal Researcher at Microsoft. Consequently, her works are not easily summarizable through slogans. In the case of her last work, a book gathering a long series of researches on teens' sociability, the warning comes immediately from the title. In effect, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of …
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Algo-rithms
Limits, enterprises, and accountability of cultural software A recent ad campaign promoted by UN and created to warn about worldwide spread of sexist and discriminatory opinions regarding female population has been based on Google searching functions. More precisely, it focuses on suggestions furnished by autofilling function after some words as “women should ...” have been introduced. Both (supposedly) based on frequently searching operations and recognized textual combinations of internet contents, the algorithm showed all stereotyped ideas running in the world. In ad …
The “Real-time” of advertising
From the crisis of control to the turn of hypercontrol One of the most interesting thesis on marketing and advertising explains how their rise spread from a reaction to an increasing state of lack of control. In the XIX century a huge industrial push increased enormously a productive capacity that, suddenly, had to wide its selling horizon - and, as result, the terms of consumption. Marketing and advertising engaged themselves on how to match producer and consumer needs at large scale. After some centuries, we can say that marketing gained esteem and dignity regarding its …