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 …
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 …
Liquid computing
Sometimes, developments and analysis connect themselves again, traveling through the same metaphors in which, in the meantime, our lives (deeply) are unfolding ... References Gruman, G., 2014, “Welcome to the next tech revolution: Liquid computing”, in Infoworld.com, July 15, 2014. Petullà, L., 2008, Media e computer liquidi, Milano, Lampi di Stampa. …
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 …
[Read more...] about The digital re-mediation of sociability
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 …