Anthony J. Pennings, PhD

WRITINGS ON DIGITAL ECONOMICS, ENERGY STRATEGIES, AND GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS

Building Dystopian Economies in Facebook’s Metaverse

Strangely relevant to the new emergence of virtual environments like Facebook’s Metaverse, the talk was held in downtown New York City at the Woolworth Building, known as the “Cathedral of Commerce” when it was built in 1913. The location was strangely appropriate given the topic, a wrap-up of a year-long project at New York University on Second Life. The project involved an animation class taught by Mechthild Schmidt-Feist, and my class, the Political Economy of Digital Media. I still have the tee-shirt my students gave me that says “Got Linden?” a reference to Second Life’s currency, the Linden.

Hypertext, Ad Inventory, and the Use of Behavioral Data

A new advertising environment emerged with the Internet and its click environment. The hypertext system, with its global connections to “new inventory” of browser-view-able webpage content divided into multiple sections of advertising potential, started a new era of personalizable “banner” ads. An offshoot of the ad economy emerged powerfully with keyword search and auctioning, exemplified by Google. This post discusses how the online ad economy emerged and became the basis of a new means of economic production based on the wide-scale collection of data and its processing into prediction products.

Show-Biz: The Televisual Re-mediation of the Modern Global Economy

Media industries “show” business and finance through various camera, editing, and special effects techniques, drawing in data from many sources and presenting them on different windows of high-resolution screens. These techniques create ways of seeing and showing the economy. Consequently, they influence public opinion as well as investment and trading strategies that shape global, local, and national economic activities and investment patterns.

Will Offshore Wind Power Print Money?

The economics of offshore wind energy are very much like media economics – high upfront costs and low marginal costs. Wind power requires major capital influx to set up but once operational, the wind is free. Lubrication and other maintenance is needed at times but as long as the wind is blowing, electricity and thus money is being created.

Five Generations of Wireless Technology

The term “generations” has been applied to wireless technology classifications as a way to refer to the major disruptions and innovations in the state of mobile technology and associated services. These innovations include the move to data and the Internet protocols associated with convergence of multiple forms of communications media (cable, mobile, wireline) and the wide array of services that are becoming increasingly available on portable devices like laptops and smartphones. We are now on the cusp of the 5th generation rollout of wireless services with intriguing implications for enterprise mobility, “m-commerce,” public safety and a wide array of new entertainment and personal productivity services.

Digital Disruption in the Film Industry – Gains and Losses – Part 2: Non-Linear Editing

I examine the transformation of post-production practices with the advent of Non-linear Editing (NLE) and digital-enabled special effects (F/X), paying particular attention to the introduction of the Avid NLE. These technologies came about when computer micro-processing power was sufficiently miniaturized, and software applications became efficient enough for immediate interaction.

US INTERNET POLICY, PART 2: THE SHIFT TO BROADBAND

This post is second in a series that I am producing during the COVID-19 pandemic about the importance of telecommunications policy in ensuring the widespread availability of affordable high-speed Internet access. Teaching online and working from home have gone from fringe activities to be central components of life. As we move to a Smart New […]

US Internet Policy, Part 1: The Rise of ISPs

Much of the early success of the Internet in the USA can be attributed to the emergence of a unique organizational form, the Internet Service Provider or “ISP,” which became the dominant provider of Internet and broadband services in the 1990s. These organizations resulted from a unique set of regulatory directives that pushed the Internet’s […]

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  • About Me

    Professor at State University of New York (SUNY) Korea since 2016. Moved to Austin, Texas in August 2012 to join the Digital Media Management program at St. Edwards University. Spent the previous decade on the faculty at New York University teaching and researching information systems, digital economics, and strategic communications.

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    apennings70@gmail.com
    anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr

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    The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of my employers, past or present.