Lotus 1-2-3, Temporal Finance, and the Rise of Spreadsheet Capitalism
One of the books I read during my PhD years was Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco (1989), about the $25 billion leveraged buyout (LBO) of the iconic conglomerate (tobacco/snacks/) by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR). An LBO is the purchase of a company using large amounts of short-term debt and […]
The Framing Power of Digital Spreadsheets
The power of framing in digital spreadsheets arises from the ability to define what data is included, how it is processed by functions or formulas, and the visual or numerical emphasis placed on specific inputs and outcomes. Spreadsheets exert framing power through selecting and prioritizing data, formula logic and embedded assumptions, standardization and norms, simplifying complex realities, and selective presentation of results.
The Digital Spreadsheet: Interface to Space-Time, and Beyond?
The digital spreadsheet, a visual interface, uses language and numerical information organized for intelligibility and uses media and mathematical formulas to initiate horizontal and vertical causation. The spreadsheet interfaces the conscious agent with space-time and the quantum realm to operate in the space-time reality and to “summon” new realities through the acts of writing and measurement.
Technostructural Stages of Global ICT for Development (ICT4D)
This post explores and outlines the following stages or phases of economic and social development utilizing information and communications technologies. The ICT acronym has emerged as a popular moniker, especially in international usage, for the digital technology revolution and is often combined with “development” to form ICT4D.
VisiCalc and the Rise of the PC Spreadsheet
The big computer mainframes of the 1960s and even the minicomputers of the time were not accessible enough to provide the type of direct experience needed to play with the numbers by making multiple changes and producing various scenarios that would make the spreadsheets so valuable later on. It was the microprocessor-enabled PCs that made possible the successive lineage of major digital spreadsheet applications – VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, Microsoft’s Excel, and Google Sheets that transformed modern organizational practices.
The Techno-Epistemology of Databases, Part I
Techno-epistemology refers to knowledge produced, categorized, and certified within a particular technological context. In particular, it asks how the characteristics of the technology shape the ways of perceiving, recording, and organizing knowledge. Database technology and management are at the nexus of systematizing knowledge in the organization.
Digital Spreadsheets as Remediated Technologies
The digital spreadsheet was designed as an electronic document in which data was arranged in the rows and columns of a matrix and could be manipulated and used in calculations. It combined listing, tabling, and other formulaic calculations to create a new imaginative technology that transformed modern finance and the management of organizations – large, and especially the small.
Digital Spreadsheets – Part 5 – Numeracy and the Power of Zero
The zero is an extraordinary cognitive invention that has been central to the quantitative workings of the spreadsheet. In conjunction with Indo-Arabic numerals and double-entry accounting techniques, the spreadsheet has been crucial to the rise of modern capitalism and that peculiar historical manifestation, the contemporary corporation.
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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.
You can reach me at:
apennings70@gmail.com
anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr
About me
Writings by Category
- artificial intelligence
- automatrix
- books and films
- characteristics of digital media
- creative cities
- creative industries
- crisis communications
- cultural Industries
- data analytics and meaning
- democratic political economies
- digital coordination
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- digital geography
- digital media economics
- digital media management
- digital monetarism
- digital spreadsheets
- disruption
- dystopian economies
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- electric money
- enabling frameworks
- enterprise systems
- financial news
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- futurists
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- how IT came to rule the world
- intellectual property
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- political economies in sf
- political economy of media
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- sensing technologies
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- technologies of meaning
- technology management
- telecom policy and net neutrality
- telegraphic political economy
- telelearn/telework
- the cold war
- the smith effect
- uncategorized
- visual literacy and rhetoric
