Anthony J. Pennings, PhD

WRITINGS ON DIGITAL ECONOMICS, ENERGY STRATEGIES, AND GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS

Lotus 1-2-3 – A Star is Born

Just as VisiCalc helped Apple’s sales, Lotus 1-2-3’s popularity helped IBM’s PC sales take off. Launched in the late summer of 1981, IBM faced stiff competition in the Apple II and a host of new computer manufacturers using the CP/M operating system. Although IBM had name recognition, particularly in the business world, it still needed the kind of practical application that would justify its expense. Lotus 1-2-3 would supply the incentive to put a PC on top of every desk in the business world.

How Schindler Used the List

Innovators in bureaucracy and population technology, the Germans were leaders in the use of telegraph and teletype communications to control their national administrators and armies. By the turn of the century, the Germans had transformed British “political arithmetic” into “statistics” (state-istics), numerical techniques in the service of State and population administration. They used the tabulating machines and punch cards designed for the US census to identify and control the population. These techniques were taken up by the SS in their management of the Final Solution.

Digital Spreadsheets – The Time-Space Power of Accounting, Part 1

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. While the spreadsheet handles various types of information, accounting information is some of the most effective and its power is accelerated by an organization’s information technology.

Digital Spreadsheets – Part 5 – Ease and Epistemology

In this post, I discuss how spreadsheets in conjunction with other forms of financial and managerial representation not only produce the ongoing flows of knowledge that run the modern economy but have created a technologically-enhanced epistemology for garnering resources, registering value, and allocating wealth.

Lotus Spreadsheets – Part 4 – Symbols and Lists as Administrative Technologies

Spreadsheets like Lotus 1-2-3 were designed to facilitate organizational coordination and activity by setting up relationships between symbolic and material resources. Using a grid structure, spreadsheets achieve their efficacy by combining the following components: symbolic representation; lists; tables; cells and; formulas. In this post I will examine how the first two components, symbolic representations and […]

Thirty-Five Activities Media Degrees Should Anticipate in Digital Work Environments

I have been working on some projects looking at curriculum that combine media and business. Below is a list of activities that are prevalent in work environments organized around digital technologies. 1) Managing creative work and digital innovation 2) Assessing digital threats and opportunities 3) Understanding global media and cultural trends 4) Marketing content and […]

Steven Levy’s “A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge”

I have been developing a number of posts on the digital spreadsheet as a meaning-making technology. They have had a major impact on organizations and forming what I call spreadsheet capitalism; the particular way organizations have been enabled by this technology since the late 1970s. Spreadsheets have become central to the information practices, including accounting and financial, that have facilitated the acceleration, coordination, and globalization of the modern political economy.

Lotus Spreadsheets – Part 3 – Identifying the Components of a Transformative Tool

I begin a formal analysis of the spreadsheet by identifying some of its component parts, a type of Cartesian reductionism, but with the intent of showing also how they all work together to create a powerful organizational and productivity tool. Spreadsheets combine a number of technologically enhanced cognition features to create, manipulate and visualize diagrammatic rationalities. In other words, spreadsheets not only appraise aspects of reality, but are constitutive technologies that can shape perceptions and empower control over the lived experiences of people and the resources that support them.

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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.