Anthony J. Pennings, PhD

WRITINGS ON DIGITAL ECONOMICS, ENERGY STRATEGIES, AND GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS

Thomas Edison Builds the Universal Ticker-Tape Machine

Electricity was being harnessed to expand finance’s reach throughout the country and across the seas. New networks of telegraphed information and news added both layers of certainty and volatility to Wall Street and for investors around the world. Edison’s inventions and patents helped solidify these technological innovations and the financial practices and provided the means for him to escape New York and set up his laboratories and facilities for creative innovation and manufacture.

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.

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.

COVID-19 and US Economic Policy Responses

In this post, I look at how the Federal Reserve and Congress addressed the economic ramifications of the emerging pandemic in 2020.

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.

FROM NEW DEAL TO GREEN NEW DEAL, Part 1: Roosevelt Saves Capitalism

“I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.” – FDR in the summer of 1932. Recent discussions about a proposed Green New Deal encouraged me to review some of my notes on the original New Deal and if it could provide relevant insights into our current situation. The New […]

The Spreadsheet that Fueled the Telecom Boom – and Bust

“I had built a model in an Excel spreadsheet that translated what our sales forecast was into how much traffic we would expect to see,” he says. “And so I just assigned variables for those various parameters, and then said we can set those variables to whatever we think is appropriate.” – Tom Stluka, Worldcom […]

Spreadsheets and the Rhetoric of Ratios

In this post, I examine the figuring of ratios as a conceptual technique for constructing systems of understanding in the modern political economy. The ratio is an important mathematical device for reality construction in a wide range of activities, but their role in financial and management environments are especially notable. These type of ratios are […]

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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

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