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 […]
Lotus Spreadsheets – The Killer App of the Reagan Revolution – Part 1
The PC-based spreadsheet created a new visualization process that combined financial calculation with interactive manipulation in such a way as to help create a new financial-based economic dynamism. It is this combination of financial deregulation and technological innovation that created the trajectory of digital money-capital and enshrined the legacy of the Reagan Revolution.
Reviewing Castells’ Global Automaton
In my long-term quest to find some answers as to what constitutes the techno-informational framework of the global financial system, I ran across Manuel Castells’ description of the “Automaton” a number of years ago. He wrote a chapter called “Information Technology and Global Capitalism” in Global Capitalism (2000) where he made some linkages between the […]
The Surveilling Eye of Global Financial News
Surveillance of the world is considered an important function of media systems and plays a unique role in the financial industry. Furthermore, it is important to place the analysis of financial news within the political context of a larger techno-structural environment of global financial trading that works to discipline countries, companies and people around the world. The implications of this global web have been amplified by the extraordinary volume and velocity of the system that sees tens of trillions of dollars of trades transacted every day.
JFK’s Contribution to Global Communications
On November 22, 1963, shortly after noon, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he rode in a motorcade through downtown Dallas. Although he was only president for three years, he had an extraordinary influence on the development of our modern technological age, especially the rise (literally) of global communications and the fulfillment of Clarke’s vision.
The Network is the Computer – UNIX and the SUN (Stanford University Network) Workstation
When computers began using “third generation” integrated circuit technology, processing speeds took a giant leap forward, and new computer languages and applications were enabled. From the time-sharing initiative by General Electric in the early sixties came BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) that allowed a new class of non-engineers and scientists to program the computer […]
Apollo 13: The Write Stuff
The cybernetic process of guiding a spacecraft to the Moon is exemplified by some clever F/X and acting, but more than that it tells the story of a certain break with “reality” and a new trust in the techniques and instrumentalities of hyperreal simulation.
WSJ in the Ether about Inventing the Internet
Controversy emerged recently with Gordon Crovitz’s opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Who Really Invented the Internet?” Crovitz’s article is part of the backlash to President Obama’s somewhat poorly phrased speech but nonetheless accurate assertion, “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet.”
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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
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- digital monetarism
- digital spreadsheets
- disruption
- dystopian economies
- educational innovations
- electric money
- enabling frameworks
- enterprise systems
- financial news
- financial technology
- food policy and security
- futurists
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- political economies in sf
- political economy of media
- science and technology studies
- sensing technologies
- smart new deal
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- sustainable development
- 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