MMT in a Post-Covid-19 Environment
We hear the term “printing money” a lot, usually by gold or bitcoin enthusiasts who believe in establishing strict financial constraints. By establishing “hard money” and limiting the quantity of money in an economy, they hope to see their assets rise in value while keeping prices down. Certainly, governments do print some of their money for public use, but the preponderance of funds are entries in digital ledger accounts.
Analyzing YouTube Channels
We are pushing the realms of media analysis here by taking film and television studies and applying it to a new visual medium – YouTube.
US Technology Diplomacy
I’d like to cover three areas about US technology diplomacy. First, I want to talk about America’s domestic renewal. Then I will address some of the major US institutions managing technology diplomacy. The State Department has the prerogative for taking diplomatic leadership but the USTR and Commerce Department are also involved. Lastly, I want to end with some comments on “norms” in multilateral technology diplomacy, particularly the “securitization” of cyber technology.
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.
The North-South Politics of Global News Flows
This research argues that the road for the international Internet and e-commerce was substantially paved by the attempts to free up the global flows of financial news and information needed for the new regime of digital monetarism.
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.
From Gold to G-20: Flexible Currency Rates and Global Power
When British author Ian Fleming published the James Bond spy novel, Goldfinger in 1959, the world was locking into a new framework for managing global trade and foreign exchange transactions. The New Deal’s Bretton Woods agreements tied participating currencies into a fixed exchange rate with the US dollar that itself was tied to $35 for […]
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