Anthony J. Pennings, PhD

WRITINGS ON DIGITAL ECONOMICS, ENERGY STRATEGIES, AND GLOBAL COMMUNICATIONS

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.

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.

YouTube Meaning-Creating (and Money-Making) Practices

Note: This is required reading for my Visual Rhetoric and IT class. Youtube has emerged as the primary global televisual medium, attracting about 1.3 billion viewers from countries around the world with over 5 billion videos watched every day. People suck up some 3.25 billion hours of YouTube videos each month and over ten thousand […]

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 […]

Apple’s GUI and the Creation of the Microsoft’s Excel Spreadsheet Application

Microsoft’s famous spreadsheet application, Excel, was originally designed for Apple’s Macintosh personal computer. This post explores the beginning years of the personal computer and its transition to its more modern interface pioneered by Apple and its Macintosh computer. This transition opened the way for new software innovations, particularly the development of the Excel spreadsheet application […]

Anchoring Television News

“The news is privileged discourse, invested with a special relation to the Real.” – [1] The news anchor is a finely tuned instrument for television performance. Unlike print journalism where disembodied letters of information suggest an objective third person, the televisual anchor is intimate and direct. The news broadcaster leads the viewer through the news […]

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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.