A Digital Bobsled in ICT4D
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Aug 29) A Digital Bobsled in ICT4D. apennings.com https://apennings.com/digital-geography/a-digital-bobsled-in-ict4d/ Introduction Cool Runnings (1992) (“peaceful journey”) is not simply as an underdog sports story, but as a parable about entering a technological world without having to become culturally or economically identical to the countries that built it.[1] My earlier […]
I Can See Clearly Now: Jimmy Cliff, Cool Runnings, and the Case for Appropriate Development
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Aug 20) I Can See Clearly Now: Jimmy Cliff, Cool Runnings, and the Case for Appropriate Development. apennings.com https://apennings.com/political-economy-of-media/i-can-see-clearly-now-jimmy-cliff-cool-runnings-and-the-case-for-appropriate-development/ Introduction I often use a song to set a theme for my classes. For my EST 230 – Information and Communications Technology for Sustainable Development, I chose Jimmy Cliff’s […]
Blockchains as the Telecom Substrate of a SACT-AI Bancor/ICU System
Citation APA (7th Edition) Pennings, A.J. (2026, Jun 26) Blockchains as the Telecom Substrate of a SACT-AI Bancor/ICU System. apennings.com https://apennings.com/characteristics-of-digital-media/from-wires-to-ledgers-blockchains-as-the-telecommunications-substrate-of-a-sact-ai-bancor-icu-system/ Introduction In a SACT-AI Bancor / International Clearing Union (ICU) system, blockchains are not merely financial ledgers, they function as the synchronization layer of the global economy. It is a new kind of telecom […]
Marshall McLuhan and the Age of the LLM: The Medium is the Prompt
By outsourcing the labor of synthesis, drafting, and dialectical reasoning to an external electronic oracle, we are rewriting our internal cognitive architecture. The spreadsheet turned the economy into a quantitative model; the LLM is turning culture itself into an automated, editable simulation.
McLuhan’s Media Tetrad Applied to Digital Spreadsheet Logic and the Introduction of AI
Unlike approaches that focus only on the intended uses of technology, the tetrad examines how media reshape human perception, social organization, and power relations through four interconnected questions.
Poovey, Giddens, and Goody on the Significance of Double-Entry Book-Keeping for the Modern Economy
Poovey’s account is more deconstructive, exposing how balance rhetorically depoliticizes economic knowledge (aligning with critical histories of facticity), whereas Giddens’s is more reconstructive, treating bookkeeping as an enabling infrastructure for modernity’s dynamic time-space power without deeply interrogating its ideological masking function. Together, they illuminate how the SACT Stack’s foundational “balance” operates as both a rhetorical/epistemological achievement (Poovey) and a temporal-storage/power mechanism (Giddens), sustaining the apparent objectivity and global synchronization of spreadsheet capitalism’s endless ledgers.
Spreadsheets and the Modern Fact made Operational
Spreadsheets are the modern fact made operational. They inherit the rhetorical power of double-entry bookkeeping, extend it through computation, and enforce it through synchronization. To understand spreadsheet capitalism, is not to reject numbers, but to remember that their authority was built, not given.
The Ghost in the Grid: Interpretants and Calculable Traces in Spreadsheet Capitalism
The spreadsheet, as a computational medium, transforms heterogeneous material realities into standardized symbolic inscriptions. To understand this transformation, semiotic theory offers two powerful but distinct conceptual tools: Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion of the interpretant and Jacques Derrida’s concept of the trace. While Peirce emphasizes the generative continuity of meaning through interpretive mediation, Derrida foregrounds the structural absence and deferral that inhabit all signification. Taken together, these frameworks illuminate how the numbers and letters populating financial spreadsheets function as representations of the messy, contingent world.
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About Me
Professor (full) at State University of New York (SUNY) Korea since 2016. Research Professor for Stony Brook University. 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 global political economy
You can reach me at:
anthony.pennings@gmail.com
apennings70@gmail.com
anthony.pennings@sunykorea.ac.kr
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