A Digital Story about Economics and Health
Posted on | December 23, 2010 | No Comments
Busy with grading today but I liked the combination of story-telling and data visualization in this video. Hans Rosling is a doctor from Sweden who has done a lot of work on paralytic diseases in developing countries.
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications.
Tags: data visualization > Hans Rosling
Susan Crawford on US Broadband Policy, Net Neutrality and the Comcast-NBCU merger
Posted on | December 21, 2010 | No Comments
Here is the video of Susan Crawford’s talk at New York University on November 29, 2010. Professor Crawford was recently the Special Assistant to the President for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy.
Notes from Alex Goldman
Some relevant articles to today’s FCC decision.
MSNBC
‘Open’ Internet just a pipe dream
Paid Content
FCC Pushes Through Net Neutrality—And Draws Fire From Right And Left
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications.
Tags: Alex Goldman > Net Neutrality > Susan Crawford > telecom policy and net neutrality
Best IT/Media Policy Books
Posted on | December 11, 2010 | No Comments
Do we really know the impact technology is having in our lives? Sometimes I wonder if social media, as important as it is, is shielding us from the other important influences IT is having in our lives from the financial crisis we are recovering from, the way we conduct war and espionage, and the structural problems inherent in our economy. I would say our educational systems, and the news media, and certainly our cultural institutions are still behind in understanding and conceptualizing ways to deal with the problems associated with our new information and communication technologies. Luckily we do have some good thinkers who are writing and making contributions to this area.
So I wanted to reproduce this list by Adam Thierer on The 10 Most Important Info-Tech Policy Books of 2010. Have a quick look at the list below and then link to the post at the Technology Liberation Front for a good description and links to buy.
- Tim Wu – The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
- Kevin Kelly – What Technology Wants
- Jaron Lanier – You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
- Nicholas Carr – The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
- Clay Shirky – Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
- Barbara van Schewick – Internet Architecture and Innovation
- Milton Mueller — Networks and States: The Global Politics of Internet Governance
- Ronald J. Deibert, John G. Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, and Jonathan Zittrain (eds.) – Access Controlled: The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace
- Richard A. Clarke and Robert K. Knake – Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It
- Adrian Johns – Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
Honorable Mentions:
You might want to also take a look at their list of the best books of the 2000s.
Tags: Barbara van Schewick > Clay Shirky > Jaron Lanier > John Nichols > Jonathan Zittrain > Milton Mueller > Nick Bilton > Richard A. Clarke > Rob Frieden > Robert W. McChesney > Tim Wu
Informating the Subject: Reflecting on Zuboff’s Future of Power and Work
Posted on | December 10, 2010 | No Comments
Shoshana Zuboff’s In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988) was one of the more interesting inquiries into the processes of computerization and electronic communications to emerge out of the 1980s. While suffering from a number of deficiencies that will be discussed later, it nonetheless represented a serious and significant contribution to the organizational and sociological discussion of the new information technologies. One of her contributions, the verb “informating,” provided important insights into the key practice of the new technologies and the construction of modern identities in a cybernetic age.
Applied in pre-Internet computerized environments, informating is the process of registering a wide range of information related to computer tasks. She both connected and compared informating to the processes of automating. Computers are often involved in the processes of automating – the process of replacing human activities and work with machinery. Zuboff distinguished informating from automating because “it produces a voice that symbolically renders events, objects, and processes so that they become visible, knowable, and shareable in a new way.”[1] Consequently, informating is an effective concept for approaching that vast writing project which characterizes the politics of electronic modernity and whose activities determine and aggregate the facts of social existence.
Informating can be a vehicle to understand and politicize the constitution of the self and identity in the modern information society. Like other textual practices, computerized informating is implicated in the ways individuals both know themselves as well as the way they are situated in modernity’s broad range of institutional structures and their disciplines and eligibilities. The data collection processes involved in computerization are significant in that they lead to an accumulation of information that is intimately related to the individual and yet are essential, in aggregate and other forms of “scrubbing,” for the continuance of modern bureaucracy. As they monitor the various activities of everyday life, they also keep a record that can be accessed or fed into larger databases across the Internet. For example, in a supermarket, your grocery’s barcodes are read and fed into a computer. Not only does it tabulate the price but enters the information into other files, database lists for inventory, finance, and marketing. Informating stores data about activities, placing it in files which can later be analysed, examined, and graded.
Her concern with the codification of the work environment into machine-compatible texts opened up a range of inquiry that is applicable to other facets of modern life. Drawing on what she terms the dual capacity of information technology: its ability to both automate and informate productive activities; she was able to analyze how technology changes the practices of work, managerial authority, and the supervision of employees. Although her main concern was how industrial intelligence has been removed from the site of the body and relocated within the electronic space of cybernetic control and communication, her suppositions have applicability elsewhere.
Identities are rooted the institutional and textual structures of society. They are mediated and produced through the predominant modes of signification and understanding and informating provides important data sets which can be referred to again for the examination and further training of the subjectivity of individuals. She drew on Foucault, who focused in part on the procedures of examination that were a crucial strategy for the exercise of modern power. The examination works to hold their subjects of attention “in a mechanism of objectification.”[2] Examination turns the economies of surveillance and visibility into an operation of control. It proceeds by the textualization, the writing of visibility according to a set of prescribed protocols and knowledges. Under this official gaze, the subject becomes a slate to be evaluated, classified, and registered in the official system of files considered by what Max Weber considered to be so important for the organization of bureaucracy.” The examination that places individuals in a field of surveillance also situates them in a network of writing; it engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them.”[3] The file is a prescripted event in the sense that it has an agenda and not just a loose collection of random documents.
These cybernetic identities are characteristic of the information age. The proliferation of multimediated information is changing the way people operate in the arenas of their lives. Furthermore, since information technology is largely developed out of institutional requirements, it is inherently political. Cybernetic identities are connected to the great bureaucratic spaces of credit, education, and production. They are the result of types of observation, classification, and registration. They result from a penetrating gaze which codes, disciplines, and files under the appropriate heading. Actions lose their actuality, and bodies lose their corporeality.
Mark Poster used Foucault to think about the consequences of computer databases on subjectivity and its multiplication of selves to feed an extensive array of organizational files. He was less concerned with databases as “an invasion of privacy, as a threat to a centered individual, but as the multiplication of the individual, the constitution of an additional self, one that may be acted upon to the detriment of the ‘real’ self without that ‘real’ self ever being aware of what is happening.” The texture of postmodern subjectivity is dispersed among multiple sources of information production and storage. In The Mode of Information, he warned of the “destabilization of the subject,” a fixed self no more but rather one “multiplied by databases, dispersed by computer messaging and conferencing, decontextualized and reidentified by TV ads, dissolved and materialized continuously in the electronic transmission of symbols.”[4] In an age when Google wants to “organize the world’s information,” we are still trying to determine the implications of that multiplication of identity within the networks of institutional power.
Taking it to the world of the web and social media in this talk by Rachel Botsman, she makes the case for “collaborative consumption,” This is the sharing or exchanging of various goods and services, such as DVDs, power tools, etc. with absolute strangers because the informating capabilities of social media are able to track a person’s “reputation,” We saw this with eBay of course, and she expects it to be a major economic force as more and more people develop their reputation as a type of social currency. Which of course, it always has been.
Notes
[1] Zuboff, Shoshana. In the Age of the Smart Machine: the Future of Work and Power. New York: Basic, 1988. Print., p. 9.
[2] Rabinow, Paul, comp. The Foucault Reader. London: Penguin, 1991. Print., p. 200-201.
[3] Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990. Print.. p. 98
[4] Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1990. Print.. p. 15.
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Anthony J. Pennings, PhD is a professor of global media at Hannam University in South Korea. Previously, he taught at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas and was on the faculty of New York University from 2002-2012. He taught at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and was a Fellow at the East-West Center in Hawaii.
Tags: In the Age of the Smart Machine > Informating > Mark Poster > Shosana Zuboff
Advertising, E-Commerce and the Power of Search
Posted on | December 10, 2010 | No Comments
At the core of global e-commerce’s extraordinary potential is the power of search engines and the new advertising strategies they enable. Search engine based advertising has continued to increase rapidly and drive e-commerce with it. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported that Internet advertising revenues in the U.S. totalled nearly $6.5 billion during the third quarter of 2010, a 17% increase over the same period a year earlier.
Source: IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report/PwC (www.iab.net)
Advertisers have steadily moved to online marketing and advertising instead of traditional media outlets. Especially smaller businesses, often requiring stricter quantitative accountability for their expenditures in terms of how many people are viewing their ads, actual site visits and even directly quantifying sales in relation to their expenditure have combined advertising strategies with search capabilities, providing a powerful tool for small and large businesses as well as other organizations that need to reach out to customers and/or other targeted audiences.
Gateway sites that use specialized search engines and software-based “spiders” search the global infosphere cataloging information and responding nearly instantly to investigating queries with extraordinarily fast results. Google has climbed to the top of the search business and has capitalized on this success to become a major force in the web advertising business with over $20 billion in 2009 revenues, far outpacing the other advertising behemoths such as Omnicon and WPP.
What made Google so successful? Primarily it was an innovative method of ranking websites based on searching for links to that site. Google “crawls” the Internet using robotic “spiders” and uses PageRank, which assigns a numeric value how how significant a page is based on the links found to that site. It analyzes inbound and outbound links and uses a mathematical equation to determine the pages rank. This is something that a webmaster cannot tamper with to increase the website’s rank.
In fact, Google added a new twist this Fall. They changed their search algorithm when a online vendor claimed to the New York Times that the large number of complaints they were getting actually increased their page rank and consequently increased their profits.
Notes
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications.
WordPress Guru Skypes into NYU Class
Posted on | December 6, 2010 | No Comments
OK, so he is one of our own, but it doesn’t diminish Tony Zeoli‘s commitment to WordPress since its early days. Tony skyped in our Digital Media Management class last Thursday night to talk about WordPress, the open source blogging turned content management system increasingly being used by corporeals and corporations alike. WordPress is currently being used for some 12% of the top million websites according to an interview with its founder, Matt Mullenweg.
Anthony Zeoli
What started out as simple weblog software designed to simplify the creation and maintenance of blogs has turned into a web content publishing and management system that is powered by PHP, a general-purpose scripting language and MySQL, a relational database management system (RDBMS). WordPress is supported by a wide community of designers and programmers that has continued to improve its capabilities for personal or large-scale publishing with their focus on design aesthetics, publisher usability and web standards.
Zeoli is now the lead developer at the Reese Felts Newsroom at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications.
Tags: Anthony Zeoli > Matt Mullenweg > MySQL > PHP > Reese Felts Newsroom > Tony Zeoli > WordPress
Addressing Game Addiction
Posted on | December 2, 2010 | No Comments
SEOUL (AFP) – South Korea’s government is close to adopting a “Cinderella” law to ban youngsters from playing online games past midnight amid growing concerns about Internet addiction, officials said Thursday.
A bill to be submitted to parliament as early as this month will require South Korean online game companies to cut off services at midnight for users registered as younger than 16, the culture and family ministries said.
Digital Distribution and the Future of Publishing
Posted on | December 1, 2010 | No Comments
Digital distribution, the electronic transport of media content by streaming or downloading, is a substantial area of growth for e-commerce and looks to significantly impact the future of publishing.
A Major Trend
Digital distribution has already been a major influence on the sales of music, movies, games, and the sharing of user-generated content. Music downloads from sites such as Apple’s iTunes continue to challenge CDs for sales dominance. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) recently said that digital music purchases would account for one-quarter of all worldwide sales during 2010. In addition, movie services like NetFlix dominant the distribution of DVDs via a mail-order e-commerce platform and increasingly stream films and documentaries from their computer servers directly to consumer PCs.
Cable TV and Telcos are also providing the digital distribution of video content via their on-demand services, while YouTube.com provides a fascinating arena of user-generated content. The game business, which has surpassed the film industry recently in terms of total sales, also distributes many games digitally directly to PCs or video game consoles. News and informational content such as periodicals and magazines have also moved to the Internet, although their viability has been questioned. Will the new mobile devices provide the difference?
The iPad and the Future of Digital Publishing
With newly available devices such as Amazon’s wireless reading device called Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook, we can expect increased sales of digitally distributed publications. I already buy most of my books via the Kindle store but mainly to read on my Android-based cellphone.
Apple’s iPad has garnered first-mover advantage in the area of digital publishing, providing the technical environment, if not the business model for the future of newspapers and advertisements. Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin empire talked to media this morning about their new publication called “Project” on the iPad.
“Sadly for physically printed products, I think the future is in apps,” Branson told CNN.
Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems management, and global communications.
Tags: Digital distribution > International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) > iPad > Richard Branson > Virgin Media
Referencing this Material
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
- digital destruction
- digital geography
- digital media economics
- digital media management
- digital monetarism
- digital spreadsheets
- disruption
- dystopian economies
- educational innovations
- electric money
- enabling frameworks
- enterprise systems
- financial news
- financial technology
- food policy and security
- futurists
- geopolitical risk
- global communications
- global e-commerce
- health IT
- how IT came to rule the world
- intellectual property
- journalism
- meaning makers
- meaningful play
- media strategies
- mobile technologies
- multimedia
- political economies in sf
- political economy of media
- science and technology studies
- sensing technologies
- smart new deal
- social media
- space systems
- strategic communications
- 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
Pages
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