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.
Remediation and Spreadsheet Logic: Meaning and Certainty Through Hypermediacy?
The most important conclusion is that the spreadsheet creates a distinctive form of authenticity.
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.
Show-Biz: The Televisual Re-mediation of the Modern Global Economy
Media industries “show” business and finance through various camera, editing, and special effects techniques, drawing in data from many sources and presenting them on different windows of high-resolution screens. These techniques create ways of seeing and showing the economy. Consequently, they influence public opinion as well as investment and trading strategies that shape global, local, and national economic activities and investment patterns.
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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
About me
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