Category: technology
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Book Review: The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry)
The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry), By Siva Vaidhyanathan. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Google’s omnipresence has become something of a cultural meme, as it seeks to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” (Google 2012). Even Google has mocked of its own pervasiveness, with its 2009 April Fools prank, the “Brain…
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Building Community in Tag-Based Architecture
Since I only seem to write good things while I’m procrastinating, I’m going to spend another few hours avoiding revisions I need to do. First off: I recommend reading Mike Barthel’s recent essay at The Awl, What Are The Politics of The Internet? Though I don’t entirely agree with some of his conclusions, I think…
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Writing Interlude: Approaching “community”
The big writing roadblock, lately, has been understanding just what “community” is, and how it functions for the folks in my data set. Is it a social space? Is it an entity on its own? If you can “belong” to it, does that mean it functions like a collective membership category? If so, what are…
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Building a Vlogger Network on YouTube: A Visualization
One of the problems I’ve run across in working with YouTube is that its social network elements are tied us with its primary function as a platform for user-generate content (UGC). This content is also primarily user-filtered, based around the idea of “tags.” Presumably, a YouTube user “subscribes” to another’s videos because of the content.…