Licensing
'internet' Tag
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Real, Virtual Communities: A Response to Brian Williams
June 8, 2008Brian Williams talked about how this year’s primary season has shown that even in the age of the Internet, we still have a longing for real communities. I take issue with his use of “virtual community” and claim that most political communities are virtual.
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Memetic Inkblots
June 3, 2008I explore the memetic inkblot, which refers to units of cultural information that have effectively no singular semiotic value and therefore serve as a psychosocial indicator. In other words, they are so vague and open to interpretation that you can learn a lot about someone by asking someone to give a simple definition of them.
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A Communicative Ethnography of Argumentative Strategies in a Wikipedian Content Dispute
March 28, 2008This presentation was adapted from a chapter in my Senior thesis on Wikipedia’s legal system that focused on a dispute over the inclusion of images of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in an article about him, using a methodology of communicative ethnography. Most who opposed the image were not familiar with Wikipedia’s unique method of content [...]
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The Wikipedian Discourse: A Foucauldian Archaeology
December 20, 2007This paper is a Foucauldian account of power relations as expressed through discourse in the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia.
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There Is No Cabal: An Investigation into Wikipedia’s Legal Subculture
May 31, 2007An investigation into the community formed by small number of Wikipedia contributors who care enough to decide how, at some level, Wikipedia is run. The work discusses identity, communication, and organizational hierarchy in this subculture.
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Senior Thesis: Democracy in Wikipedia
May 10, 2007My thesis studied the legal culture of Wikipedia to examine the law through stories and histories, giving the reader a sense of not only what the Wikipedian legal system is, but also what fundamental assumptions the community makes in utilizing such a system.
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Response: Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City by William Mitchell
January 29, 2007In his book Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, William Mitchell describes how information technology – specifically digital, wireless networks which are accessed primarily through portable devices – fundamentally changes how we interact with others. More than anything else, “[c]onnectivity had become the defining characteristic of our twenty-first-century urban condition” (11). For Mitchell, [...]
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Web Design: Blueprints on the CSS Zen Garden
May 18, 2006This was a CSS stylesheet I wrote for the CSS Zen Garden, which is a really cool concept in web design. There is a standard HTML page in which all the content is wrapped up in div tags, and the idea is to write a CSS stylesheet that makes it pretty. Mine was based on [...]
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Notions of Identity Liberation in Virtual Gaming Communities
May 5, 2006The vast worlds of MMORPGs seem close to postmodern theories of identity, as a player is able to radically constitute their on-line self at will. Despite this, these virtual gaming communities should not be seen as safe spaces in which a subject can realize their true (or ideal) self.
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Open Source Software: The Newest Specter?
November 23, 2005Corporate adoption of open source software should not be viewed as antithetical to capitalism; rather, it is an example of corporations co-opting Communism to become more capitalist.