So given what’s going on* in Egypt and the Middle East, we in the West are fascinated by not so much revolutions and popular uprisings against dictatorial regimes, but an efficacious use of social media. Even Clinton is talking about the Internet as “the world’s town square”, and it seems that the old conversation about [...]
In an age of information overload, the history of Wikipedia’s co-evolving media use and governance model gives us a powerful lesson regarding the way in which the development of social structures and media technologies are fundamentally interrelated in the digital era.
This is a tentative article-length introduction to my thesis on Wikipedia. It is an attempt to analyze Wikipedia from an interdisciplinary perspective that tries to make problematic various assumptions, concepts, and relations that function quite well in the “real world” but are not well-suited to studying Wikipedia. I begin by talking about the nature of [...]
This panel was at Wikimania 2008, and featured James Forrester, Andrew Lih, Kat Walsh, and Charles Matthews. Everyone except for Lih is or has been on the Arbitration Committee, and this turned into a discussion about admins.
I 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.
Benjamin Wiker’s book on bad books throughout the ages is misinformed and makes a few critical errors in its analysis. Specifically, it ignores the cultural context around each book he critiques, treating them as pure subliminal propaganda.
This paper is a Foucauldian account of power relations as expressed through discourse in the on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia.
An 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.
My 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.
In 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, [...]