Media Technologies: Essays on communication, materiality and society

Fred Turner's summary of several essays

people understand digital culture in terms of bits      (manovich, henry Jenkins, lawrence Lessig   bits can be copied infinitely without loss to the original )

The Relevance of Algorithms    Tarleton Gillespie
Gillespie points out that scholars, pundits, and everyday users tend to take a certain pleasure in the fact that algorithms act on their own, as pieces of science and technology, ad so seem to stand outside and even beyond ordinary politics.
In the digital era, .. it involves interrogating algorithms--- first by denying that they are apolitical, and second, by seeking out the ideals they encode and the communities that benefit from those ideals.

Making Media Work          Greg Downey
But Downey reminds us, these new regimes of production have been built and continue to function on the back of an industrial infrastructure --- an infrastructure that continues to depend on and replicate the class hierarchies of the industrial era.
In short, Downey reminds us that despite two decades of claims to the contrary, information technology does not free us from the politics of labor as we knew them in the 19th century. They shift them, reconfigure them a bit, but they hardly do away with class, with the overworking of some bodies for the profit of others, and with the fact that factories, social or mechanical, never run without workers.

(Downey    closed captioning: subtitling, stenography, and the digital convergence of text with television, 2008       Telegraph Messenger Boys: labor, technology, and geography, 1850-1950)


Repairing Repair    Steven J. Jackson
Jackson advocates that we adopt what he calls "broken world thinking."

To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World (Vincent Mosco)

P19
When economist Dallas Smythe and Herbert Schiller bagan to turn their attention to communication in the 1950s and '60s, they drew connections between their new filed of study and the resources, like agriculture and oil, that had occupied economists for many years (Mosco 2009, 82-89).
(The Political Economy of Communication)

Around this time the computer scientist turned public-policy analyst Anthony Oettinger developed a general resource theory that linked energy and materials to information, and it became the conceptual foundation for the Harvard University Program on Information Resources Policy, which Oettinger chaired for several decades. When the communication scholar Marc Uri Porat (1977) published his influential map of the shift to an economy powered by information workers, it became time to think about an information economy.
(Porat, Marc Uri. 1977. The Information Economy: Definition and Measurement. Office of Telecommunications Special Publication 77-12, May. Washington. DC: US Department of Commerce)

Videotex--- P. 21   This was a computer-based service that delivered information from a central facility to users at terminals in their homes, in public places, and to a lesser degree, in business. Users were able to interact with the service by making specific information requests.
…
Videotex held great promise as report after report predicted major transformations in every aspect of life,…
(Tydeman, John, Hubert Lipinskim, Richard P. Adler….. 1982   Teletext and videotex in the United States     New York: McGrawHill.)

Cybernetics in the Soviet Union
for economic planning and control
Gerovitch, Slava. 2010. "The cybernetic scare and the origins of the internet"    Baltic worlds  (online resources)
Spufford, Francis. 2010. Red Plenty.  London: Faber and Faber

The Computer Utility comes to Chile (25-29)

p. 180-182
four elements of big data
1) the data under analysis are invariably quantitative in that operations are applied to numerical values of objects, events, outcomes, ideas, opinions, etc.
2) big data develops generalization based on correlations among variables.    a growing respect for correlations rather than a continuing quest for elusive causality.
3) tends to be theoretical
4) primary goal of big data is to be predictive