Archive for the ‘political economy’ Category

Commercial Whiplash: Nokia, carriers, and why Canada is still full of crap mobiles

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

On Nokia's shrinking North American market share: "(Samsung & others) were quick to meet carriers’ customization demands, an area in which Nokia proved reluctant." (http://bit.ly/zuSN). But this is precisely why Nokia ought to be lauded - for its efforts in putting out handsets that straddle grids/networks (3g/wi-fi) and balancing different interaction ...

Twittering the Election, SIFTing Media Collections

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

If you haven't seen this already, then go check it out. Terse political opinions fly by with impunity. What to do, what to do...and how does media theory speak to this? I can anticipate hundreds of approaches, from critical political economy to social constructivism to what-have-you ... but then again, ...

Open Mobile

Tuesday, September 16th, 2008

I'm presenting a keynote this Sunday for an event called Open Mobile, presented in part by Mobile Muse as part of New Forms Festival 2008. I'm co-presenting with Roland Tanglao and Jesse Scott (artist info here), who will be my visual accompanists. But hopefully their visuals will override and scramble ...

Smartphones, Price Points, and Purchasing Power Parity

Saturday, July 19th, 2008

"Expensive phones are like an enormous test phase, but budget phones are the true launch pad for a mobile technology." Well said. Read the rest at All About Symbian. It's exciting to see the trickle of smart phone functionality into lower end handsets. Perhaps Nokia's actually been listening to its participatory ...

The PhD - the comprehensive exams

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

So I'm diving straight into my comprehensives now. I'm building lists and checking them twice (and more). While building these reading lists is in many ways a very personal journey, I've decided to blog about the process so that I might get feedback from unexpected locales, harnessing the "wisdom of ...

Single Sign-On and Content Aggregation: a Preliminary Analysis of their Potential in Facilitating Progressive Social Change

Monday, December 17th, 2007

What is the relation between the technology of single sign-on and community mobilization? There are two approaches to - or models for - the twin issues of convenience and security in our current era of mass content browsing: (1) single sign-on (OpenID, MicroID) and (2) content aggregation (Jaiku, Pageflakes, Readr). Both ...

AOIR Music and Sound Panel - Oct 18, 2007

Friday, October 26th, 2007

This update is running quite late, but is still valuable, I think, in attempting to sustain the dialogue which was unfortunately given too short an interval at our panel on Music and Sound at the AOIR conference last week. As well, I particularly need to move among the "diaspora" of ...

Technical Micropolitics and Musical Amateurs

Friday, October 19th, 2007

I presented at AOIR today as part of a panel on Music and Sound. Here's the PDF of my talk, complete with notes. I did this with an extreme headache, and a growing sense that I need to, as my friend and colleague Flo articulated it the other day, "coccoon" myself ...

4S, Montreal

Friday, October 12th, 2007

I'm blogging this from the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) conference in Montréal. We (Roy Bendor, Jack Post, Peter-Paul Verbeek and I) just completed our panel on Bruno Latour ("Translating Latour") and I'm now in a very interesting panel about "Problematizing Technological Appropriation". My first impression is that ...

U.S. Justice Department values ISPs over people

Sunday, September 9th, 2007

Ah, I see the baldfaced ignorance of an administration that invades Afghanistan and Iraq has trickled into the sphere of Internet regulation as well (Thanks to Flo for pointing me here).. To wit: "Regulators should be careful not to impose regulations that could limit consumer choice and investment in broadband facilities" ...