I had the great honor of being a guest on APQC (American Productivity and Quality Center)‘s podcast to talk about business communication, sustainability, and beat-up tour vans (yes, tour vans). It’s a massive crossover episode between the disparate parts of my professional life: business communication, sustainability, ethics, podcasting, and independent […]
Discoverability
“Discoverability: Toward a Definition of Content Discovery Through Platforms” is an excellent article about a technical concept in digital media studies. McKelvey and Hunt build provisional categories for how the environment (“surrounds”) and paths through the digital environment (“vectors”) create experiences that are not just the user’s choice but aren’t […]
Scarcity and Abundance, Digitally
My friend Chris Krycho, synthesizing some recent articles on scarcity and abundance, came up with a career-long research project idea: And from this wondering emerges a dream of a research program for technologists: What would the implementation of such technologies look like? What would their edges and limitations be? What […]
General Will 2.0: Rousseau, Freud, Google by Hiroki Azuma
General Will 2.0: Rousseau, Freud, Google by Hiroki Azuma (orig. 2011, translated from Japanese in 2014). This book promises to reread scholars of social thought (Rousseau, Freud, Rorty, Nozick) in light of the internet to come to new conclusion about societies and the state in the Internet era. Azuma believes […]
TikTok: Commercial Speech, National Security, and Globalization
I recently gave an informal talk to business students at Brigham Young University – Hawaii about TikTok for business. (This previous sentence is brought to you by the wonders of the internet.) While I was able to give some insights on how one might use the platform for advertising and […]
Curation Essay
So I just posted a long essay about social media platform governance up at the tab that says “Curation Essay“. I argue that one way of thinking about governance is via the intertwined nature of curation and values. I didn’t pitch it to journals because it’s an unusual argument that […]
New IEEE Article out now!
Dawn Janssen and I researched how 18-24-year-olds are adjusting to workplace technology conventions. Our respondents are handling things a lot differently than we (and the literature) expected. Thanks to ASU News for writing about the findings, which are out in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication now! The abstract is here: […]
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
I finally read it! I found it deeply compelling. Borges’ intellectual project in this one is to take every idea he is considering to its logical and even illogical extreme to make points about the idea. He critiques “the death of the author” in “Pierre Menard, the Author of the […]
Literally clicking links
From some correspondence: I continue to be amazed by the extent to which surfing the internet is part of my thinking process. Literally clicking from link to link, thinking about things, thinking about what I’m writing, thinking about people’s arguments, thinking about how arguments work out in the real world […]
Why Links Rot
Link rot is a technical way of saying that when websites disappear from the internet, links to those websites don’t disappear. The phenomenon of clicking a link and finding a 404 error or a completely disappeared website is frustrating. However, it’s particularly frustrating in light of the reality that some […]