Twenty-five years ago, my colleagues Miyuki Kamachi and Jiro Gyoba and I designed and photographed JAFFE, a set of facial expression images intended for use in a study of face perception. In 2019, without seeking permission or informing us, Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen exhibited JAFFE in two widely publicized art shows. In addition, they…[Read more]

The period from 2013 to 2017 represents a watershed moment for Chinese mobile radio as several breakout shows such as Thinking Logically and the Guo Degang Comedy Show became viral topics across the country. Interestingly, this coincided with what critics in the United States have been calling a “golden age of podcasting,” fueled by such hit pod…[Read more]

This chapter explores a case of activism to promote FM broadcasting in the USA at the turn of the millennium, using data drawn from a large ethnographic project. These radio activists provide a unique site for analysing new media adoption and resistance; as technologically savvy critics of Internet utopianism, they are not dismissible as mere…[Read more]

In the early years of the 21st century, as free software communities matured, they began to recognize that their contributor bases were overwhelmingly composed of men. A 2006 European Union policy report revealed that fewer than 2% of free software practitioners were women, which catalyzed attention to these matters (Nafus, Leach, & Krieger,…[Read more]

Both radio activism and gender advocacy within F/OSS illustrate how
technologies acquire political meanings within technical communities. In
examining these sites, we can observe how activists who are concerned with
expressing political beliefs do so through engagement with technologies. Geek
communities are important because they are situated…[Read more]

At the turn of the millennium, scholars and pundits reflected on how communica- tion systems could shape events and societies, often while basking in the perceived glow of the then-novel Internet. Others pled for reasoned engagement with the interplay between communication infrastructures and the social life of knowledge, a much-needed corrective…[Read more]

Abstract: The freedom of research is a cornerstone of our civilisation; in many ways it can even be seen as a human right. However, freedom of research does not mean the liberty to cheat. Cheating in science – deliberate falsification of evidence to support a hypothesis – is not only academic misconduct; it is also a crime against society and the…[Read more]

Short description (video lecture) of what you can do, when you “do chresiology”, part 2 (slides).

Book review of Low Power to the People

Review of Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism

The United States ushered in a new era of small-scale broadcasting in 2000 when it began issuing low-power FM (LPFM) licenses for noncommercial radio stations around the country. Over the next decade, several hundred of these newly created low-wattage stations took to the airwaves. In Low Power to the People, Christina Dunbar-Hester describes the…[Read more]

Hacking, as a mode of technical and cultural production, is commonly celebrated for its extraordinary freedoms of creation and circulation. Yet surprisingly few women participate in it: rates of involvement by technologically skilled women are drastically lower in hacking communities than in industry and academia. Hacking Diversity investigates…[Read more]

This chapter examines how activist ideals manifest in the realm of practice, emphasizing the reality of technical expertise running afoul of participatory goals in the practice of radio activism. A major plank of the radio activists’ work was the promotion of technical participation to novices through various activities such as radio s…[Read more]

Twenty people spent a weekend gathered around two refrigerator-sized FM radio transmitters inside a large truck parked on a busy street. These large machines were unwieldy: over thirty years old, they were heavy to move, frustratingly dark to work in, and required high electric current to operate. They were not in working order; they were filthy…[Read more]

This article follows radio activists engaged in a combination of policy advocacy and broadening access to technology and skills through hands-on work. In practice, this largely played out as a systematic elevation of “technical” work and downplaying of policy/advocacy expertise, even though both were salient features of their work. The article arg…[Read more]

This article names and examines carbon vitalism, a strain of climate denial centered on the moral recuperation of carbon dioxide—and thus fossil fuels. Drawing on interconnections between CO2, plant life, and human breath, carbon vitalists argue that carbon dioxide is not pollution but the stuff of life itself and thus possesses ethical and e…[Read more]

The study posits a twelve pronged formulation of indices to measure the over coverage and
under coverage of the Indian states and union territories by newspapers on socio-economic,
demographical and political aspects. Union territories (UT), mainly Delhi and Chandigarh
were unjustifiably favoured on all twelve counts which clearly points out…[Read more]

This paper discusses the effect of social media on the occurrence of ‘Arab Spring’. In the
Arab world no country could claim to be truly democratic and most were autocratic coupled
with desertification (68.4 per cent of the total land area), phenomenal rise in population and
scarcity of water. Moreover, about 60 per cent of the population is…[Read more]

This paper examines the dynamics of access and exclusion in children’s Internet use, in
both private and public school spaces and interrogates the role of socioeconomic and
demographic predictors as well as the schooling system in shaping Internet habits. More
specifically, it explores the nature of Internet use by primary school children, m…[Read more]

This research work is an investigation into the reception of anti-smoking advertisements
that make use of “fear appeals”. The objective of the research is to bring audience
perceptions, interpretations and making sense processes of such advertising campaigns to
the limelight. Instead of measuring effects or effectiveness of anti-smoking mes…[Read more]