The videos of TikToks can easily reach billions. But because the app won’t share what’s popular, we don’t know just what the world is watching.
Tag: Communication
“Our Hands”: Reading with DeafBlind Poet John Lee Clark
Clark’s poetry collection questions how those excluded from spoken conversation devise new avenues for transmission.
Public Thinker: Ainissa Ramirez on Putting the Story Back in Science
“We teach science as separate from the rest of the world. I want people who live in the world to see how they’re actually doing science.”
What Did We See in Color TV?
For those seeking to break up with their phones, or just decrease their screen time, tech ethicist Tristan Harris recommends starting with a quick technological fix ...
Newspapers and Northern Lights
In 1818 John Ross pointed the ship Isabella toward the Northwest Passage and opened up the Arctic exploration mania; the Shackleton-Rowett expedition of ...
Public Thinker: Siva Vaidhyanathan on Facebook and Other “Antisocial” Media
Siva Vaidhyanathan has built a career as a media studies and communications ...
The Future of the Global University
Great universities seek to erase the borders that confine intellectual exchange. The aspiration is at once scholarly and political: policies informed by research will topple ...
Shoptalk: Overheard at ICA
This May over three and a half thousand scholars descended on Prague for the International Communications Association Conference. In between the thousands ...
Reading with Strangers
On a visit to Bogotá in 2006, riding on the then new TransMilenio bus rapid transit system, I discovered that it sponsored Libro al Viento (Books on the Wind), a series of free publications ...
What Is It Like to Be an Elephant?
Why did Harambe become a meme? In a post-election landscape that demands we acknowledge Internet trolling as a practice with world-historical consequences ...
The Politics of Networking a Nation
In 1981, one year before his death, the Soviet cybernetician and computer pioneer Victor Glushkov published the book What Is the OGAS? OGAS was the Russian acronym for All-State Automated System for ...
Being Data
In 1966, Der Spiegel interviewed Martin Heidegger: SPIEGEL: And what takes the place of philosophy now? HEIDEGGER: Cybernetics.1 Even before the mass production of personal computers, Heidegger saw ...
From Bartleby to Scrivener for iOS
From the earliest typewriters to Google Docs, writing devices have never been built for novelists. Instead, they are designed for office use, with creative writing of all sorts seen as a marginal-at ...
A Brief History of Women Accepting Oscars
From the comfort of the couch, the Academy Awards hold a perverse attraction. What will fall flat more often: the dreadful jokes, or the award recipients as they clamor up the stairs to claim their ...
Paying Attention Like Primo Levi: An Interview with Ann Goldstein
Stuart Woolf, a British historian and the first English-language translator of Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir If This Is a Man, wrote that Levi’s “interest in the translation of his books was ...
“Sharing” the Israeli Occupation
In April of 2014, an Israeli combat soldier from the Nahal Brigade named David Adamov was captured on camera violently threatening a Palestinian teenager in Hebron. After a video of the event posted ...
Speaking in Science
Some of today’s most provocative scientific tools are being built to do science themselves. IBM’s Watson, for instance, is being developed to sift through data at volumes far exceeding the capability ...
The Dress Has Always Been News
As “the dress” befuddled the Internet’s hive mind, our newsfeeds swelled. Tumblr and Buzzfeed, recognizing the viral power of a garment that appears gold and white to some but blue and black to ...
Writing Technology
Read my blog, please, but don’t dare peek into my diary. Even though these two genres employ some of the same conventions—a diurnal relation to time, a preoccupation with subjective experience—one is ...
The Democratic Surround: A Conversation Between Fred Turner and Clay Shirky
Last December, Public Culture senior editor Fred Turner sat down with Clay Shirky, the author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age and Here Comes Everybody: The Power of ...