Originally posted on The Rhetoric of Information:
“It was wet & white & swift and where I am we don’t know.” John Berryman, “Dream Song 28: Snow Line“ Recent weather conditions out east provide an occasion to question the idea of facts—and by extension, information—as simply empirical. According to the Washington Post, the official count…
Originally posted on Digital Technology & Culture 101:
I teach digital culture because I read and write about the history of information sciences. Some people think of information science as something that only concerns professional librarians. Studying the history of communication technologies, however, makes clear that how we organize and circulate information everyday has much to…
Originally posted on The Rhetoric of Information:
Jacoba Urist has more to say about artists using data as material for aesthetic visualization in the Atlantic article “From Paint to Pixels.” With plenty of colorful images on offer as evidence, Urist points out, “Art is as much a product of the technologies available to artists as…
Originally posted on The Rhetoric of Information:
In 2010 Dave Kemp asked a hundred people to share anything in their wallets that connected to a database. He photographed the results and shared the images as an exhibit titled Data Collection. He described the project as “functioning as a simple, and very reductive, portrait of these…
Originally posted on Digital Technology & Culture 101:
Marshall McLuhan defines media technology as an extension of biological faculties. The wheel, for example, extends the human foot. The hammer extends the arm. Eyeglasses extend vision. This video features a few short clips that capture some of McLuhan’s main contributions to the study of media and technology,…
Originally posted on The Rhetoric of Information:
Knowledge society, information society, post-industrial society, control society, network society, service society… each term has been used to describe the shift from industrial societies based on the manufacture of tangible goods toward a social system dominated by the production and exchange of information. Daniel Bell summed it up…
