Peer-to-Peer Protesting: Evading the Police Kettle

Review of the Sukey app: http://www.sukey.org/   Since the WTO protests in Seattle and in particular the 2003 Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) meeting in Miami Florida, police agencies around the world have assembled a set of practices and protocols to constrain and immobilize political protestors. Dubbed the Miami Model of protest policing [...]

Algorhythmics: Understanding Micro-Temporality in Computational Cultures

Abstract While in the terminology of the computational sciences an algorithm is often defined as a finite sequence of step-by-step instructions, which “bear a crucial, if problematic, relationship to material reality,”1 rhythm, a term closer to the study of cultural phenomena, shall be defined as an elementary movement of matter, bodies and signals, which oscillate [...]

Editorial Issue Two

Given the number of texts that follow in this, the second issue of Computational Culture, it is, for the sake of readers, at least, incumbent upon an editorial to attempt the virtues of celerity and concision for the sake of readers. We will do our best to satisfy such a requirement. The developing field of [...]

Sensing an Experimental Forest: Processing Environments and Distributing Relations

Abstract The use of wireless sensor networks to study environmental phenomena is an increasingly prevalent practice, and ecological applications of sensors have been central to the development of wireless sensor networks that now extend to numerous ‘participatory’ applications. How might environmental sensing projects be understood as giving rise to new practices for sensing environmental processes, [...]

The Order of Places: Code, Ontology and Visibility in Locative Media

Abstract This paper explores the regimes of visibility of urban places inscribed in locative media by way of examining the ways in which space is encoded in these systems. I explore some contrasting configurations of these regimes through case studies of two location-enabled platforms: Flickr and Foursquare. Based on a reading of Yahoo’s patents as [...]

What is in PageRank? A Historical and Conceptual Investigation of a Recursive Status Index.

Abstract: This paper proposes an analysis, based in a software studies mindset, of Google’s PageRank algorithm. It develops two lines of investigation: first, it situates this ‘evaluative metric’ in a larger genealogy of ideas, concepts, theories, and methods that developed, from the 1930s onwards, around the fields of sociometry, citation analysis, social exchange theory, and [...]

The Googlization of Google

Review of Siva Vaidhyanathan. The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry). University of California Press March 2011 280 pp. ISBN: 9780520258822   The literature on Google has exploded in the last few years. To the extend of my overview, much of it falls into two categories. The first treats Google as the paradigmatic [...]

Review of: Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media

Review of, Geert Lovink, Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media Polity Press, London, 2011. Every couple of weeks, when I walk into a bookstore (or rather, click through www.amazon.com), I am confronted with a rather massive amount of new books with keywords in their titles ranging from “network”, “web”, “internet”, “social media”, [...]

Notes from the Digital Underground: Cyber Illegalism and the New Egoists

Review of: Misha Glenny, DarkMarket: Cyberthieves, Cybercops and You New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011; ISBN 978-0-307-70055-1 202 pages Joseph Menn, Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet New York: PublicAffairs, 2010; ISBN 978-1-58648-907-6 305 pages Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar [...]

Die Aufklärung in the Age of Philosophical Engineering

The public access to the web is twenty years old. Through it, digital society has developed throughout the entire world. But has this society become mündig, that is, mature, in the sense that Immanuel Kant used this term to define the age of Enlightenment as an exit from minority, from Unmündigkeit ? Certainly not: contemporary [...]