Cyber-utopianism was always bunk. The web was never democratic and it has become more or less what techno-realists like myself always expected it to become: a new playground for capitalism. It didn’t happen without resistance and that resistance certainly hasn’t stopped. But from the first moments that networking moved beyond the military and academic research,…Continue readingCultures of the Web Wrap Up
It is difficult for me to engage effectively with the representation of characters in video gaming, online or off, for the simple reason that I have engaged with gaming almost not at all. The gaming apps I use most are different implementations of Sudoku and Solitaire, with the occasional diversion of a word game or…Continue readingWhat is an Orc?
According to the ITU (see below), 61.8% of Cubans used the internet in 2019, though other sources have lower numbers (49.1% in 2020, according to Wikipedia; 40.3% in 2020, according to InternetWorldStats). Whatever the exact figure, there is no question that current levels are a sharp increase in a short period of time – doubling…Continue readingA ‘Weekly Package’
Web scraping is the enormously helpful ability to run a program that will automatically extract data from web pages for you and provide them to you in a structured file for use in analysis or elsewhere. The off-the-shelf web scraper so helpfully named Webscraper is easy to install and relatively easy to use, with many…Continue readingScraping the library
For this history, I chose to look at reggiochildren.it, the website of Reggio Children S.r.l., the entity created by the municipality of Reggio Emilia, Italy, for promoting and protecting the Reggio Emilia Approach® to early childhood education. I think it fair to consider a pedagogy to be a cultural product, as a general statement, while…Continue readingA History of reggiochildren.it
To think about ‘Decolonizing the Web’ starts with thinking about the web as a colonial space. One has two immediate, diametrically opposed reactions as soon as one introduces that frame. On the one hand, how could the web be colonized? It’s not like anyone is Indigenous to the internet, much less the web. Given that…Continue readingColonialism and the Web
For the purposes of my current research, I approach the web essentially as a corpus. There is no shortage of materials online about … well, anything … but certainly not about children, childhood, parenting and education. Some of those materials are historic documents, the influences which have shaped the understandings of children and childhood we…Continue readingMy goals for studying “Cultures of the Web”