Can news media be regarded as infrastructure? And if so, how useful might Star and Ruhleder’s eight dimensions of infrastructure be as used an analytical tool for tackling the medium of news (Star and Ruhleder, 1996)? I tackle two of their eight dimensions; embeddedness and transparency. For empirical data I rely on work as a… Continue reading Infrastructure, news and impartiality
If you haven’t yet heard of Bitcoin, either you have little interest in financial markets or you’ve been sleeping under a rock for at least the last 5 years. Bitcoin is the first decentralised digital currency; a form of exchange that is created using open source software and backed not by central banks, but by… Continue reading Blockchain economics
Google CAPTCHA codes (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) were invented to reduce spamming and hacking on the internet. They are usually made up of a series of random, distorted letters and numbers that must be deciphered, and more recently, in the form of images that must be selected according… Continue reading CAPTCHA Codes as a digital infrastructure
The quick response, or shortly, QR codes has been around since 1990s, even though they are popularised in the recent decade by the growing use of smartphones and camera devices. The QR code was first developed by an automobile component manufacturing company in Japan for tracking the products they produce for Toyota. [1] In… Continue reading A Gateway to the Internet of Things: QR Codes
The use of artificial intelligence in medicine has long been a factor of science fiction. The notion that the body’s functioning can be understood in a standard fashion – that despite our individual natures, every human heart, hip or hand work on the same principals. It therefore is a tangible idea that symptoms of illness… Continue reading Diagnostic Algorithms
Google Glass was launched in March 2013, for a select few, know as “Google Explorers”, until it was publicly released later in 2014 — however, in January 2015, the product had already been discontinued. The main questions I will look at are: what makes Google Glass such an interesting ‘infrastructure’ to study, what was it… Continue reading Google Glass and Wearable Technology – one step too close?
On the 15th November 2011 both houses of the Great British parliament passed the Localism Act. The Bill, sponsored by Eric Pickles and Baroness Hanham, aims to ‘devolve greater powers to councils and neighbourhoods and give local communities more control over housing and planning decisions.’ This Bill fosters the decentralisation of power to a greater… Continue reading The City 2.0: Establishing green localities
A lot of things function silently in the background of our daily lives, things we commonly call infrastructure. The internet is one of the most complex and widespread of these. Yet on the 27th of February 2017, Amazon Web Services (AWS) failed, meaning that “software, from web apps to smartphone applications, relying on this cloud-based… Continue reading Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you: The Internet!
Picture 1: Symbol of Second Life. The eye that sees, the hand that makes. Technological advances create new digital forms and things that challenge what we know about our reality. Video games, as they come to realistically simulate our real lives more and more, hold an essential position in this controversy. Here, I would like to look at one of… Continue reading The Tools Behind the Game: Making of Second Life
Desperate and destitute. These are some of the words that come to mind when thinking of the multitude of displaced Syrians. However, this does not seem to be the case for many Syrians residing in Öncüpınar Accommodation Facility in Kilis, Turkey. Many of the people who live there speak of the facilities that enable day-to-day… Continue reading Passage Through “Shangri-La”
Anthropology of Infrastructure 