A lot of digital tools are not about reducing work, but rather about redistributing it to a different set of workers. A handy rule of thumb when considering people embracing digital tools is to just see if that person is redistributing their labor or having labor redistributed to them.
Lacking, for the most part across the disciplines—data scientists, social scientists, humanities and creatives—was any sense that culture is itself technically created and mediated, even as tech is, of course, culturally determined. My takeaway: media studies needs to continue pushing on this, hard.
After spring 2024’s revival of the student protest movement at a scale not seen since the 1960s, reactionary administrators & faculty got together to opportunistically discredit & try to reverse intellectual trends they didn’t like and blamed for creating the encampments like Vandy report & this one
This keeps popping up and I have to chime in and say that yes, AI bots are reshaping how we are able to access websites for crawling; these changes block a lot of the Internet Archive’s attempts to automatically harvest the whole web (which I have many thoughts about), and no, Wayback =/= “history”
I am frustrated, as usual, especially in this space, by the uncritical amplifying of this “IA vs the bad guys” rhetoric that collapses all the many ways ephemerality, CONSENT, and open access are in conflict with each other in this instance and most others, when it comes to web preservation.
For a paper ostensibly dedicated to higher education, the Chronicle really seems to hate academia.
it's that time of year when we give the @mediaarchaeology.bsky.social a thorough clean & I stumble upon all kinds of delightful things I had forgotten about or that mysteriously materialized - herewith: an Osborne Vixen luggable from 1984, signed by Lee Felsenstein! "I worked on this!"
