I don’t think we computer geeks appreciate how profoundly the rise of the smartphone, and Facebook, has changed the Internet audience. It’s something that really only happened in the last five years, as smartphones and data plans dropped radically in price and became accessible – and addictive – to huge
Toward People’s Community Control of Technology: Race, Access, and Education
This field review explores how the benefits of access to computing for racialized and minoritized communities has become an accepted fact in policy and research, despite decades of evidence that technical fixes do not solve the kinds of complex social problems that disproportionately affect these communities.
Blacksky - Apps on Google Play
Discover communities, trending conversations, and social media built for you.
SimPolitics
For more than six decades, the public has been promised that computers will revolutionize politics, both nationally and internationally. In SimPolitics, Fenw...
Trial Data Reveals Racial Bias in Age Verification Software
New trial data reveals racial bias in age verification software used for social media restrictions. Discover how unreliable these systems really are now.
Unpacking the Racism of Digital Blackface in the Information Age
Big Tech tried to get young people addicted. Now we’re fighting back
Two seismic court decisions in the US have intervened where legislators have failed to defend social media users from exploitation, writes campaigner Zamaan Qureshi
The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution
This essay presents a processual model of the personal computing movement that depicts the PC's birth within the context of complex and often contradictory social strategies, each of which used the meaning of computer technology in a distinctive way. It suggests that innovators are constrained by such processes to depict new artifacts in culturally meaningful ways, so that it is difficult for them to conceive of their technologies in radical terms. The rhetoric of "revolution" aside, innovators found it expedient to draw from the stock of meanings at hand as they created new meaning-frameworks for their artifacts. The result is that the new artifacts did not express a coherent or effective political vision and failed to have the intended social effects. This study implies that new technologies frequently reproduce existing social and meaning systems; if they do bring about social change, the changes may differ from those intended by the innovators.
The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution
This essay presents a processual model of the personal computing movement that depicts the PC's birth within the context of complex and often contradictory social strategies, each of which used the meaning of computer technology in a distinctive way. It suggests that innovators are constrained by such processes to depict new artifacts in culturally meaningful ways, so that it is difficult for them to conceive of their technologies in radical terms. The rhetoric of "revolution" aside, innovators found it expedient to draw from the stock of meanings at hand as they created new meaning-frameworks for their artifacts. The result is that the new artifacts did not express a coherent or effective political vision and failed to have the intended social effects. This study implies that new technologies frequently reproduce existing social and meaning systems; if they do bring about social change, the changes may differ from those intended by the innovators.
Bluesky & Open Social Media Tech
The End of Software
To understand how software will change, we can benefit from studying how technology has changed other industries. History tends to rhyme, if you listen. Before the internet, media behaved very differently—it was expensive to create. You had to pay people to make content, edit it, and distribute ...
Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization
Using nationally representative data from the 2020 and 2024 American National Election Studies (ANES), this paper describes how U.S. social media use has shifted across platforms, demographics, and politics. Overall platform reach declined, driven by growth in the share of Americans — especially the youngest and oldest cohorts — who report using no social media. Visiting and posting activity on Twitter/X and Facebook have fallen by nearly 50% since 2020, with the decline on Twitter/X driven primarily by reduced participation among Democratic users. While Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter/X lost ground, TikTok and Reddit grew modestly, consistent with a more fragmented digital public sphere. Platform audiences aged and became slightly more educated and racially diverse. Politically, most platforms shifted toward Republican users while remaining, on balance, Democratic-leaning. Twitter/X experienced the largest change: among posters, the partisan balance swung over 70 percentage points from Democrats to Republicans. Across platforms, political posting remains closely tied to affective polarization, as the most partisan respondents are also the most active. As casual users disengage while polarized partisans remain vocal, online discourse becomes narrower and more ideologically extreme.
How Bluesky, Alternative to X and Facebook, Is Handling Explosive Growth (Published 2024)
The fledgling social media site has been flooded with new users since the election. It hasn’t all been easy.
Whatever Happened to Civility on The Internet?
In response to Wil Shipley’s recent post about the lack of an iPhone SDK, a reader left this comment: I often enjoy reading these entries, but you always come across as a little bit of an a**hole. Full of yourself, overly critical and a bit mean. Dismissing and
America's Digital Demand Threatens Black Communities with More Pollution
The collective costs of artificial intelligence and data centers are disproportionately harming Black households.
