TIME Magazine Cover: Computer in Society
Weizenbaum examines computers and society - The Tech
An article from the Tuesday, April 9, 1985 issue of The Tech - MIT's oldest and largest newspaper and the first newspaper published on the Internet.
How we got here
Wherein our hero, in this publication's inaugural, dates himself (as if others would) in a reminiscence of computers and websites past.
triumph of the nerds
The Computer for the 21st Century
one more final edit from me to go The Computer for the 21st Century
The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution
JAMES W. CAREY, JOHN J. QUIRK, The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution, The American Scholar, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Summer, 1970), pp. 395-424
The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution
JAMES W. CAREY, JOHN J. QUIRK, The Mythos of the Electronic Revolution, The American Scholar, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Spring, 1970), pp. 219-241
The International Research Conference in the History of Computing at Los Alamos, 1976
under the hood
This week I’ve been thinking about what it’s like for a new generation to make things with computers. When we were talking in Berlin, Luce made a point that...
Anna Stansbury on Twitter / X
Nope. This paper is about US academics 1900-1960! The present looks different.Asking people to stop drawing inference from these stats as if they're about the present& asking authors to put time period in their title and abstract!🙏 https://t.co/bphnK6Hy7H— Anna Stansbury (@annastansbury) December 31, 2024
The 800-Millisecond Problem
A blog about my journey through Mozilla,Open Source Contribution, Virtual,Augmented,Mixed Reality, Security,Hackathon and in general technology.
» Apple, Carmen Sandiego, and the Rise of Edutainment The Digital Antiquarian
If there was any one application that was the favorite amongst early boosters of personal computing, it was education. Indeed, it could sometimes be difficult to find one of those digital utopianists who was willing to prioritize anything else — unsurprisingly, given that so much early PC culture grew out of places like The People’s Computer Company, who made “knowledge is power” their de facto mantra and talked of teaching people about computers and using computers to teach with equal countercultural fervor. Creative Computing, the first monthly magazine dedicated to personal computing, grew out of that idealistic milieu, founded by an educational consultant who filled a big chunk of its pages with plans, schemes, and dreams for computers as tools for democratizing, improving, and just making schooling more fun. A few years later, when Apple started selling the II, they pushed it hard as the learning computer, making deals with the influential likes of the Minnesota Educational Consortium (MECC) of Oregon Trail fame that gave the machine a luster none of its competitors could touch. For much of the adult public, who may have had their first exposure to a PC when they visited a child’s classroom, the Apple II became synonymous with the PC, which was in turn almost synonymous with education in the days before IBM turned it into a business machine. We can still see the effect today: when journalists and advertisers look for an easy story of innovation to which to compare some new gadget, it’s always the Apple II they choose, not the TRS-80 or Commodore PET. And the iconic image of an Apple II in the public’s imagination remains a group of children gathered around it in a classroom.
Topics — Real Life
ABOUT TOPICS: Since we began Real Life in the summer of 2016, we’ve run many essays across a range of topics, with a particular focus on the personal and cultural implications of living with technology. Our aim is not to track the news cycle so much as the longstanding social issues that inform and transcend it. We wanted to make it easier to read and explore Real Life beyond our chronological archive, so we’ve created these Topics to gather in one place the work we’ve published on some key themes. More Topics will be added to this page over time.
Humanities in the Machine - Blain Smith
There is something quietly remarkable about the people who built the foundations of modern computing. Not their technical achievements, though those are extraordinary. What is remarkable is where they came from before they ever touched a machine.
Thoughts on Cyberpositionality: The Construction of Digital Communities in Digital Spaces, Damien Patrick Williams
I found Rebecca Monteleone, Martin Perez Comisso, and Elma Hajric’s “Cyberpositionality: Sociotechnical Location in the Digital Age” (2024) to be an extremely timely and important article which can…
Technological parables and iconic illustrations: American technocracy and the rhetoric of the technological fix
This paper traces the role of American technocrats in popularizing the notion later dubbed the ‘technological fix’. Channeled by their long-term ‘chief’, Howard Scott, their claim was that technolo...
