history

Gripping . . .Informative . . . Smart . . . Nothing superfluous in Download, the Discovery Channel's four-part history of the internet. Journalist John Heilemann makes "algorithm" sound like "aphrodisiac." In Silicon Valley, it is.

Connie Yowell of the MacArthur Foundation has blogged about a great four-part series coming up on the Discovery Channel, reblogged here with all the pertinent information for watching, downloading, or setting your TIVO. 

Why is the book the standard of literacy? Books for the masses are a relatively new phenomenon. It's not they were handed down to Moses with the tablets. Yet declining literacy is equated with declining book readership. It's not the same thing.

Remixing History: The International Technohistorian Project

'Smart mob' tech spurs student activism

Rosalind Franklin & Wyllie O Hagan, DNA Discoveries in Science and Art

Microkids

When I descend into cold murky water looking for a shipwreck for historical and archaeological research the quiet and darkness can often make me feel very much alone. But being an underwater archaeologist and the director of an online museum I know I can never do either of those jobs by myself. There is always a team from various sciences there to help raise up the stories of our past from their watery graves.

At our recent seminar on Anne Allison's brilliant book Millenial Monsters, an ethnography of the global interest in Japanese toys (and much much more), one of the panelists, Larry Grossberg, one of the founders of Cultural Studies, was reflecting on the rapidity with which people are willing to pronounce on "the new" and "the old." He was referring to "new media" and the many comments one reads about the catastrophic social effects wrought by new technologies, the disruptions in social life as we know it, and so forth.