Fred Turner

The Limits of Peer Production: Some Reminders from Max Weber for the Network Society

In the last few years, a powerful consensus has emerged among scholars of digitally enabled peer production. In this view, digital technologies and social production processes are driving a dramatic democratization of culture and society. Moreover, leading scholars now suggest that these new, hyper-mediated modes of living and working are specifically challenging the hierarchical structures and concentrated power of bureaucracies. This paper first maps the assumptions underlying the new consensus on peer production so as to reveal the sources of its coherence. It then revisits Max Weber’s account of bureaucracy. With Weber in mind, the paper aims to expose analytical weaknesses in the consensus view and offer a new perspective from which to study contemporary digital media.

Burning Man at Google: a cultural infrastructure for new media production

Every August for more than a decade, thousands of information technologists and other knowledge workers have trekked out into a barren stretch of alkali desert and built a temporary city devoted to art, technology and communal living: Burning Man. Drawing on extensive archival research, participant observation and interviews, this article explores the ways in which Burning Mans bohemian ethos supports new forms of production emerging in Silicon Valley and especially at Google. It shows how elements of the Burning Man world — including the building of a sociotechnical commons, participation in project-based artistic labor and the fusion of social and professional interaction — help to shape and legitimate the collaborative manufacturing processes driving the growth of Google and other firms. The article develops the notion that Burning Man serves as a key cultural infrastructure for the Bay Areas new media industries.

Computational journalism

How computer scientists can empower journalists, democracys watchdogs, in the production of news in the public interest.

Actor‐Networking the News

To date, journalists and most of those who study them remain wedded to a deeply modern understanding of the profession, one in which firm analytical borders separate news and newsmakers, reporters and audience, press and politics. New media technologies have begun to corrode these boundaries in practice, however. With its emphasis on socio‐technical hybrids, actor‐network theory offers a powerful tool for analyzing shifts in the practice of journalism under new technological conditions.

The Family of Man and the Politics of Attention in Cold War America

In the early spring of 1955, more than a quarter million people streamed through the doors of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They came to immerse themselves in The Family of Man. An exhibition of 503 photographs of men, women, and children, made by 273 photographers from around the world and selected by photographer Edward Steichen and his assistant, Wayne Miller, The Family of Man filled the entire second floor of the museum. A series of temporary walls designed by architect Paul Rudolph channeled visitors through the images, allowing them to move at their own pace, to pause where they liked, and to pool at pictures of particular interest. Visitors gazed at photographs of children dancing, families gathering, and men and women of myriad nations working, walking, marrying, fighting. Some pictures dangled from wires overhead, some hung from poles, and at least one faced downward from the ceiling. Some filled entire walls, while others were as small as a handbill. Together, the installation and the images left few places where visitors could turn and not encounter a picture of another person doing something they were likely to recognize. The Family of Man quickly became one of the most popular exhibitions in

Network Celebrity: Entrepreneurship and the New Public Intellectuals

By conventional lights, Tim O’Reilly is not a celebrity. He has never acted onstage or onscreen, made a music video, or fallen down drunk on his own reality TV show. If he went into rehab or fathered a child out of wedlock, no paparazzi would hover outside his door. Nor is O’Reilly a public intellectual in the usual way. He holds no professorships, writes nothing for the New York Review of Books, and has rarely, if ever, appeared on a Sunday morning TV talk show. And yet O’Reilly is both famous and exceptionally influential. According to Wired magazine, he is “the guru of the participation age” (Levy 2005). Inc. magazine has called him “Silicon Valley’s leading intellectual” (Chafkin 2010). In a muchtalkedabout takedown for the Baffler, the acidtongued Evgeny Morozov (2013: 66) put it this way: “The enduring emptiness of our technology debates has one main cause, and his name is Tim O’Reilly. . . . Entire fields of thought — from computing to management theory to public administration — have already surrendered to his buzzwordophilia.” So what kind of creature is O’Reilly? On the one hand, he seems to be the prototype of the Northern California entrepreneur. In the mid1980s, after a brief stint as a freelance writer, he began to publish howto books for computer software. By the late 1990s, he was organizing conferences for tech world engineers and executives. By the early 2000s, he was gathering friends from all sorts of professional corners at his FOO Camps (for “Friends of O’Reilly”). Today his company, O’Reilly Media, is worth more than

Theaters of Alternative Industry: Hobbyist Repair Collectives and the Legacy of the 1960s American Counterculture

100 million, and O’Reilly (2011) himself has become a venture capitalist, investing seed funds in various high-technology startups including Foursquare, Bitly, and Instructables. On the other hand, O’Reilly has promulgated ideas that have traveled far beyond the tech world. He has been a

Why Study New Games

This chapter describes initial results from an ethnographic study of design and engineering engagements in community-operated sites at which hobbyists mend and repair mass-produced goods. We conducted participant observation at seven repair events and two collectives in the San Francisco Bay area where consumer electronics are reassembled, and spoke with approximately eighty repair practitioners. Here we describe surprising connections between repair and social movements that, in turn, reveal deep ties between contemporary hobbyist repair and countercultural design practices of the 1960s. These links, we argue, open new and important areas for design research.

Can we write a cultural history of the Internet? If so, how?

This article recalls the New Games Tournament of 1966 and with it, twoways to imagine play in the period: one, military war gaming and the other, the protest-oriented play of the counterculture. It then analyzes the legacy of these cultural styles for contemporary forms of gaming.

The Corporation and the Counterculture

ABSTRACT What would a cultural history of the Internet look like? The question almost makes no sense: the Internet spans the globe and traverses any number of completely distinct human groups. It simply cannot have a single culture. And yet, like the railroad, the telegraph and the highway system before it, the Internet has been an extraordinary agent for cultural change. How should we study that process? To begin to answer that question, this essay returns to four canonical studies of earlier technologies and cultures: Carolyn Marvins When Old Technologies Were New; Leo Marxs The Machine in the Garden; Ruth Schwarz Cowans More Work for Mother and Lynn Spigels Make Room for TV. In each case, the essay mines the earlier works for research tactics and uses them as jumping-off points to explore the ways in which the Internet requires new and different approaches. It concludes by speculating on the ways that the American-centric nature of much earlier work will need to be replaced with a newly global focus and research tactics to match.