Category: digital
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Revolutionary Thinking
I had been encouraged after a conference session to read Heather Ford’s (2022) Writing the Revolution, and can understand after having done so why this book was recommended. Ford in it offers her decade-long digital ethnography of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution Wikipedia entry from its emergence and through its evolution and uses it to challenge…
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Quite Careless Indeed
Sarah Wynn-Williams’s (2025) book Careless People is offered as a memoir of her six years at Meta (Facebook), but it focuses as much on the people whose decisions created this company, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan, who was reportedly hired to appease the Trump administration. Wynn-Williams, a former New Zealand diplomat,…
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Seductive Sirens
I wanted to like Chris Hayes’s (2025) new book. Instead, I found myself wanting more from it. Hayes compares the commodification of labor in the nineteenth century to the commodification of attention today. In doing so, he distinguishes among voluntary, involuntary, and social attention (27ff) and contrasts boredom and idleness (59ff) before considering the deep…