Author: sovink77

This week’s readings for my New Media Seminar encompass how we understand time (according to McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which I am proud to say I read way back in 1993 when it came out in graphic novel form).  Those who know me well know that I have a very complicated calendaring system using Google Calendar […]

As a sociologist of education, I often assign students to read Ivan Illich’s “Deschooling Society,” and it inevitably starts the same discussion: how would a large and complex society such as the United States function without formal schooling? Of course, my university students—benefactors of and true believers in schooling structures for the most part—may put […]

In case this is shocking to anyone, I’ll put this up front: my spouse and I are gamers. Granted, our enthusiasm has waned over the years, especially since having children. We also tend to enjoy different types of videogames now than in the past. While I might have delighted in solving complex and sometimes nonsensical puzzles in […]

Reading Marshall McLuhan this week has caused me to reflect on the media forms that have had the biggest impact on our world. Though it’s hard to beat the printing press for sheer revolutionary impact, the first thing that popped into mind was social media. Of course, the distractive properties of Twitter and Facebook are well known, and […]

This week I stumbled through Ted Nelson’s 1970s imaginary “Computer/Lib,” and was struck by the ongoing tension between ease-of-use and complexification. And as I pondered, I considered: is the Apple Watch, or iWatch, a contender for each category? As a watch, it’s needlessly complex. It’s also needless machine (don’t we all have phones to attend […]

I just read some excerpts of Engelbart’s 1962 report, “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” While the piece was interesting, I found it kind of a hard slog at the same time. Maybe it’s because I was distracted by trying to read while hanging out with my friend’s new baby, but I think part of […]

This week I read Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” featuring Turing’s arguments against resistance to the idea of thinking machines, as well as his predictions for what digital computers of the future would be able to do. These days, many humans still have the same objections as those Turing argued against. We find thinking machines […]

The Internet has created opportunities and perils. We have mountains of data, but few individuals can tackle the mountains with anything better than a sand shovel. These reams of data are enticing for social scientists such as myself—with whole chat rooms of strangers to interview, millions of comment threads to assess, we have seemingly unlimited new avenues to […]