MichaelZimmer.org

I’m honored and thrilled to be a part of an online symposium featuring Julie Cohen‘s important new book, Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice, hosted at Concurring Opinions the week of March 5. Thanks to Danielle Citron for organizing!  Full announcement below: During the week of March 5, we’re [...]

Each year the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee issues a research report highlighting some of the innovative and influential research within our campus community. I feel privileged to be featured in the 2011 edition (PDF, page 34). Here’s an excerpt from my story: Limiting the danger of new technologies The Internet, the Web, search engines, social media [...]

My research in the ethical dimensions of Internet and social technologies is featured on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s homepage this week. The new article, “Promoting an ethical compass for the information age“, highlights some of my recent work on the Twitter and Library of Congress archiving agreement, consulting for the New York Public Library to [...]

For the last 353 days, I’ve been part of a team planning Internet Research 10.0 – Internet: Critical, the 10th annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). My life is about to get back to normal, as an interdisciplinary collection of nearly 400 scholars, researchers and graduate students interested in Internet and new [...]

The art blog Art Fag City recently published a brilliant and insightful photo essay by Jon Rafman, titled “IMG MGMT: The Nine Eyes of Google Street View”. Through text and Street View images, Rafman critically interrogates the gaze of Street View, exposing the ways in which it frames our view of the world, while at the same time constraining it.

In the post are some of the more compelling Street View images he has found, along with his closing remarks.

There’s nothing worse than listening to yourself talk. Following up on March’s special issue of First Monday on “Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0,” I was recently interviewed by Joy Austria and A.J. Hannah for the First Monday Podcast series. You can download the MP3 (5.2MB, 15:16) or read the transcript. Hopefully you can read between [...]

This spring I am running a reading group at the Yale Information Society Project (but open to all) titled “Technology, Law, Society, Values and Design.” The description and draft syllabus are below — comments and suggestions are welcome! Technology, Law, Society, Values and Design The starting point of this reading group is the position that [...]

Blogging has been light lately as I’m visiting family over the holiday break. Today, however, I came across one of my favorite essays by the late Neil Postman, cultural critic and founder of my PhD-granting department at NYU, and felt compelled to interrupt my break from blogging to share it. The essay, “Five Things We [...]

UNESCO has released an important assessment of the nature of knowledge acquisition in our technologically-mediated age. The“Kronberg Declaration on the Future of Knowledge Acquisition and Sharing” (PDF) recognizes that… Knowledge is the key to social and economic development; Creation, acquisition and sharing of knowledge have been going through dramatic changes because of rapidly emerging new [...]

Philipp Lenssen points out that when you search Google for “she invented,” on the results page you are asked “Did you mean ‘he invented’?” There has been lots of discussion on this seemingly misogynistic “correction” that Google provides, and those familiar with my research know that I’m a proponent of critiquing algorithm and system design [...]