Research | Platypus

Steampunk: Reimagining Trash and Technology

 Matt Hale  August 20, 2013

It begins with a question. What if? What if Napoleon had won the Battle of Waterloo, if the Hindenburg hadn’t crashed, or if Thomas Edison had never been born? What might the world be like if history had been different? Steampunk is an expressive genre that explores the possibilities of a past that never was, but might have been. Inspired by the steam-powered and mechanistic imagery of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells’ novels and the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethos of cyberpunk art and literature, steampunk combines the aesthetics and materials of the nineteenth century with the technological developments and sensibilities of the twenty-first. It is a style defined by anachronism and guided by an impulse to explore and interrogate the role of technology in everyday life. Although the genre began as a form of speculative literature in the 1980s and 1990s, it took on new life during the first decade of (read more...)

Open Science and the Ambivalence of the Digital Economy

 Alessandro Delfanti  July 30, 2013

What does sharing mean in contemporary science? New practices of open science are questioning assumptions about the evolution of scientific cultures. Often, references to the emergence of new forms of open sharing and cooperation through digital networks point at the restoration of a modern scientific ethos of sharing and communalism to which scientists are somehow naturally socialised. Yet I believe scientific cultures are the subject of a cultural mash-up. This includes cultural elements taken from the modern, Mertonian ethos of science that preceded the late 20th century transformation towards academic capitalism and post-academic science. Elements coming from that tradition are still at scientists’ disposal, since the influence of that culture has survived the social dimension from which it was born, but they need to remix it with new and different cultural elements directly related to computers and information technologies, which are indistricable from today’s scientific enterprise. An old culture that is pre-existing, accepted, (read more...)

What’s Up in the Cloud(s)?

 Casey O'Donnell  July 16, 2013

In May, Adobe prompted me reflect on the “Cloud.” Adobe announced that it’s widely used “Creative Suite,” which includes things like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat and many other software products would be transitioning to a subscription-based, web-based and cloud-based product, the “Creative Cloud.” My first (and clearly cynical) thought was, “Well, at least I don’t have to install their bloated software anymore or have Acrobat update every other day.” At the same time, the reality of what that would mean for people who use these products for their jobs, encouraged me to consider it further. It also prompted me to return to a 2008 discussion between Richard Stallman and Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian. I should also disaggregate the cloud infrastructure from products that deliver their services via the cloud. These are often conflated in accounts of the trend. The cloud infrastructure is/are computers and the networks that connect them and them to (read more...)

Twitter Hashtags, Emotion and The Resonance of Social Protest

 Veronica Barassi  June 25, 2013

There is something strikingly similar between the events taking place in Turkey and in Brazil. It is the momentum, intensity and force of these uprisings. It is the connection between profoundly context specific roots of social unrest and broader global political issues. In this post I want to focus on the issue of social media technologies. This is not to propose yet again a techno-deterministic analysis on social media and social protest. In fact, as argued elsewhere, in the understanding of the relationship between Web 2.0 technologies and social movements it is of fundamental importance that we move beyond techno-deterministic analyses that emphasize pervasiveness, agency and change (Barassi, 2012, Barassi and Treré, 2012, Barassi, 2013). What I want to do in this post is to consider the events in Turkey and Brazil by raising some points on the connection between social media, collective emotion and transnational resonance. In order to (read more...)

Off the Grid in the Modern World

 Phillip Vannini  June 18, 2013

Power is an interesting word. For most social scientists “power” stands for authority, control, sovereignty, economic capital, military-industrial hegemony, social stratification, and similar ideas. But power—especially in everyday usage—is synonymous with something seemingly more immediate, proximate, and concrete. Thus we may commonly talk of “engine power” that allows us to drive faster, of “physical power” that enables us to jump higher, or of “domestic power” that permits us to live comfortable, connected, and convenient lives. What is truly interesting about this is that the dictionary definition of power—the ability or capacity to act—refers to all of the above, an idea that only a handful of scholars have capitalized upon. It’s an irremediably cloudy, intermittently soggy day on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula. But not even an unexpectedly miserable stretch of bad late spring weather can cast a wet blanket over the elation in the air. It’s the last interview—with informants number (read more...)

Is the Captain Crazy? Am I In Charge?

 Charlotte Linde  May 27, 2013

Probably everyone reading this has had the experience of receiving a command or an instruction from a legitimate authority that elicits the response: “Are they out of their minds?” If it is a bureaucratic authority, like the IRS, reflection suggests that there is no “they” to have a mind that they could be out of. This kind of authority is the result of a code of rules that is not monitored for consistency, and there may be no one who is charged with determining whether the application of a particular rule makes sense. This is the authority of the faceless “They”. But there is the even more frightening situation in which one’s manager issues an order which makes no sense, or which appears to be operating in a different universe. (As a linguist, I note the existence of a lexical item for one particular style of managerial insanity: the “bring (read more...)