Author Archives: Jeff Hemsley

A theme in recent readings has been that deliberative discussion and other forms of political participation have been on the decline, particularly since the 1980s [1],[2]. I can’t help but think about this from an economics perspective. It might be … Continue reading →

I’m going to argue that while our new networked world posses new problems and risks, in some ways they aren’t that much different than what humans have faced before. But first, I’m going to tell you about Cindy. I was … Continue reading →

After reading the excerpt from Viktor’s Mayer-Schönberger’s “Delete : the virtue of forgetting in the digital age”, I wondered if I ought to delete my last post, Hacktivism, which isn’t terribly racy or radical, but ponders on how companies in … Continue reading →

What is hacktivism? I visited the site www.thehacktivist.com to understand how they defined it. In short it is the melding of hacking and activism. Hacking is essentially writing software that circumvents computer or network security, and activism is generally a … Continue reading →

For this week’s writing I thought it would be fun to explore how our course blog relates to the gatekeeping readings. Not because I feel any particular angst or thrill about being gated or gatekeeper, but because as an Exploited … Continue reading →

At the end of Summer some students moved in across the street. Predictably, the following Friday they had a crashing, clashing, thumping, noisy party till two AM. I put in ear plugs and could still hear the rhythmic thumping. Since … Continue reading →

Nissenbaum and other authors discussed control and access as aspects of. I’d like to suggest that much of today’s media impairs our ability to control how much access to us advertisers have. I’d also like to suggest that there are … Continue reading →

Recently I read The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen and, oddly, kept thinking about it while reading about privacy. Veblen, an economic scholar in the late 1800’s, coined the term “conspicuous consumption”. To oversimplify, he means that … Continue reading →

In this first chapter Braman introduces ‘information policy’ as a developing field created by drawing together policies from dispirit areas of the existing legal landscape. Her view is a constructionist one wherein changes in society alters how laws are perceived … Continue reading →