Review of Blogs from apennings.com - December 2010

Two Great Debates on Net Neutrality: Cerf-Farber and Lessig-Gilder

With the FCC releasing its latest rulings on Net Neutrality just before Christmas I thought I would go back to two very good debates about it. The first one at the Center for American Progress on Monday, July 17, 2006 featured Vinton G. Cerf, the creator of TCP and David Farber from the University of [...]

Neuromancing the Code: When IT Changed

During the 1980s, a different short of conversation about computers and data networking emerged. I was an undergraduate at the time doing an internship about Asian computerization at the East-West Center and I remember the personal computer with its IBM clones and the Apple Macintosh held most of the public’s tech attention with their associated [...]

A Digital Story about Economics and Health

Busy with grading today but I liked the combination of story-telling and data visualization in this video. Hans Rosling is a doctor from Sweden who has done a lot of work on paralytic diseases in developing countries. Share Anthony J. Pennings, PhD has been on the NYU faculty since 2001 teaching digital media, information systems [...]

Susan Crawford on US Broadband Policy, Net Neutrality and the Comcast-NBCU merger

This was a good talk on US telecom policy related to today’s net neutrality rulings. Here is the video of Susan Crawford’s talk at New York University on November 29, 2010. Professor Crawford was recently the Special Assistant to the President for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy.

Best IT/Media Policy Books of 2010

It’s 2010 and do we really know the impact technology is having in our lives? Sometimes I wonder if social media, as important as it is, is shielding us from the other important influences IT is having in our lives from the financial crisis we are recovering from, the way we conduct war and espionage, [...]

Informating the Subject: Reflecting on Zuboff’s Future of Power and Work

Shosana Zuboff’s In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988) was one of the more interesting inquiries into the processes of computerization and electronic communications to emerge out of the 1980s. While suffering from a number of deficiencies which will be discussed later, it nonetheless represented a serious and [...]


Advertising, E-Commerce and the Power of Search

At the core of global e-commerce’s extraordinary potential is the power of search engines and the new advertising strategies they enable. Search engine based advertising has continued to increase rapidly and drive e-commerce with it. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported that Internet advertising revenues in the U.S. totalled nearly $6.5 billion during the third [...]