“You know what your trouble is? You’re the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it’s going to have some specific purpose. It’s for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it’s new technology, it’ll open areas nobody’s ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won’t play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of.”

~William Gibson “The Winter Market”

Dissertation Award World Tour

Since the completion of my dissertation, the only step left is to submit my research for award consideration. Name of AwardAssociationDate of ConferenceLocation of ConferenceStatusKenneth Harwood Outstanding Dissertation AwardBroadcast Education AssociationApril 7-10, 2013Las Vegas, NVWonHerbert S. Dordick AwardInternational Communication Association, Communication and Technology SectionJune 17-21,2013London, EnglandNominatedAoIR 2013 Dissertation AwardAssociation of...

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Local is National: Lessons from the Campaign

The following was my panel pitch for the 2013 SxSW Conference for the Government and Civic Engagement track During the course of previous election cycles, it is easy to observe how the ideas and the beliefs of the candidates at the national and regional levels get boiled down to sound bites and talking points....

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SOPA and PIPA have the fundamental capability to change how users interact with the Internet.

Breaking the ‘net

January 18, 2012 will be best remembered for the “blacking out of the web” as several of the core business of the Internet have either decided to blackout the site (e.g., reddit.com) or black out their logo (e.g., google.com). The focus of the outage has been the Stop Online Piracy...

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Writing from the iPad

Note: this entry is a response to a series of emails that were posted on the Association of Internet Researcher’s email list regarding the ability of an iPad to be a device for writers. I’m normally considered an early adopter of technology. I love being on the “cutting edge.” My...

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Festivals in the Age of Instant Access

The submission deadline for SxSW is this Friday. This year I wanted to focus on the structural issues surrounding the conference system. So I starting working around this theme on "How being Hippy Hipster Punk helps with the Creation & Transmission of Knowledge.“ Also, I knew that I wanted to have...

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In Defense of Internships

This is a response to “Spend Your College Tuition on Being Mentored and Starting a Company” by Jason Calacanis Jason, While I appreciate the sentiment you’re making regarding your child’s future, I am concerned with this article. Your statement “We don’t do internships because the law is so fracked up in California...

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The Concept of Reach

As my presentation for SxSW is coming closer, I felt it was time to clarify some of the concepts from my discussion of nanocelebrity. Perhaps the most important to look at is the concept of reach. Normally, reach is discussed as an effect of the network itself. People can connect...

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Rural U.S. and the Use of Broadband

One of the regional newspapers in Ohio wrote on Sunday about the ability of residents to connect to high-speed Internet service. The argument that was presented in a follow-up article was that broadband connectivity was part of the overall business infrastructure planning of rural Ohio. The one point of concern...

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