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Digital Culture + Media Initiative

@dcmiatpsu.bsky.social
38 followers 35 following 42 posts

Initiative of Penn State's Department of English, directed by Matt Tierney, supporting critical, speculative, and historical scholarship on cultures and media of computerized society. dcmi.la.psu.edu

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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 04/04/2026
Guys, it's a superb book. Here, you can also get a taste from one of the early chapters, this prehistory of the containerization published in the Radical History Review a few years back: read.dukeupress.edu/radical-hist....
pennpress.org
Standardizing Empire – Penn Press
How the US military origins of global capitalism facilitated both South Korea’s “economic miracle” and the decline of US industrial might The US milita...
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
This Thursday DCMI presents: “Automating Servitude: How Platforms Exploit Women’s Work,” with Julia Ticona (@jticona.bsky.social). Professor Ticona is the author the brilliant book Left to Our Own Devices: Coping with Insecure Work in a Digital Age (Oxford 2022) and much more. Grucci Room 3:30pm.
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
This April, we warmly welcome you to two lectures on computation and women's work: 💻 April 2, 3:30: Julia Ticona, “Automating Servitude: How Platforms Exploit Women’s Work” ⚙ April 9, 3:30: Patrick Chung, “Militarized Circuits: Expat Engineers, Rural Women Factory Workers, and Global High Tech”
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
the hole (tsai)
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
I sometimes refer to my gen ed teaching as "driving 65 in a 35," so, maybe?
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 03/01/2026
The new Fowkes tr.? Now wishing I could drop everything to read along.
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 19/12/2025
A warmer and more earnest colleague could not have been wished for than Eduardo Mendieta. Our final exchange was in appreciation of this article that I enjoyed so much I sent it to my mom. Rest well.
jstor.org
Decolonizing Blackness, Decolonizing Theology on JSTOR
Eduardo Mendieta, Decolonizing Blackness, Decolonizing Theology, The CLR James Journal, Vol. 27, No. 1/2 (Fall 2021), pp. 101-120
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
One more day of it, then will update!
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 04/12/2025
Classroom report: "To be a barnacle on the floating corpse of capital. Was that the most I could hope for from a professional life?" Ending the Work + Literature course on @lclaberge.bsky.social's gorgeous, funny FAKE WORK: moving and meta, a workplace satire and memoir of political consciousness.
haymarketbooks.org
Fake Work
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 16/11/2025
This Wednesday, Melissa Charenko tells us all about "Proxy Data: A History of the Scientific Stand-in." In person only, Wednesday at 3pm, locals come one come all!
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
Indeed! The book is a history of how it got that way.
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
Really terrific work, Erik. I've been recommending it around to colleagues too.
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
Classroom report: This week in a gen ed course about work, we're finishing this very good book by Erik Baker (@erikmbaker.bsky.social). It's good in the classroom, great on the history, and right on the politics. Read it, share it, teach it.
hup.harvard.edu
Make Your Own Job — Harvard University Press
A sweeping new history of the changing meaning of work in the United States, from Horatio Alger to Instagram influencers.How Americans think about work changed profoundly over the course of the twenti...
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 25/10/2025
This line is from a late essay collection called Like a Conquered Province: the Moral Ambiguity of America. But the sentiment (or idea, depending on what we take it for) is there in most of his major work too, e.g., Growing Up Absurd and the novel Empire City.
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 25/10/2025
And also the terms of drive, as in Goodman himself, a "drive to morality [as] the natural ingenuousness of youth... brought up on a literature of devastating criticism that has gone unanswered because there is no answer."
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 25/10/2025
Yes, exactly that.
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 25/10/2025
Few moralisms are worse for politics than the one that enjoins moralism from politics.
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
Really great work by a friend of friends of the initiative.
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 09/10/2025
Meanwhile, why wait!? Order yourself a copy of @melissacharenko.bsky.social's outstanding new book from @uchicagopress.bsky.social. Available next month!!
press.uchicago.edu
Climate by Proxy
How twentieth-century scientists used proxies to understand historic climates, shaping scientific analyses of the past and the future. Unlike our daily reckoning with the weather, our experience of cl...
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 09/10/2025
Our first in-person lecture of the year is Melissa Charenko, “Proxy Data: A History of the Scientific Stand-in.” @melissacharenko.bsky.social is an Assistant Professor at U Penn, and will speak to us at 3pm on 11/19 in the Grucci Room. Come one, come all. We couldn't be more excited!
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 29/09/2025
"That's unexpected." "It's completely unexpected." ... is an objectively funny way to begin a conversation about one of the most widely reported (if collectively disavowed) ongoing stories in the higher ed and tech industrieds.
nytimes.com
Big Tech Told Kids to Code. The Jobs Didn’t Follow.
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 10/09/2025
Assigned that wonderful book in my work-and-literature class this fall, and will now bring this image in too!
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 23/07/2025
Ground beef entrepreneur predicts all-hamburger future.
theguardian.com
OpenAI CEO tells Federal Reserve confab that entire job categories will disappear due to AI
Sam Altman also said AI could already diagnose better than doctors, as his company expands into Washington
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 20/06/2025
Featuring excellent methodological foreword by DCMI fave Marc Steinberg.
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
I went to his memorial service. Literally tripped over Lionel Hampton.
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 10/05/2025
If you're in Durham for @sns2025.bsky.social at the end of the month, come by, say hi, bright and early. Friday @ 8:30am, with Ben Mangrum and Justin Mitchell:
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 16/04/2025
+ whether or not you can come to the talk, all scholars of digital studies should read this fantastic article, a densely and beautifully written object lesson in interdisciplinary thinking: www.erudit.org/en/journals/...
erudit.org
Price Monitoring, or Where Surveillance Studies Meets the Sociology of Price Formation – Surveillance & Society
An article from Surveillance & Society, on Érudit.
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 10/04/2025
𝗧𝗢𝗗𝗔𝗬
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
But first, this week at the same time and place, it's Kalindi Vora on "Data Work as Care Work!"
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
Our third and final talk of this year's series is next week! In “Finance by Other Means? The Ambiguous Moral Economies of the Subscription Business Model," Aaron Shapiro (@bricolageyumyum.bsky.social) asks how we might "reclaim subscriptionization for post-capitalist transformation." Join us!
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
This event was outstanding, what a crowd, what a lecture. Thanks to all who attended!
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 04/04/2025
"Data Work as Care Work" — we couldn't be more excited for our upcoming visit from Kalindi Vora of Yale. On April 10 at 3:30 in the Grucci Room, @kalindivora.bsky.social urges us to "challenge ongoing coloniality in tech design in the face of growing datafication."
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
TODAY!
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 26/03/2025
Classroom report: This article by @ursulahuws.bsky.social can still strike the hearts of students learning to be creative workers (and of at least some of the teachers who teach them). It's also a crystal-hard model of dialectical thinking.
ephemerajournal.org
Expression and expropriation: The dialectics of autonomy and control in creative labour | Ephemeral Journal
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 12/03/2025
Only A. or E. can dignify the already-dead.
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 28/02/2025
We're delighted!
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 28/02/2025
Cannot wait: on 4.3, the year's first DCMI talk is Omedi Ochieng, brilliant author of INTELLECTUAL IMAGINATION and GROUNDWORK FOR THE PRACTICE OF THE GOOD LIFE! (Up next: Kalindi Vora on 4.10 + Aaron Shapiro on 4.17!) @omediochieng.bsky.social @kalindivora.bsky.social @bricolageyumyum.bsky.social
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 01/01/2025
Special session of #MLA25 #MLA2025, next Friday at 3:30: "Sentimental Politics after Doomerism," with Zachary Loeb, Matt Tierney, Melanie Abeygunawardana, and Sheila Liming (@seeshespeak.bsky.social). Come say hi.
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
An outlier in our program of in-person talks, our series of spring 2022 was held remotely in a series of webinars. Videos still linked from our site, under "recent posts," include such friends and luminaries as Yuri Furuhata, Armond Towns, Marc Steinberg, Jim Hodge, Alenda Chang, and Michael Sawyer.
dcmi.la.psu.edu
Digital Culture + Media Initiative | of the Department of English
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
Our lectures are intimate and wide-ranging, engaged with their audience and with the present. All, in all disciplines, are welcome! Check out our speaker bios, and our list of past talks, here:
dcmi.la.psu.edu
Speakers | Digital Culture + Media Initiative
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 02/12/2024
So excited to announce our spring speakers! April 3: Omedi Ochieng, Colorado (@omediochieng.bsky.social) April 10: Kalindi Vora, Yale (@kalindivora.bsky.social) April 17: Aaron Shapiro, UNC (@bricolageyumyum.bsky.social) Talks are in-person in the Grucci Room, Burrowes 102, at 3:30pm. Join us!
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Digital Culture + Media Initiative @dcmiatpsu.bsky.social · 27/11/2024
What we are (speaker series, course incubator) and do:
dcmi.la.psu.edu
Digital Culture + Media Initiative | of the Department of English
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