iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Absolutely fantastic cover of one my favourite Cranberries songs. elisapie.bandcamp.com/track/sinnat.... Just released on Tuesday.

elisapie.bandcamp.com

Sinnatuumakka (Dreams), by Elisapie

from the album Sinnatuumakka (Dreams)

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Via @dropout.tv the closest approximation of my profession's (media arts professor) colour (#8EFC56) davidsimaginedfuture.org

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I love this meta of defining what a definition is: “The purpose of formulating a definition is ‘to extract and describe the established meaning of a concept already in use and (analyse) its components’ (Jax, 2007: 343).” Ronzhyn et al. (2022). doi.org/10.1177/1461...

doi.org

Defining affordances in social media research: A literature review - Alexander Ronzhyn, Ana Sofia Cardenal, Albert Batlle Rubio, 2023

An increasingly influential strand of research on social media relies on the concept of affordances to account for effects. However, hindering the possibility o...

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Ah! Just found the best version yet on Wikicommons commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A...

commons.wikimedia.org

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

I know there are many data visualizations to adore. This will remain top five for me.

Export in Bananen in Tonnen von 1994-2005 (Banana exports in tonnes from 1994-2005). It is a multicolour bar chart in 3D with photos of bananas in the background.

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Reposted by Steve Jankowski

Mél Hogan / The Data Fix @melhogan.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Open call for pitches for vol 3 of Predictions: ruhr-uni-bochum.sciebo.de/s/pDyDideqak...

ruhr-uni-bochum.sciebo.de

Prediction_Volume 3 Open Call for Submissions.pdf

sciebo - Die Campuscloud

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Biblically-accurate Wikipedian commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wi...

This image comes for a Wikimedia style guide document as an example Wikimedia imagery. It has an illustration of a femme-presenting person x's on their shirt and a hat with many eyes on it. It looks like a less intense version of an Angel from Ezekiel in the Christian Bible.

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Also please don't look at any of the websites I've ever made in my entire life 😅.

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

@matuzo.at Hear me out. Black t-shirt, white lettering and red star. The HTMHell logo. I would buy this in a heartbeat.

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

👏 This is the type of work of what I've been thinking about when I argued that we need a utopian media studies. Getting offline is not the answer. Instead, there's just a lot of work to do. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Correction. ET Book (which is based on Bembo). edwardtufte.github.io/et-book/

edwardtufte.github.io

ET Book · Edward Tufte on GitHub

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

The new monospace Datatype font takes Edward Tufte's ideas and jams them into a font. So lovely. franktisellano.github.io/datatype/ Only thing that could be better is if it was designed to match ET Bembo (maybe it does, I'll have to try it out).

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Vsauce mentioned Mark Fisher in this video to help explain why the future feels the way it does. That is all. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0teS...

youtube.com

Vsauce Explains How Consciousness May Have Come About

YouTube video by More Alex O'Connor

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Reposted by Steve Jankowski

Zach McDowell @zacharymcdowell.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

I've been writing and talking around these issues for a while, and it's really great to see Helen Choi's new piece in AI and Ethics saying it loudly: there is a *positional duty* of academics to defend the knowledge commons. OA! link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43681-026-01373-z

link.springer.com

Towards a practice of knowledge commoning: academics’ ethical duties to defend Wikipedia in the age of generative AI - AI and Ethics

Wikipedia is the most widely used reference work in history and one of the most valuable training resources available to the generative AI (genAI) industry; and yet that same industry is…

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

bsky.app/profile/pmam... @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social "Yeah, that seems about right" – Area X

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Wikimedia research methodologies: a bibliometric history of peer production and AI (2005–2025) – I describe the past 20y of this charismatic research object from the perspective of how concerns and methods have shaped its meaning both for researchers and the public more broadly rdcu.be/jjVzyGCbjFja

A triangular diagram that shows the preference for qualitative, quantitative, and evaluative research when studying Wikimedia projects from seven research concerns: Digital property and Commons; Distributed authority; Social media platforms; a reliable source; optimizing Wikipedia; Corporate AI Software; and Wikipedia's significance.

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

On target. We saw this also at work with discourses about AI and the 19th century daguerreotype. But what we argue is that there is with new media in general, there is a moment of unsettling the relationship between culture and technique. It repeats a bit. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

A screenshot of a research paper: The enduring schism between culture and technique: Historical (dis)continuities between the Daguerreotype and Generative AI. By
Claudio Celis Bueno, Steve Jankowski and Jakko Kemper

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

The best place to download my glossary entries on the nature of Internet "projects" and "hype histories" with the Institute of Network Cultures is here matterofimagination.neocities.org/glossary

matterofimagination.neocities.org

matterofimagination

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

Completely misusing Latour here, but… "They kept using the old opposition between what is constructed and what is not constructed, instead of the slight but crucial difference between what is well and what is badly constructed (or composed)" (2010, 478). www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/defaul...

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:To...

A picture taken from Wikicommons titled "Topology joke." A coffee cup with a handle is topologically equivalent to a donut. A coffee cup transforming into a donut is represented by ceramic models.

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Kraken / Giant Squid could be the closest one to what you are thinking of.

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Feels like the focus has moved from the classic discourses about virtual communities to cybernetics again. But obviously, this time around its a bit different. Pinpointing that difference is what needs to happen.

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

2 letters from the same company – 10 years apart. www.facebook.com/notes/370797... www.meta.com/thefutureisf... They show a rhetorical shift from the networked communitarianism of the 2010s, to something like "AI materialism" with the meaning of "community"in both texts are wildly different.

meta.com

The Future is for Everyone

Read Mark Zuckerberg’s piece on our values for building superintelligence for everyone.

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

One of my colleagues Lydia Kollyri had paper "rethinking platform vernaculars" published with New Media & Society. She told me she wrote it because students struggle with these ideas in a course we teach together. Should be a classic explainer on the concept journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

An infobox for the ages. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_B...

A screenshot of the Wikipedia infobox for Count Binface which includes their species (Recyclon) and the origin (Sigma IX).

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I think we should see more media theory in the narrative form of comics. Such a useful pedagogical format – one of my instructors used "The Watchmen" for half a term to guide discussions on "Media & Society".

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

There are tonne of researchers we list in the article that we think are working towards (or aligned with) utopian media studies, like @melhogan.bsky.social @loriemerson.net @gabrielebalbi.bsky.social @nannathylstrup.bsky.social @jfarkas.bsky.social @jamesbridle.bsky.social @edwardongwesojr.com

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

The introduction to the special issue makes a claim that we should manifest 5 utopian sensibilities through the work media scholars do when they engage with utopia as "archaeology," "ontology," and "architecture" (See Levitas 2013). link.springer.com/book/10.1057...

link.springer.com

Utopia as Method

Utopia should be understood as a method rather than a goal. This book rehabilitates utopia as a repressed dimension of the sociological and in the process produces the Imaginary Reconstitution of Soci...

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Shout out to the amazing contributors to the issue mnc2144.wixsite.com/masclab @anya-shchetvina.bsky.social @nathaliefridz.bsky.social @grohmannrafael.bsky.social @katemadd.bsky.social, www.criticalinfralab.net, including the rest whose socials I couldn't find.

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

☀️ U T O P I A N ☀️ M E D I A ☀️ S T U D I E S ☀️ I am so proud of this work w/ Convergence. Kemper & I make the argument that many media scholars use utopian approaches in their research. But we just need to reflect on how to do it together, and do it well. journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

I was mad but couldn't be mad because it was funny.

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Jokes on me. I just bought Fourtet's "Wingdings" album from bandcamp and when I added it to music-app (iTunes–which I should get rid of), it didn't play. Had to edit the metadata in Audacity and change the filenames which just caused havoc. lol. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingdin... Now I'm 😎

en.wikipedia.org

Wingdings (album) - Wikipedia

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

I'm proud to announce "Digital ecologies of hope: A natural history of emerging media futures" as the last Utopian Media Studies article. It includes a creative supplement (which is the entire article, but illustrated: journals.sagepub.com/doi/suppl/10... journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

Get on board. Made all my histories of digital culture students make zines this year. Never realized how enjoyable it would be to pass on the stapler skills o students. Inspired no less by a couple of great media scholars deep into zine-making @apasek.bsky.social @ktmac.bsky.social

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

Just proof that history and philosophy are besties.

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Likely Bunsen Honeydew. AND just realized, in this moment, that his lastname is likely because his head looks like a honeydew melon.

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Reposted by Steve Jankowski

Everest Pipkin @everest.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

first day of the second "the browser is already a game engine" class with sfpc. excited for the next 10 weeks of talking and thinking deeply about online games

I WANT A GAME THAT LOOKS LIKE A HOMEPAGE
I WANT A GAME I CAN DOWNLOAD AND EDIT ON MY COMPUTER
I WANT A GAME THAT LIVES IN AN IFRAME
I WANT A GAME I CAN INSPECT WITH THE CONSOLE LOG
I WANT A GAME WHERE I CAN HIT CONTROL-A AND SELECT EVERY HTML OBJECT ON THE SCREEN
I WANT A GAME MADE OF HOTLINKED IMAGES FROM WIKIPEDIA COMMONS
I WANT A GAME THAT RUNS ON A PHONE FROM 2011
I WANT A GAME MADE OF 1000 <a> TAGS
I WANT A GAME I CAN COPY-PASTE FROM
I WANT A GAME WITH A GUESTBOOK
I WANT A GAME THAT IS A WEBSITE, NOT ON A WEBSITE

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

My riff on the Cyberpunks prayer from www-jstor-org.proxy.uba.uva.nl/stable/1465622 (p. 792).

A revised version of the Cyberpunks prayer.
Our User,
Who art in data,
Hallow be thy network.
Thy update come,
Thy code will be run
Offline as it is online,
Give us this day our daily thread,
And block our toxic posts
As we block those who troll against us.
And lead us not into disconnection,
But deliver us from disconnection.
For thine is the System and the Software
and the glory forever, and ever
Amen.

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

🚨 INTERNET HISTORY ALERT 🚨 Super excited to announce my two entries of "Projects" and "Hype Histories" as part of the _Imagining the Internet(s)_ Collaborative glossary by the Institute of Network Cultures. networkcultures.org/wp-content/u...

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

✨Tomorrow✨ I will be giving a lightning talk at the public event "Real Inspiration for Protopian Futures: Toolbuilder Showcase & Mini Writing Workshop" where I will present work on how the history of media stories helps us think about the future. luma.com/dbvh8eoz

luma.com

Real Inspiration for Protopian Futures: Toolbuilder Showcase & Mini Writing Workshop · Zoom · Luma

Protopian stories imagine a future that is neither flawless nor catastrophic, but instead workably better than today. It’s about plausible progress rather than…

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

As part of the special issue on Utopian Media Studies that I am co-editing with Convergence, I am pleased to see this article by the very talented @anya-shchetvina.bsky.social and @nathaliefridz.bsky.social come out. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... #utopia #mediastudies #webhistory

Screenshot of the journal title page for the article: "The Vernacular web: A notion at the intersection of media theory and a utopian web imaginary". with the abstract: "This article critically examines the vernacular web as a notion that exists in conceptual ambiguity
between Media and Internet Studies, Web History, and artistic and activist practice. Drawing on Ruth Levitas’s argument that utopian implications are often embedded within the Social Sciences and can be critically excavated (2013), it argues that the vernacular web operates across two registers: an analytical concept describing amateur, non-institutional, and ostensibly autonomous forms of online practice, and a temporally grounded imaginary that invests the early web with utopian value. By analysing the reciprocity between these two registers, the article traces how utopian assumptions about autonomy, participation, and digital well-being circulate across scholarship, historical narratives, and activist practice. Through the cases of Olia Lialina’s essays and The Yesterweb, it identifies three constituent values of functional autonomy, while arguing that this imaginary remains half-baked: oriented towards aesthetics and affect rather than a reflection on the feasibility, limitations and potential risks."

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

You completed the appliance repair ritual that is equivalent of "turn it off / turn it back on again" or "clean the cache."

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Love this and will keep it in mind for next year when I run the course Histories of Digital Culture again (it's just finishing up). Relatedly, we have an digital archives "playlist" that students use textaural.com/uva_HDC/play... . First link explains the archive, the second links to it.

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Steve Jankowski @textaural.bsky.social · 22/06/2026

What a fascinating looking collection! Looking forward to digging into it.

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