Papers by Benjamin Peters
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Mar 10, 2022
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Mormon Studies Review, 2018
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New Media & Society, 2020
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How Not to Network a Nation, 2016
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How Not to Network a Nation, 2016
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Information, Communication & Society, 2016
ABSTRACT It is a curious fact how much talk about privacy is about the end of privacy. We term th... more ABSTRACT It is a curious fact how much talk about privacy is about the end of privacy. We term this ‘privacy endism,’ locating the phenomenon within a broader category of endist thought. We then analyze 101 newspaper articles between 1990 and 2012 that declare the end of privacy. Three findings follow. First, claims about the end of privacy point to an unusually broad range of technological and institutional causes. Privacy has been pronounced defunct for decades, but there has never been a near consensus about its causes. Second, unlike other endist talk (the end of art or history, etc.), privacy endism appears ongoing and not period specific. Finally, our explanation of the persistence and idiosyncrasy of claims to the end of privacy focuses on Warren and Brandeis’s 1890 negative conception of privacy as ‘the right to be let alone’: namely, modern privacy talk has always been endist because the right to privacy was born out of the conditions for its violation, not its realization. The conclusion comments on implications of that basic proposition.
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How Not to Network a Nation, 2016
https://twitter.com/fturner/status/78816734794507878
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New perspectives on the misinformation ecosystem that is the production and circulation of fake n... more New perspectives on the misinformation ecosystem that is the production and circulation of fake news. What is fake news? Is it an item on Breitbart, an article in The Onion, an outright falsehood disseminated via Russian bot, or a catchphrase used by a politician to discredit a story he doesn't like? This book examines the real fake news: the constant flow of purposefully crafted, sensational, emotionally charged, misleading or totally fabricated information that mimics the form of mainstream news. Rather than viewing fake news through a single lens, the book maps the various kinds of misinformation through several different disciplinary perspectives, taking into account the overlapping contexts of politics, technology, and journalism. The contributors consider topics including fake news as “disorganized” propaganda; folkloric falsehood in the “Pizzagate” conspiracy; native advertising as counterfeit news; the limitations of regulatory reform and technological solutionism; Reddi...
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Russian Journal of Communication, 2017
ABSTRACT This necessarily speculative as well as historically grounded essay examines two key wor... more ABSTRACT This necessarily speculative as well as historically grounded essay examines two key works in the Russian-language literature, Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star (1908. Krasnaia Zvesda: utopia. St. Petersburg: Tovarishchestvo khudozhnikov pechati) and Arkady and Boris Strugatskys’ Monday Begins on Saturday (1965. Ponedel’nik nachinaetsia v subbotu: Skazka dlia nauchnykh rabotnikov mladshego vozrasta. Moskva: Detskaia literatura) for insights into their respective pre-revolutionary and Soviet imaginaries of the relationship between data, statistics, and society. It is argued that each work reveals their own peculiar science fantasy and speculative future rooted in the present, with special comment on the historiographical role of data in shaping the twentieth-century visions of labor and work.
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New Media & Society, 2020
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Russian Journal of Communication, 2017
ABSTRACT This introduction reviews the intersection of data, ethics, and the Russian case. Its fo... more ABSTRACT This introduction reviews the intersection of data, ethics, and the Russian case. Its four sections, respectively, raise the ethical stakes concerning the contemporary data, outline a proverbial step toward a more humane ethics of data by normalizing certain features (such as anthropomorphic care) in the human–data relationship, reviews the leading scholarly literature on data, institutions, and social structures in specific, and summarizes the diverse contributions to this special journal issue. Each step is meant to broaden, ground, and sober the study of data in the modern moment. Taken together, the aim of this introduction, like the special issue it introduces, is to press the cutting edge of more open, humane, and critical research on data and the twenty-first century Russian case.
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International Affairs, 2016
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In the age of search, keywords increasingly organize research, teaching, and even thought itself.... more In the age of search, keywords increasingly organize research, teaching, and even thought itself. Inspired by Raymond Williams's 1976 classic Keywords, the timely collection Digital Keywords gathers pointed, provocative short essays on more than two dozen keywords by leading and rising digital media scholars from the areas of anthropology, digital humanities, history, political science, philosophy, religious studies, rhetoric, science and technology studies, and sociology. Digital Keywords examines and critiques the rich lexicon animating the emerging field of digital studies. This collection broadens our understanding of how we talk about the modern world, particularly of the vocabulary at work in information technologies. Contributors scrutinize each keyword independently: for example, the recent pairing of digital and analog is separated, while classic terms such as community, culture, event, memory, and democracy are treated in light of their historical and intellectual importance. Metaphors of the cloud in cloud computing and the mirror in data mirroring combine with recent and radical uses of terms such as information, sharing, gaming, algorithm, and internet to reveal previously hidden insights into contemporary life. Bookended by a critical introduction and a list of over two hundred other digital keywords, these essays provide concise, compelling arguments about our current mediated condition. Digital Keywords delves into what language does in today's information revolution and why it matters.
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Reviewing one book of keywords filled with numerous entries would be enough of a challenge. Doing... more Reviewing one book of keywords filled with numerous entries would be enough of a challenge. Doing two is an attempt to catch water in a net. With 25 keywords in Digital
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Russian Journal of Communication
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Your Computer Is on Fire
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John Durham Peters, professor of English and of Film and Media Studies at Yale University, is kno... more John Durham Peters, professor of English and of Film and Media Studies at Yale University, is known for his work on the history of media and communication. His first book, Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication, gained worldwide fame thanks to its transdisciplinary outlook on humanity’s thirst for communion, which it finds not in cables and signals, but in its very human condition. In The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, he invites readers to expand their understanding of media beyond mass media. Francois Cooren, professor at Universite de Montreal’s Department of communication, invited John Durham Peters to give a presentation for the department’s 40th anniversary and took the occasion to discuss with him about his conception of communication. The two men exchange their views, among others, on the need to get past the separation between an apparently immaterial realm of communication and the material world it would merely represent. B...
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Papers by Benjamin Peters