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On this episode we have the privilege of hosting a distinguished returning guest, who’s groundbreaking research has reshaped the landscape of media studies; the Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, Cinematic Arts, Education, and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California, Dr. Henry Jenkins. What does it mean to be a fan in the digital age? What do fan pra...

Rachel O’Dwyer is a writer and researcher whose work looks at digital economies and culture. Her writing touches on online transactions, art markets, programmable money, and alternative currencies. Rachel’s work probes the social and political landscapes that these technologies bring into being. She serves as a lecturer in digital cultures at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, Irela...

On this episode, we host Dr. Henry Jenkins, an esteemed scholar of fan studies, participatory culture, and transmedia. As the director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the author of influential works such as "Textual Poachers," Dr. Jenkins explored how audiences actively engage in shaping and reshaping media content. He was the principal investigator for "The Civic Imagination Proj...

This month we welcome Benjamin Edwards, AI and Machine Learning Reporter for Ars Technica. He specializes in computer and video game history, has been covering the world of AI technology for over 16 years for publications such as The Atlantic, Wired, PC World, Macworld, Ars Techinca, 1UP, and Game Developer Magazine. Benj also runs Vintage Computing and Gaming, a blog devoted to computer and video...

With the rise of NFTs, blockchain and cryptocurrency took the art world by storm. But often, this meant doubling down on art’s status as a financial asset. However, this technology could have a place in the art world beyond the speculative churn of NFT markets.  How can blockchain help build an ecosystem where artists and galleries support each other – one where creators have sovereignty over...

As AI systems become more widespread, it is becoming all the more important to know we can trust them. This month, Rohit Taware interviews Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of CalypsoAI, Victor Ardulov. Victor created the technical roadmap, and managed a team of applied scientists, to build a unique software that is being used to check the health and well-roundedness of generative and Deep Neural Net...

With the rise of open social media platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky, nonprofits have new opportunities to develop close conversations with the communities they seek to support. Many of these open social media platforms are also better aligned with nonprofits’ values than major tech companies have been. What are the best ways for non-profits to get involved? How do nonprofits navigate this...

In the aftermath of a chaotic Twitter takeover, many people have moved away from centralized social media platforms to a new set of social platforms that are open-source, decentralized, and user-centered—like Bluesky, Mastodon, and Nostr. But civic-minded social platforms are nothing new. This episode presents some of Open Social Media’s origin stories from three speakers who have been invol...

At a time when many people are focused on recent advances in artificial intelligence, another transformative technology is quietly emerging to reshape our future: quantum computing. The people working toward this radical shift imagine a world where quantum computing revolutionizes drug discovery, financial strategies, and various global challenges. This episode explores the mind-bending possibilit...

IMAGE BY Alexis Kenyon via DALL-E Many of us assume everyone has access to the Internet. In light of the last few years of global pandemic, however, we observed headlines about the unconnected and the issues that were created in social, work, and educational daily experiences. Why are some Americans, especially in the rural Midwest flyover states, left without access or with incredibly slow Intern...

Being an entrepreneur in the international cryptocurrency market involves numerous challenges—from government regulations to cultural context. These challenges play out very differently around the world. The conversation revolves around cryptocurrency in India, web3 entrepreneurship, and cryptocurrency technology-based arcades for gamers. Nikita Menon speaks with Siddharth Menon, a founder of vari...

Blockchain was created to build democratic systems but more often than not we see stories of scams, frauds and attacks. Despite these allegations, there are a few builders who continue to work towards improving this technology; builders who wish to see a democratic internet being enabled by the blockchain. Hari Anantharaman speaks with Austin Griffith to understand what it means to be a builder in...

ChatGPT, short for “Conversational Generative Pre-training Transformer,” is an advanced language model developed by OpenAI that can understand and generate natural language with a high degree of accuracy. It has been a hot topic lately, for contexts in education and industry. This technology is capable of tasks such as language translation, question answering, and text generation &#821...

Cryptocurrency has been in the news this past month after a cascade of bankruptcies unraveled a web of fraud. This comes after a year of already declining markets recast the 2021 crypto boom in a dark light. However, the headlines usually stick to flashy financial projects with big bottom lines. James Brennan speaks with Marisa Rando from PactDAO to learn how mutual aid can be served by blockchain...

With the journalism industry dwindling across the country, journalists formed the Colorado Sun as a beacon of hope. The Colorado Sun is a small but mighty digital news source for the state of Colorado. It is a Public Benefit Corporation making it first and foremost dedicated to serving the Colorado public, and setting it apart from traditional news sources. We talked to Eric Lubbers, in charge of...

Do social media networks have to be addictive, or polarizing, or advertising-funded? This conversation explores lessons from the past that could help us make social media better today. Our guest is University of Virginia media studies professor Kevin Driscoll, author most recently of “The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media.” He brings us stories of an almost-lost era before the...

Democracy seems to be in crisis around the world. Aspiring dictators are on the rise in many countries, and the flows of information are under the control of often-unaccountable tech companies. Could democracy be on its way out? This month, we hear from one of the most celebrated scholars of politics and media working today, Zizi Papacharissi. Her latest book, After Democracy, draws from interview...

These days it seems like cryptocurrencies and blockchains are mostly enabling abuses: speculative bubbles, malware attacks, and money laundering for rogue states. But could the same technology also hold powerful governments and corporations accountable? Jonathan Dotan directs the Starling Lab at Stanford University and USC, which uses emerging cryptographic technology to document human rights abus...

When we think about social media platforms and online interactions, it might seem like we are merely experiencing feeds of information that are curated for us by algorithms. The scale by which companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram now operate can make us question whether these information sharing spaces are public at all. What would it look like for platforms to look more like other kind...

Competitive entertainment has always been an essential part of human culture. Traditionally, sports have been the preferred form of competition, however, in a modern age of mass globalization through connection, a new form of entertainment has taken the stage: esports. With online communities of millions spread across the world, esports has been rapidly expanding and encourages a volatile competit...

News headlines have been full of debates about Critical Race Theory (CRT), books and topics being banned in schools, and calls to remove statues of colonizers around the world. More recently, universities and governments have done work in land acknowledgements or renaming places locally under the banner of “decolonizing.” But what does decolonizing really mean, and what does it ask of...

If you’ve noticed your social media platforms and web searches are giving you personalized results or advertisements, you might be curious about how or why this happens. This is the work of algorithms—the programming that computers use to take raw data and do something with it. While algorithms might be used as a type of buzzword, knowing what they are and how they function can be really useful. I...

When we design the future, we rely on history, whether we like it or not. In December 2021, the MEDLab and the United Nations Internet Governance Forum launched a virtual art exhibition called “Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet.” This online exhibition is an interdisciplinary, artistic experience interrogating narratives of the past and working through future possi...

Twitter is a social media platform that has played a significant role in everything from politics, news, to social justice organizing. How do marginalized communities use this platform? What drives people to use the platform to find and build community through Black Twitter. What is Black Twitter? This month, we had a conversation with Shamika Klassen, a Ph. D. candidate and researcher at the Univ...

News from the Arab world tends to come to us in the United States in the form of dramatic spectacle that oversimplifies complex situations. Lebanon is no exception—most recently, the site of a deadly explosion and a political crisis. What are we missing when we see only images of spectacle? This month we hear from Marwan Kraidy, the dean of Northwestern University’s campus in Doha, Qatar, wh...