Looks Like New

Long before our present day audio boom, public broadcasting in the United States flourished. Radio, a powerful way to connect people, underwent many transformations and federal regulatory shifts that impacted what it became. Where did public media come from? We explore these origins in the early 1900s with Dr. Josh Shepperd, assistant professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado, Bould...

With all of the headlines about scandals and issues within technology companies and social media platforms, one may ask how we got where we are today. Is it possible for things to get better? As we witness company leaders and engineers retroactively addressing issues, is there a way for forward thinking to happen within the industry? Dr. Casey Fiesler explores these questions and more.

You have likely heard of or used FitBit, Apple Smartwatches, GoPros or other devices we affix to our bodies each day. Despite the rapid development of wearable technologies in the last few decades, this conversation explores how they might not be as new as they might seem. Dr. James Gilmore explains the benefits, costs, and potential future implications of wearable technology in an increasingly di...

How did the Global South once inscribe its battle for liberation into media archives and how does accessing and viewing this material change through time, location and context? What lessons can the mediated image learn in counteracting the digital divide today? This month we are discussing archival footage documenting the Non-Aligned Movement, through images of African and Asian liberation and rev...

After years of shedding reporters and newsrooms, Colorado is home to a new experiment in sustainable journalism. In early May, the National Trust for Local News announced it was acquiring Colorado Community Media, a network of 24 newspapers in the Denver Metro area, via the Colorado News Conservancy, a new public benefit corporation. The Colorado News Conservancy is to be majority owned by the  jo...

As the US federal government considers once-in-a-generation investments in infrastructure, is it possible to also enable a new commitment to a democratic economy? Sara Horowitz is the founder of the Freelancers Union and author of the new book Mutualism, which presents a powerful vision for “building the next economy from the ground up. In this conversation, we explore strategies for bringing the...

In the last year, many of us have relied on the Internet even more than before. As we process life’s individual and collective trauma, do we turn to digital spaces for support and healing? If so, why? This month, we had a conversation with Dr. Samira Rajabi who unpacked her personal experiences and research on this topic. Dr. Rajabi is an Instructor in Media Studies and Director of Technology Infl...

Most of us use the Internet each day with our smartphones and devices. But too rarely do we consider how our connections are possible. How does the Internet work? What environmental toll does the Internet have? Our guest this month, Hunter Vaughan, discusses his background and work with asking these questions and current efforts to help lessen the environmental impact of the Internet. Vaughan is a...

A lot of us are thinking about the legacies of racism these days, and about a media ecosystem that seems to hinder any hope of progress. But too rarely do we think about race and media together. Who gets to be the heroes of the digital age? Whose bodies become a kind of media? Our guest this month, Armond Towns, has been developing a “Black media philosophy” that confronts media cultures sat...

Free and open-source software is a kind of miracle. It’s community-created technology, a commons that anyone can contribute to and use. But those communities are not always the utopias they’re made out to be. Many have been havens for exclusionary cultures, and their tools have been used to perpetrate human-rights abuses. Coraline Ada Ehmke is a software developer working to change tha...

The stakes for moderation and governance in online communities are getting higher and higher. Harms can be very serious, from election manipulation to sexual abuse. But for the most part, platforms rely on only very blunt tools for addressing these harms—the digital equivalents of censoring and exiling. But can we do better than simply imagining we can make harm go away? Niloufar Salehi (UC Berkel...

Art has often been the vanguard of new tech. It was through art that many people got interested in the Internet to begin with, or became willing to pay for subscription services. But too often, large corporations take advantage of business models that artists work to create. What if artists owned and governed their own business models? Austin Robey is co-founder of Ampled, a platform for musicians...

Brick House is a new news organization that calls itself “the wolf-proof media cooperative.” It has emerged in part out of a failed experiment, Civil, which sought to use Bitcoin-like blockchain technology to shore up the ailing news business. Brick House’s founder, the veteran journalist and entrepreneur Maria Bustillos, explains why she thinks a simpler, older model of cooperat...

This month, President Donald Trump has threatened to ban the Chinese-owned platforms TickTock and WeChat. This comes after years of China banning major US platforms like Google and Facebook, and securing the purchase of Uber’s Chinese business by a Chinese company. Chinese tech activists Katt Gu and Suji Yan speak with us about how this conflict looks from where they live in Shanghai, and they des...

Activist Adrienne Maree brown writes that the work of social change requires “science fictional behavior”— which is surely all the more true in the context of a global pandemic. To help us think through this crisis, we hear from Cadwell Turnbull, whose critically acclaimed first book, The Lesson, portrays an alien sort-of-invasion centered on his native US Virgin Islands. In addition t...

We are haunted and mobilized by images. The cellphone video of George Floyd’s death has set cities on fire, elevated Black struggles for justice, and reminded White Americans of violence that their society is organized to blind them to. We hear from Sandra Ristovska, a scholar and filmmaker at the University of Colorado Boulder who specializes in video evidence of human rights crimes. She ex...

Often, discussions about diversity in the tech industry focus on mere representation. But in this discussion from Boulder Startup Week, we take inspiration from the Zebras Unite network, which seeks not just to change representation superficially but to change models of business and culture. We hear from information scientist Shamika Goddard, startup co-founder Corey Kohn, and neuro-engineer Shaz...

How can we collaborate at a distance? The COVID-19 pandemic has many of us rapidly changing how we work—and wondering how many of the changes will stick. To guide us through this process, we hear this month from Natalia Lombardo and Richard D. Bartlett, founders of The Hum, an organization that supports teams with self-organization and decentralized collaboration. They are already accustomed resid...

Today’s guest is Evan Ravitz, a proponent of direct democracy , who served on the City of Boulder’s Campaign Finance and Elections Working Group . Ravitz has been critical of the City of Boulder’s delays in rolling out a voter approved initiative allowing electronic signatures to be submitted to get an initiative on the ballot.

The cultures of computer hacking have made their way from marginal subcultures to becoming driving forces in the world as we know it. Facebook’s headquarters is on a street called Hacker Way. A hack of the Democratic National Committee’s emails helped elect the current US president. Free Software produced by volunteer hackers around the world powers the internet. Hackers have been noble whistleblo...

While digital privacy issues often get a lot of attention and even alarmism, it rarely seems to change behavior. Even if it did, do individual choices really make a difference? Amie Stepanovich is a veteran policy expert and advocate who argues that we need to think about these questions not just as individuals but as a society. She is executive director of Silicon Flatirons a center on technology...

There is a kind of dream out there that, once we get the gizmos set up just right, work will be transformed. While many speculate about this, Kevin Owocki, founder of the Colorado-based startup Gitcoin , is in the thick of it. Not only is Gitcoin trying to create a new way for software developers to get paid, it is using blockchain technology to re-imagine how we steward and fund freely available...

This month, Spanish activist Stacco Troncoso and his collaborators released the DisCO Manifesto ( disco.coop ), which proposes a new model for organizations that account for the care work that supports workers and their communities. In this conversation, he explains how the model works and how it challenges norms, both in familiar workplaces and in techno-utopian visions. Troncoso is a founding me...

Unicorns are mythical animals. It’s also the name for a mythical idea that drives the tech startup economy. In that context, a unicorn is the rare $1 billion company that makes the whole system of widespread crashing-and-burning seem to work. Is there another way? Mara Zepeda is a co-founder of Zebras Unite, a network that is working to create a more ethical and inclusive startup ecosystem. She is...

We might not think about textiles as advanced technology, but in fact it was textile looms that helped inspire the designs of the earliest computers. This month we hear from Steven Frost, is an artist and an instructor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, who hosts the Colorado Sewing Rebellion at the Boulder Public Library. He talks about the transgressive potential of threads...