Last week I heard Siva Vaidhyanathan speak about the googleization of everything. This post isn’t really about that. While I think he’s a great presenter and a fine writer  — we live on different ends of the spectrum: he fears Google, I love Google. When I read his book last Spring I found myself disagreeing with him page after page. I’m more in favor of the In The Plex version of Google. But that’s a topic for another day…

Something Siva said though really stuck with me. This is totally paraphrasing but it goes like this:

 The digital divide was initially about the have and have-nots related to web and technology access. That is shifting— now the divide is about those who understand the data being collected and who know how to manipulate that system vs. those who are unaware of this process and who are simply objects being used.

This sparked a memory from…

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I took my son to an office store this weekend. We went down the desktop aisle: they had four. By the time he’s a teenager desktops will be faded memories. He already has his own iPad.

This semester I’m participating in a seminar titled Awakening the Digital Imagination: A Networked Faculty-Staff Development Seminar. We’re using the New Media Reader and it’s loaded with all the classics: V. Bush, Licklider, Engelbart, Kay, etc. Each week we read an essay and discuss the foundations of computers and the web. We’re encouraged to blog our thoughts and so I’ll devote a few posts here to that experience.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about my early encounters with computers. I can’t recall the first one I ever saw or typed on, but it must have been in elementary school. I know my…

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