I am interested in understanding how media change over regimes of time, space, technology, and power. Grounded in the humanities and social sciences, my work tends to intersect historical, critical, and transnational approaches to that basic puzzle of why media in general–and digital communication technologies in particular–take hold differently in different contexts.
My current book project puts this foundational question into sharp focus by examining why the Soviet Union, despite repeated attempts, failed to build an Internet. With support from the Harriman Institute—a leading center for post-Soviet studies—I uncovered in the archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences a significant irony: while the United States first built the ARPANET (predecessor to the Internet) on state subsidy and communitarian collaboration, the Soviet Union failed to do the same largely due to unregulated competition among bureaucrats. My Soviet Internet book will retell and rethink how digital networks first took hold under capitalists behaving like socialists, not socialists behaving like capitalists. Combining this and other case studies, the book aims to challenge contemporary debate about modern media, culture, and society.
Other than the book project, my work on this theme has led to publications in three areas of research, including new media history, critical information studies, and global media studies with emphases on Eastern Europe and the Middle East, where I lived during the Arab Spring. Some publication topics to date include new media in history, new media in crisis, search engine politics, pre-cybernetic literature in interwar Europe, and early Soviet information science; working paper topics include the metaphors for copyright, property and transgression, the digital commons, and piracy cultures; and several other articles currently in preparation.
On a more personal note, I have developed these interests over the last decade alongside Kourtney Lambert, who is, in addition to so much else, an incandescent high school math teacher and recent alumna of Columbia’s Teachers College. Together we luxuriate in learning languages, sampling cuisines, and–when we are not exerting ourselves on Ultimate Frisbee and triathlons fields–just geeking out to music, math, novels, and chess. Kourtney chronicles some of our antics on her blog.
