In this week's show, Thomas Gideon's Command Line podcast interviews NYU professor Gabriella Coleman, an anthropologist who studies hackers, trolls, 4chan and other online phenomena. I met Biella when she was doing fieldwork for her PhD by hanging around EFF and the hackers in its orbit, and I've met very few social scientists with a better understanding of how online dynamics work.
The feature this week is an interview I conducted with Gabriella Coleman. I was introduced to her work through her writings at The Atlantic. She mentions Malcom Gladwell's criticism of online activism and Indy Media. The main reason I invited her on was her critique of Bruce Sterling's The Blast Shack. We delve a bit further into the question of WikiLeaks lasting impacts. I mention a couple of times Clay Shirky's long haul view. Gabriella recommends Adrian Johns' book on piracy (which I ordered with a gift card I received recently, can't wait to read it). She also mentions a revisit of the topic of WikiLeaks at The Economist. You can also find Gabriella on Twitter where she is quite active and sharing some great links related to topics we discuss in this interview and of course her broader work.
TCLP 2011-01-12 Interview: Gabriella Coleman
(Image: Biella Coleman, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from sfllaw's photostream)
