Paolo Bory
Biographic Data
| ID | 3477743 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paolo Bory |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paolo |
| FAMILY NAME | Bory |
| SIGNATURE | BORY P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Politecnico di Milano |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4661-3040 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 9 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Six provocations for metaverse datafication
Although the ‘metaverse’ is still the feverish pipedream of tech companies and venture capitalists, it is also a powerful imaginary for channelling enormous resources towards deepening and extending ongoing processes of digitalization and datafication. It is thus likely that an increasing amount of human activity – both professional as well as leisure-related – will take place in metaversal spaces, and that the paradigm of ‘Big Data’ is about to …
Metaverse datafication
The ‘metaverse’ is currently being posited as the ‘next step of the Internet’ and the ‘interface of the future’, as can be witnessed not only from the rapid adoption of the term by technology companies and industry professionals, but also from the enormous investments made towards the development of metaverse platforms or ‘worlds’ and related technologies, such as headsets and other wearables. These developments – whether involving immersive envi…
Strong and weak AI narratives
The current debate on artificial intelligence (AI) tends to associate AI imaginaries with the vision of a future technology capable of emulating or surpassing human intelligence. This article advocates for a more nuanced analysis of AI imaginaries, distinguishing “strong AI narratives,” i.e., narratives that envision futurable AI technologies that are virtually indistinguishable from humans, from "weak" AI narratives, i.e., narratives that discus…
‘We will multiply the fires of resistance’
Drawing on a 12-month virtual ethnography on the main online spaces of three refused knowledge communities (RKCs) in Italy, this study aims at contributing to the debate on emerging forms of science-related populism from a two-fold perspective. First, we identify and describe the main features and the role played by an understudied figure who we label the ‘catalyst of dissent’ – a public influencer who does not belong to the scientific community …
The path to WeChat
This article contributes to the literature on WeChat, providing a historical perspective on the long-lasting culture of its mother company, Tencent. Through a corpus of primary and secondary sources, the article retraces four constitutive choices which characterized Tencent’s culture from 1998, when the company was founded, to 2011, when the first version of WeChat was launched. We argue that Tencent’s market strategy has always been based on fou…
The Internet Myth
The Internet is broken and Paolo Bory knows how we got here. In a powerful book based on original research, Bory carefully documents the myths, imaginaries, and ideologies that shaped the material and cultural history of the Internet. As important as this book is to understand our shattered digital world, it is essential for those who would fix it.' - Vincent Mosco, author of The Smart City in a Digital World The Internet Myth retraces and challe…
The Italian network hopes
The article retraces the histories of two Italian networking projects of the mid-19990s: the national infrastructural plan named Socrate, launched by the monopolist Telecom Italia in 1994 and the civic network Iperbole, launched by the municipality of Bologna in 1995. Relying upon a corpus of primary sources and in-depth interviews with key-informants, the article stresses the complex relationship between infrastructures, networks and media imagi…
The rise of corporational determinism
This paper proposes a new theoretical concept, corporational determinism, to describe narratives by which digital media corporations are presented as the main or only agency informing socio-technical change. It aims to unveil how digital media corporations employ such narratives to reinterpret the past of digital media, to underline their leading role in present societies, and to show their ability in predicting and shaping the future. Drawing on…
How the Web was told
The essay investigates the evolution of the “narratives of invention” used by the founding fathers of the World Wide Web in a selected corpus of papers written by Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues from 1989 up to 1993 and later in the books of James Gillies and Robert Cailliau and of Berners-Lee himself in 2000. Thanks to a textual analysis that cross these sources, we identify three main sets of common keywords that did not change and three couples…
The rise of corporational determinism
This paper proposes a new theoretical concept, corporational determinism, to describe narratives by which digital media corporations are presented as the main or only agency informing socio-technical change. It aims to unveil how digital media corporations employ such narratives to reinterpret the past of digital media, to underline their leading role in present societies, and to show their ability in predicting and shaping the future. Drawing on…
How the Web was told
The essay investigates the evolution of the “narratives of invention” used by the founding fathers of the World Wide Web in a selected corpus of papers written by Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues from 1989 up to 1993 and later in the books of James Gillies and Robert Cailliau and of Berners-Lee himself in 2000. Thanks to a textual analysis that cross these sources, we identify three main sets of common keywords that did not change and three couples…
The path to WeChat
This article contributes to the literature on WeChat, providing a historical perspective on the long-lasting culture of its mother company, Tencent. Through a corpus of primary and secondary sources, the article retraces four constitutive choices which characterized Tencent’s culture from 1998, when the company was founded, to 2011, when the first version of WeChat was launched. We argue that Tencent’s market strategy has always been based on fou…
The Internet Myth
The Internet is broken and Paolo Bory knows how we got here. In a powerful book based on original research, Bory carefully documents the myths, imaginaries, and ideologies that shaped the material and cultural history of the Internet. As important as this book is to understand our shattered digital world, it is essential for those who would fix it.' - Vincent Mosco, author of The Smart City in a Digital World The Internet Myth retraces and challe…
The Italian network hopes
The article retraces the histories of two Italian networking projects of the mid-19990s: the national infrastructural plan named Socrate, launched by the monopolist Telecom Italia in 1994 and the civic network Iperbole, launched by the municipality of Bologna in 1995. Relying upon a corpus of primary sources and in-depth interviews with key-informants, the article stresses the complex relationship between infrastructures, networks and media imagi…
How the Web was told
The essay investigates the evolution of the “narratives of invention” used by the founding fathers of the World Wide Web in a selected corpus of papers written by Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues from 1989 up to 1993 and later in the books of James Gillies and Robert Cailliau and of Berners-Lee himself in 2000. Thanks to a textual analysis that cross these sources, we identify three main sets of common keywords that did not change and three couples…
The Italian network hopes
The article retraces the histories of two Italian networking projects of the mid-19990s: the national infrastructural plan named Socrate, launched by the monopolist Telecom Italia in 1994 and the civic network Iperbole, launched by the municipality of Bologna in 1995. Relying upon a corpus of primary sources and in-depth interviews with key-informants, the article stresses the complex relationship between infrastructures, networks and media imagi…
The rise of corporational determinism
This paper proposes a new theoretical concept, corporational determinism, to describe narratives by which digital media corporations are presented as the main or only agency informing socio-technical change. It aims to unveil how digital media corporations employ such narratives to reinterpret the past of digital media, to underline their leading role in present societies, and to show their ability in predicting and shaping the future. Drawing on…
The path to WeChat
This article contributes to the literature on WeChat, providing a historical perspective on the long-lasting culture of its mother company, Tencent. Through a corpus of primary and secondary sources, the article retraces four constitutive choices which characterized Tencent’s culture from 1998, when the company was founded, to 2011, when the first version of WeChat was launched. We argue that Tencent’s market strategy has always been based on fou…
The Internet Myth
The Internet is broken and Paolo Bory knows how we got here. In a powerful book based on original research, Bory carefully documents the myths, imaginaries, and ideologies that shaped the material and cultural history of the Internet. As important as this book is to understand our shattered digital world, it is essential for those who would fix it.' - Vincent Mosco, author of The Smart City in a Digital World The Internet Myth retraces and challe…
‘We will multiply the fires of resistance’
Drawing on a 12-month virtual ethnography on the main online spaces of three refused knowledge communities (RKCs) in Italy, this study aims at contributing to the debate on emerging forms of science-related populism from a two-fold perspective. First, we identify and describe the main features and the role played by an understudied figure who we label the ‘catalyst of dissent’ – a public influencer who does not belong to the scientific community …
Six provocations for metaverse datafication
Although the ‘metaverse’ is still the feverish pipedream of tech companies and venture capitalists, it is also a powerful imaginary for channelling enormous resources towards deepening and extending ongoing processes of digitalization and datafication. It is thus likely that an increasing amount of human activity – both professional as well as leisure-related – will take place in metaversal spaces, and that the paradigm of ‘Big Data’ is about to …
Metaverse datafication
The ‘metaverse’ is currently being posited as the ‘next step of the Internet’ and the ‘interface of the future’, as can be witnessed not only from the rapid adoption of the term by technology companies and industry professionals, but also from the enormous investments made towards the development of metaverse platforms or ‘worlds’ and related technologies, such as headsets and other wearables. These developments – whether involving immersive envi…
Strong and weak AI narratives
The current debate on artificial intelligence (AI) tends to associate AI imaginaries with the vision of a future technology capable of emulating or surpassing human intelligence. This article advocates for a more nuanced analysis of AI imaginaries, distinguishing “strong AI narratives,” i.e., narratives that envision futurable AI technologies that are virtually indistinguishable from humans, from "weak" AI narratives, i.e., narratives that discus…
Sociology (8 works) · Media studies (6 works) · Narrative (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Epistemology (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Art (3 works) · Economics (3 works) · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI (3 works) · Law (3 works)