Benjamin Peters
Biographic Data
| ID | 3595944 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Benjamin Peters |
| GIVEN NAMES | Benjamin |
| FAMILY NAME | Peters |
| SIGNATURE | PETERS B |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Tulsa |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5298-7375 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 24 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
On digital media history
Eternity in the Ether: A Mormon Media History
Imagine a history of Mormon media without reference to Johnny Lingo but brimming with media, religious cultures, and institutions compromising and combining in ways at once mundane, magnificent, and rarely predicted.So arrives the first book-length media history of the LDS Church, Gavin Feller's new Eternity in the Ether. In his fresh canvassing of the coevolution of the LDS Church and the twentieth-century era of mass media, Feller lays claim to…
Afterword: Medium America and the grounds of a transnational history of farm media
This essay bookends the first special issue of essays dedicated to farm media and situates the issue’s contributions within a broader history of media, communications, and agricultural entanglement. The connections between these fields are grounded in what Peters calls “Medium America,” which names the spaces and ideologies most shaped by farming across the middle of the Americas to orient a critical transnational history of farm media. Land gran…
Farm media: An introduction
This essay introduces the first special issue to explore the subject of farm media, which the authors identify as the multiple forms of mediation—representational, infrastructural, and elemental—that reproduce the modern agri-food system. Through this multi-lens framework, media scholars are invited to take the farm seriously as a site of analysis, particularly the recent transformation of agriculture through intensive datafication and its accomp…
Russian Media Theory: Is There Any? Should There Be? How About These
This paper makes a bibliographic case for as well as several arguments against the existence of a body of media theory named ‘Russian media theory’. Elements of the Slavic intellectual tradition are briefly surveyed in an effort to accrue eclectic resources for thinking about media in and beyond Russian. As a gesture to the spirit of Peters’ Speaking into the Air as well in borrowing and twisting the title of his less well-known co-edited volume …
From Russia with Code: Programming Migrations in Post-Soviet Times, edited by Mario Biagioli and Vincent Antonin Lépinay
Belarus as Media, Part II: Enter the Cyber Partisans. www.youtube.com/c/cpartisans
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Roman Protasevich's Televised Confessions as Media Event (2021) www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57353413 www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/world/europe/belarus-activist-roman-protasevich.html www.reuters.com/w…
Roman Protasevich's Televised Confessions as Media Event (2021) www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57353413 www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/world/europe/belarus-activist-roman-protasevich.html www.reuters.com/world/europe/opposition-decries-hostage-video-belarus-airs-confession-detained-journalist-2021-06-03/ - Volume 80 Issue 3
Your Computer Is on Fire
Techno-utopianism is dead: Now is the time to pay attention to the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems. This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley–led technophilia. This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our t…
Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid
Reviewed by: Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid Benjamin Peters (bio) Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History. By Thomas Rid. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016. Pp. 432. Hardcover $27.95. Published in 2016, Rise of the Machines already has proven a popular introduction to the burgeoning literature on the scientific history and cultural analysis of cybernetics. Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins, dr…
Why privacy keeps dying: The trouble with talk about the end of privacy
It is a curious fact how much talk about privacy is about the end of privacy. We term this ‘privacy endism,’ locating the phenomenon within a broader category of endist thought. We then analyze 101 newspaper articles between 1990 and 2012 that declare the end of privacy. Three findings follow. First, claims about the end of privacy point to an unusually broad range of technological and institutional causes. Privacy has been pronounced defunct for…
Living in regimes of data power: Critical data studies and the paradigm of ethics
Living in regimes of data power: critical data studies and the paradigm of ethics." Russian Journal of Communication, 9(3), pp. 305–306
Book dialog: A preface
Tomorrow begins yesterday: Data imaginaries in Russian and Soviet science fiction
This necessarily speculative as well as historically grounded essay examines two key works in the Russian-language literature, Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star (1908. Krasnaia Zvesda: utopia. St. Petersburg: Tovarishchestvo khudozhnikov pechati) and Arkady and Boris Strugatskys’ Monday Begins on Saturday (1965. Ponedel’nik nachinaetsia v subbotu: Skazka dlia nauchnykh rabotnikov mladshego vozrasta. Moskva: Detskaia literatura) for insights into thei…
Data: An ethical overview
This introduction reviews the intersection of data, ethics, and the Russian case. Its four sections, respectively, raise the ethical stakes concerning the contemporary data, outline a proverbial step toward a more humane ethics of data by normalizing certain features (such as anthropomorphic care) in the human–data relationship, reviews the leading scholarly literature on data, institutions, and social structures in specific, and summarizes the d…
W iener, N orbert
This entry reviews the life and work of Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics, a postwar science of communication and control. It seeks to challenge the notion that digital communication is disembodied by highlighting several personal, disciplinary, and political tensions embodying the biography of a founding figure of the current information age.
Cybernetics
Cybernetics, a science of “communication and control” devised in the years after World War II, is often identified with communication engineering and computing. In fact, it sprang from a wide array of intellectual sources and in the 1950s and 1960s it impacted an even wider array of disciplinary quarters. This entry reviews a few of its multiple engagements, with particular emphasis on the afterlife of cybernetic concepts in the human sciences. S…
How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet
How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists. Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American pre…
How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet
How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists
Excerpts from How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet
Toward a genealogy of a cold war communication sciences: The strange loops of Leo and Norbert Wiener
A modest footnote in the mid-century annals of digital communication sciences, this article observes several strange loops in the dual biographies of Norbert Wiener, a primary founder of cybernetics – an American-born computer-compatible communication science that later took root in the Soviet Union – and his father, Leo Wiener, a Byelostock émigré who began Slavic studies in America. It proceeds in two parts: first, a biographical reflection on …
A critical response to Paranyushkin
Marshall T. Poe, A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet
And lead us not into thinking the new is new: A bibliographic case for new media history
Must the concept of the study of new media seem so thoroughly ordinary? What does it mean to study new media other than to study media that exist now? Prompted by the 10th anniversary of New Media & Society, this article aims to help rethink and elongate the history of new media studies by merging new media studies and media history literatures.The recursive definition and use of the term `new media' are reviewed. New media need to be understood …
And lead us not into thinking the new is new: A bibliographic case for new media history
Must the concept of the study of new media seem so thoroughly ordinary? What does it mean to study new media other than to study media that exist now? Prompted by the 10th anniversary of New Media & Society, this article aims to help rethink and elongate the history of new media studies by merging new media studies and media history literatures.The recursive definition and use of the term `new media' are reviewed. New media need to be understood …
Afterword: Medium America and the grounds of a transnational history of farm media
This essay bookends the first special issue of essays dedicated to farm media and situates the issue’s contributions within a broader history of media, communications, and agricultural entanglement. The connections between these fields are grounded in what Peters calls “Medium America,” which names the spaces and ideologies most shaped by farming across the middle of the Americas to orient a critical transnational history of farm media. Land gran…
Farm media: An introduction
This essay introduces the first special issue to explore the subject of farm media, which the authors identify as the multiple forms of mediation—representational, infrastructural, and elemental—that reproduce the modern agri-food system. Through this multi-lens framework, media scholars are invited to take the farm seriously as a site of analysis, particularly the recent transformation of agriculture through intensive datafication and its accomp…
And lead us not into thinking the new is new: A bibliographic case for new media history
Must the concept of the study of new media seem so thoroughly ordinary? What does it mean to study new media other than to study media that exist now? Prompted by the 10th anniversary of New Media & Society, this article aims to help rethink and elongate the history of new media studies by merging new media studies and media history literatures.The recursive definition and use of the term `new media' are reviewed. New media need to be understood …
Marshall T. Poe, A History of Communications: Media and Society from the Evolution of Speech to the Internet
Toward a genealogy of a cold war communication sciences: The strange loops of Leo and Norbert Wiener
A modest footnote in the mid-century annals of digital communication sciences, this article observes several strange loops in the dual biographies of Norbert Wiener, a primary founder of cybernetics – an American-born computer-compatible communication science that later took root in the Soviet Union – and his father, Leo Wiener, a Byelostock émigré who began Slavic studies in America. It proceeds in two parts: first, a biographical reflection on …
A critical response to Paranyushkin
W iener, N orbert
This entry reviews the life and work of Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics, a postwar science of communication and control. It seeks to challenge the notion that digital communication is disembodied by highlighting several personal, disciplinary, and political tensions embodying the biography of a founding figure of the current information age.
Cybernetics
Cybernetics, a science of “communication and control” devised in the years after World War II, is often identified with communication engineering and computing. In fact, it sprang from a wide array of intellectual sources and in the 1950s and 1960s it impacted an even wider array of disciplinary quarters. This entry reviews a few of its multiple engagements, with particular emphasis on the afterlife of cybernetic concepts in the human sciences. S…
How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet
How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists. Between 1959 and 1989, Soviet scientists and officials made numerous attempts to network their nation—to construct a nationwide computer network. None of these attempts succeeded, and the enterprise had been abandoned by the time the Soviet Union fell apart. Meanwhile, ARPANET, the American pre…
How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet
How, despite thirty years of effort, Soviet attempts to build a national computer network were undone by socialists who seemed to behave like capitalists
Excerpts from How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet
Why privacy keeps dying: The trouble with talk about the end of privacy
It is a curious fact how much talk about privacy is about the end of privacy. We term this ‘privacy endism,’ locating the phenomenon within a broader category of endist thought. We then analyze 101 newspaper articles between 1990 and 2012 that declare the end of privacy. Three findings follow. First, claims about the end of privacy point to an unusually broad range of technological and institutional causes. Privacy has been pronounced defunct for…
Living in regimes of data power: Critical data studies and the paradigm of ethics
Living in regimes of data power: critical data studies and the paradigm of ethics." Russian Journal of Communication, 9(3), pp. 305–306
Book dialog: A preface
Tomorrow begins yesterday: Data imaginaries in Russian and Soviet science fiction
This necessarily speculative as well as historically grounded essay examines two key works in the Russian-language literature, Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star (1908. Krasnaia Zvesda: utopia. St. Petersburg: Tovarishchestvo khudozhnikov pechati) and Arkady and Boris Strugatskys’ Monday Begins on Saturday (1965. Ponedel’nik nachinaetsia v subbotu: Skazka dlia nauchnykh rabotnikov mladshego vozrasta. Moskva: Detskaia literatura) for insights into thei…
Data: An ethical overview
This introduction reviews the intersection of data, ethics, and the Russian case. Its four sections, respectively, raise the ethical stakes concerning the contemporary data, outline a proverbial step toward a more humane ethics of data by normalizing certain features (such as anthropomorphic care) in the human–data relationship, reviews the leading scholarly literature on data, institutions, and social structures in specific, and summarizes the d…
Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid
Reviewed by: Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid Benjamin Peters (bio) Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History. By Thomas Rid. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016. Pp. 432. Hardcover $27.95. Published in 2016, Rise of the Machines already has proven a popular introduction to the burgeoning literature on the scientific history and cultural analysis of cybernetics. Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins, dr…
Roman Protasevich's Televised Confessions as Media Event (2021) www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57353413 www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/world/europe/belarus-activist-roman-protasevich.html www.reuters.com/w…
Roman Protasevich's Televised Confessions as Media Event (2021) www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-57353413 www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/world/europe/belarus-activist-roman-protasevich.html www.reuters.com/world/europe/opposition-decries-hostage-video-belarus-airs-confession-detained-journalist-2021-06-03/ - Volume 80 Issue 3
Your Computer Is on Fire
Techno-utopianism is dead: Now is the time to pay attention to the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems. This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley–led technophilia. This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our t…
Russian Media Theory: Is There Any? Should There Be? How About These
This paper makes a bibliographic case for as well as several arguments against the existence of a body of media theory named ‘Russian media theory’. Elements of the Slavic intellectual tradition are briefly surveyed in an effort to accrue eclectic resources for thinking about media in and beyond Russian. As a gesture to the spirit of Peters’ Speaking into the Air as well in borrowing and twisting the title of his less well-known co-edited volume …
From Russia with Code: Programming Migrations in Post-Soviet Times, edited by Mario Biagioli and Vincent Antonin Lépinay
Belarus as Media, Part II: Enter the Cyber Partisans. www.youtube.com/c/cpartisans
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Afterword: Medium America and the grounds of a transnational history of farm media
This essay bookends the first special issue of essays dedicated to farm media and situates the issue’s contributions within a broader history of media, communications, and agricultural entanglement. The connections between these fields are grounded in what Peters calls “Medium America,” which names the spaces and ideologies most shaped by farming across the middle of the Americas to orient a critical transnational history of farm media. Land gran…
Farm media: An introduction
This essay introduces the first special issue to explore the subject of farm media, which the authors identify as the multiple forms of mediation—representational, infrastructural, and elemental—that reproduce the modern agri-food system. Through this multi-lens framework, media scholars are invited to take the farm seriously as a site of analysis, particularly the recent transformation of agriculture through intensive datafication and its accomp…
On digital media history
Eternity in the Ether: A Mormon Media History
Imagine a history of Mormon media without reference to Johnny Lingo but brimming with media, religious cultures, and institutions compromising and combining in ways at once mundane, magnificent, and rarely predicted.So arrives the first book-length media history of the LDS Church, Gavin Feller's new Eternity in the Ether. In his fresh canvassing of the coevolution of the LDS Church and the twentieth-century era of mass media, Feller lays claim to…
Sociology (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Political science (14 works) · Law (10 works) · History (8 works) · Media studies (8 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Philosophy (5 works) · Politics (5 works) · World Wide Web (5 works)