Joe Litobarski

My entry on “Participation” has been published in Imagining the Internet(s): A Collaborative Glossary, edited by Nathalie Fridzema and Anya Shchetvina and published by the Institute of Network Cultures.

This Friday (10 April 2026), I’ll be at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) for the 2026 ETHU Research Day, The Weight of the Cloud: Navigating Digital Mediation, Human Meaning, and Planetary Responsibility.

The Yellow Press, a 1910 illustration depicting oligarchs feeding an industrial printing press with cash, while publisher William Randolph Hearst, dressed as a jester, hurls newspapers out to a mass readership.

An early example of “digital memory” in the form of mnemonic digits; “Woodcut illustrations from Anianus’ Compotus cum commento (ca. 1492), an adaptation of Bede’s computus system”.

The British Management cybernetician Stafford Beer looking very groovy (some would say “guru-like”) in 1975.

Two of the first computer programmers, Ruth Lichterman (left) and Marlyn Wescoff (right), physically programming ENIAC, one of the first electronic digital computers – Photo: US Army On 2 February, 1949, the New York Times ran an article headlined “ELECTR…

Paul Orban’s illustration of electronic democracy for the 1955 short story “Franchise” by Isaac Asimov Time for an update on the PhD, methinks.

Claude Shannon, one of the founders of information theory, with ‘Theseus’ the maze-solving robot mouse – Photo: Bell Labs I recently started a PhD in the History of Technology and Democracy at Maastricht University‘s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (F…