My more sensible fellow interns post here under their real names, whereas my Wordpress username is a funny, nonsensical “kurquoise.” (Look up, it says “Posted by kurquoise” in light green letters.) This pseudonym is a holdover from when we were first launching the blog, and out of convenience, it has just stuck around, but it [...]

Like Diana, I too am in the middle finals week. But as a science major, I am mired exams instead of papers, and my brain has been clutter of symbols and numbers — amino acid structures, Fourier series, formulas galore! With this memorization frenzy, the Extended Mind hypothesis is sounding mighty attractive.
David Chalmers and [...]

In this week’s audio podcast, our Reporters-in-the-Field asked 19 year old UMASS student and New Jersey native, Lisa Epstein, to share her thoughts on the world of cyberbullying. In this interview, Epstein provides insight on how the anonymity of cyberbullies makes one question who her real friends are, and how the Internet acts as a [...]

Among the various courses I am taking at the University of São Paulo this semester, “Discourse” has a lot of interesting ideas that can be connected to discussions pertaining to DNs. In the text A social theory of discourse, Norman Fairclough (1992) defines discourse as “a mode of action, one form in which people may [...]

One thing that irks me – rightly or wrongly – is when news reports cite a MySpace profile as a source of information. Usually, it’s the local news trying to dig up information on a suddenly news-worthy person without making the effort of a phone call. When it comes to national politics, though, the stakes [...]

When a friend gifted me with my own domain name this summer, it felt like he had handed me the keys to a new car. NikkiLeon.com was a URL I could share with contacts; it would be one of the first addresses an acquaintance might type when searching to see if I had a [...]

As I draw closer to the end of my internship at Berkman, I realize that I’ve actually been here for more than seven weeks. I guess it’s true that time flies when you’re having fun… or really that when you’re this busy you don’t notice time anymore. But putting aside all the technical skills I [...]

This week we’re taking a break from all the interviews to give you a glimpse of the world of Digital Dossiers. Your dossier is made up of all the digital tracks you leave behind – from your photos on Flickr, to the Facebook messages you send, to all the data your credit card company collects [...]

As you might guess from Jacob Kramer-Duffield’s write-up of a recent Berkman listserv debate, the question of what it means to be a digital native has been somewhat of a hot topic lately. At last week’s intern meeting, discussion of the issue somehow ended up as a mass argument over, among other things, whether the [...]

I’m getting married in a month. Life is good. And despite the best intentions of simplicity, our wedding seems to have become a huge undertaking. Although I don’t think that anything about planning an event or about getting married is fundamentally different because of digital technology, I have noticed a few trends and used lots [...]