I will return to this piece each year teaching STS. Living in Central Pennsylvania, we are sitting right on top of PRR country (Pennsylvania Railroad). It is useful for students to understand the sunk costs, the path dependency (literally, in this case), and the reverberations through history that simple technological infrastructure decisions can make. “How railroads shaped Internet history.”
Installing (Social) Order 
That NPR story is a great one — much shorter and concise than another piece that I often use on this same sort of topic, which is a book about t-shirts. http://www.amazon.com/The-Travels-T-Shirt-Global-Economy/dp/0471648493
LikeLike
those are excellent, seems to be a timely issue:
http://www.npr.org/2016/04/13/474075142/door-to-door-reveals-the-magnificent-and-maddening-story-of-traffic
LikeLike
follow-up: the whole collection http://www.theatlantic.com/projects/beneath-the-cloud/ is amazing…
LikeLike
Great! I seem to have one more reason to start posting again after a long, long time of absence. Materializing the virtual could be the guiding claim of my Research Group (the Digital/Media/Lab) at the MCTS — And I would love to have a flag!
LikeLiked by 1 person
heh, sounds like you have a manifesto of yer own now, we need a flag to fly
LikeLike
MATERIALIZE THE VIRTUAL; TERRITORIALIZE THE CYBER!
LikeLike
William Gibson has long in vain been trying to get people to realize that there is no “cyber” space, one of the strengths of the work you folks do here is to flesh-out/foreground the actual infrastructures for which I’m grateful.
LikeLike
TRULY! I will strike it from blog!
On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 12:27 PM, Installing (Social) Order wrote:
>
LikeLike
we need to retire the term “virtual” reality…
http://www.wnyc.org/story/new-jersey-transit-eavesdrops-your-commute/
LikeLike