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Joseph Reagle
Joseph Reagle is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University. He’s been a resident fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard (in 1998 and 2010), and he taught and received his Ph.D. at NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. As a
Published: Apr 27, 2019
Wikipedia’s death has been predicted many times in its twenty years. Reagle groups these dour prognostications into four periods. Though this history shows making predictions is foolhardy, Reagle predicts Wikipedia has many years of life ahead of it.
Published: Apr 03, 2019
Today, life hacking sits at the intersection of technology, culture, and larger concerns about work, wealth, health, relationships, and meaning. It is the manifestation of the hacker ethos, an individualistic and rational approach of systematization and experimentation.
Published: Apr 03, 2019
One way of thinking about reading online comment is that it is like watching the television game show Family Feud, where two families compete to answer questions quickly.
Published: Apr 03, 2019
Life hacking is the collective manifestation of a particular human sensibility, of a hacker ethos. In the hacker’s sight, most everything is conceived as a system.
Published: Apr 03, 2019
The time orientation arose with the emergence of industry: work was now piecemeal and part of a larger process. Work was dependent on the synchronization of labor, and the clock enabled the coordination of a distributed market.
Published: Apr 03, 2019
We live in a culture in which the creative class is expected to be self-reliant but in a moment in which distraction is omnipresent. Motivation hacking is offered as a solution, as a means of coping or even excelling. We’ll see just how much work managing the self can be.
Published: Apr 03, 2019
When life hackers discuss their relationship to stuff, they tell two stories. They talk about the gear that is essential and how they discarded everything else. In these stories zen often makes an appearance.
Published: Apr 03, 2019
The idea that self-knowledge and improvement need measurement is a variation on the idea that “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
Published: Apr 03, 2019
You can’t understand relationship hacking without appreciating something about geek identity.
Published: Apr 03, 2019
Life hackers are looking for more than tips on how to tie their shoes. Even if their approach is unusual, they seek what most people want: comfort, health, and connection.
Published: Apr 03, 2019
Even within the creative class, life hacking is not an absolute positive. For the individual, optimism is susceptible to credulousness and optimization to excess. And that which first appears as a virtue can instead be a near enemy.
Published: Apr 03, 2019
“Am I ugly?” This question has been asked on YouTube by dozens of young people, and hundreds of thousands of comments, ranging from supportive to insulting, have been left in response.
Published: Apr 03, 2019
Today maximizers have an extraordinary amount of information available to them. Sites like Yelp and Amazon offer ratings in the form of stars. These ratings can be accompanied by reviews that are often haphazard but sometimes astoundingly detailed.
Published: Apr 08, 2019
User comments, ratings, and reviews are valuable because, in economic terms, they address the marketplace problem of information asymmetry.
Published: Apr 03, 2019
One way that people improve their public speaking and lessen their anxiety is to practice in a supportive space.
Published: Apr 03, 2019
Today, comment sections can quickly fill with posts that would’ve shamed Hitler himself (hence the suggestion “Don’t read the comments”).
Published: Apr 03, 2019
Displays of bigotry and hate are upsetting and alienating, and so we are advised to “avoid the comments.” But our relationship to online comment is more complicated than “Comments are bad. Avoid.”
Published: Apr 03, 2019
Beyond the pleasure of seeing one’s name in a prominent position, the first (or at least early) comment can be a valuable asset.
Published: Aug 22, 2019
Links and connections have been a powerful technical and social feature of encyclopedias, especially Wikipedia.
