The amateur operators: notes on early adopters

The hobbyist culture around wireless telegraphy (1906-1912), at once intensely social — as it inherently involved communicating with others — and potentially isolating — as it required technical skills that could only be acquired outside of the flow of ordinary life — bears a striking resemblence to the tinkering subcultures that have attended the rise of home computing, network culture, and social media.

Fandom: An Autoethnography

This paper visualizes a sample of my own fan practices by placing them on a simple x/y grid. Based on this visualization,…