Author Archives: Kimberly Lai

For our final Niki, my group and I have chosen to work on Julian Assange, the infamous founder of WikiLeaks. I’ve been doing some massive digging about Julian Assange all day, and to say he is an intriguing man (he … Continue reading →

In the Manovich reading, the discussion on the proliferation of databases on the Internet reminded me of Facebook and the recipe/cooking blogs I frequent. On Facebook, we can catalog photos, our statuses, the pages we like, etc., which is so … Continue reading →

In the symposium and workshop today, we touched on DNS and IP servers briefly. The Galloway reading discussed this, but it was a subject too complicated and dry for someone as disengaged with computers as I am. If you have … Continue reading →

A few posts back, I spoke about technological determinism and proposed an argument that stood for it. I also promised a counterargument, so here’s what I’ll be discussing today: cultural materialism and technology neutrality. The technological determinism theory treats the … Continue reading →

Have you ever wondered how Google search works? How and why certain links are on the first page instead of the second or the third? If you’re curious, the answer is PageRank. PageRank is essentially an algorithm, and was developed … Continue reading →

Six degrees of separation is the theory that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Incredulous, right? I mean, how often have you had this happen to you? You meet someone new at a social event … Continue reading →

Yet another Niki subject I have no clue about: PageRank. But nothing fazes me when I have the Internet (also known as the Wise One). PageRank is another one of those Google inventions. It measures a webpage’s importance using an … Continue reading →