PhD candidate, University of Maryland
Contributing Editor, Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
Research Interests
Algorithms | Computational culture | Digital Ethnography | Software | surveillance studies |
About Samuel
Sam DiBella is a PhD candidate in information studies at the University of Maryland. He received his MSc in media studies from the London School of Economics. His research focuses on the the changing social value of privacy and anonymity online and the history of information technology. His writing has appeared in First Monday, Public Books, the International Journal of Communication, Surveillance and Society, and Heterotopias, among others.
Contact
Contributions to Platypus, The CASTAC Blog
View all of Samuel's posts on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.
Dreaming of Security through Lanyards and Bollards
A perimeter is always porous, to certain people. Managing how it is perforated is a kind of professional work. In my fieldwork at a casino, a guard all in black sheepishly hands out blank visitor IDs that we wear only in a closed room. He collects them on our exit to the floor and accompanies us up to the lobby bar because of regulations. In the discussion, a man expresses his exasperation at an embassy’s request for an ambulance during a US National Special Security Event. I don’t understand why he makes an ambulance sound so ominous—he says he didn’t sleep for days—until someone later explains to me that he was worried the ambulance would be filled with explosives and allowed to slip through security lines. In The Filing Cabinet, Craig Robertson describes how information architecture via office furniture soothed clerks of “the particular anxiety produced by the knowledge that (read more...)