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Hi there. My name is Greg Downey, and I'm a US-based historian and geographer of technology, employed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 2001 in two departments at once: Journalism & Mass Communication and Library & Information Studies.  After achieving Master's degrees in computer science and liberal studies at other schools, I earned a dual Ph.D. at The Johns Hopkins University in the subfields of history of technology and human geography. My area of research and teaching is the history and geography of information & communication technology, especially the often hidden labor behind such technology. (You can find out lots more about me at my web site.)

This weblog will be a tentative, fragmentary, and sometimes even contradictory space for me to explore a wide range of evolving and (to me at least) intriguing relations between labor and technology within global information internetworks. Academic teaching and research must by necessity remain tightly focused, carefully reasoned, and instrumentally productive; however, this weblog pretends to be none of these things. You may consider it as a public view of some of my own private labor as an academic, or as an open conversation in search of contributors and commentators. I'll be attempting to keep up with a global 24-hour news cycle of developments at my own leisurely pace of posting two or maybe three times a week, so don't expect "rapid response activism" or "cutting edge commentary" from this weblog. My goal is not to watchdog or replace the various strands of the news media, but to use some current internetworking tools -- Google News, various blog indexes such as Daypop and Technorati, and the like -- to pull together otherwise disconnected strands of argument and moments of action from my own particular research agenda and try to knit them into a consistent flow of essays on the constantly-changing connections between computers, capital, and lived world of work.

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope my writings can be of use to you. Cheers,