Morten Bay

University of Southern California | USC · Center for the Digital Future

Purpose As interest in technology ethics is increasing, so is the interest in bringing schools of ethics from non-Western philosophical traditions to the field, particularly when it comes to information and communication technology. In light of this development and recent publications that result from it, this paper aims to present responds critica...

ARPANET demonstrated that packet switching was an effective routing principle for computer networks, accelerating the evolution towards the current network paradigm, in which packetization is found in almost all forms of digital communication. The decision to use the packet switching principle was crucial to the development of the Internet and comp...

In this interview, the man who first managed the ARPANET project and made the network come in to existence, Dr. Lawrence G. Roberts, gives his account of how the ARPANET came to be. He contributes his perspective on the many other innovations made to computer science by ARPA in the 1960s and 1970s, and shares his view on the contentious origin narr...

Targeted social media advertising based on psychometric user profiling has emerged as an effective way of reaching individuals who are predisposed to accept and be persuaded by the advertising message. This article argues that in the case of political advertising, this may present a democratic and ethical challenge. Hypertargeting methods such as p...

Political discourse on social media is seen by many as polarized, vitriolic and permeated by falsehoods and misinformation. Political operators have exploited all of these aspects of the discourse for strategic purposes, most famously during the Russian social media influence campaign during the 2016 presidential election in the United States and c...

Political discourse on social media is seen by many as polarized, vitriolic and permeated by falsehoods and misinformation. Political operators have exploited all of these aspects of the discourse for strategic purposes, most famously during the Russian social media influence campaign during the 2016 Presidential election in the United States and c...

This paper explores public technology policies through the lens of political philosopher John Rawls’ theory of justice as fairness. Using a Rawlsian lens to analyze national policies in cases pertaining to technology-related policies in the U.S., China and to a lesser extent, Russia, the author shows how utilitarian approaches to regulation of soci...

Targeted social media advertising based on psychometric user profiling has emerged as an effective way of reaching individuals who are predisposed to accept and be persuaded by the advertising message. In the political realm, the use of psychometrics appears to have been used to spread both information and misinformation through social media in rec...

Academics, style manual editors and others have recently pushed for an elimination of the capitalisation of the word “internet”. This choice may have consequences that reach far beyond language and spelling, as it lends authority to the claim that there could be more than one “internet”, which in turn is based on a historical narrative that is not...

Targeted social media advertising based on psychometric user profiling has emerged as an effective way of reaching individuals who are predisposed to accept and be persuaded by the advertising message. In the political realm, the use of psychometrics appears to have been used to spread both information and misinformation through social media in rec...

This interview is based on two conversations the author had with Paul Baran in 2004 and 2010. The 2010 conversation represents one of last times Baran participated in an interview before his death in March 2011. Topics discussed include how Baran drew upon inspiration from Warren McCulloch's work on neural networks to bring distributedness to commu...

Inspired by the 2016 case of the encrypted Apple iPhone used by alleged terrorists in the San Bernardino, Calif. attack, this paper explores the question of whether the use of completely unbreakable encryption online or off-line would be considered ethical by the political philosopher John Rawls. Rawls is widely acknowledged as having played an imp...

Cybersecurity policies in major regions of the world are undergoing dynamic changes in response to recent events. In both the U.S., the EU and China, new policies have been proposed, and some adopted, that reflect the evolution of technology and sociotechnological developments in the three regions. The policy changes are broad and have elements tha...

The word 'cybersecurity' is widely used as a term for protection against malware and hacker attacks. It is often used situationally, in the sense that an individual's connected devices can be under attack, a corporation can be hacked or government-run, essential infrastructure can be at risk of attack. But it seems that the broadness of the term ma...

In this paper, I shall attempt to provide evidence that the relatively new field of New Materialisms may hold the key to meeting the challenge of global inequality in networked information system access. New Materialisms thinking provides a new set of ontological and epistemological tools that I argue can be of great benefit to the objective of pro...

Welcome to Computopia! You've already arrived. Those imaginative visions from 60-70s about how people would be able to look at computer screens everywhere and make telephone calls from anywhere, has long been a reality.Technology writer Morten Bay tells the exciting stories of how we made the journey from the visions of a distant Computopia to the...

This is a book review of technology pundit Evgeny Morozov's latest book in which he criticizes what he calls "technological solutionism".

Homo Conexus is the type of people we become as we venture forward into the network society. From the networks in our brains to the networks on our computers, networks are changing the way we think about ourselves and the world. Homo Conexus helps you make sense of this new age of information and networks.

Bogen giver konkrete bud på de didaktiske kompetencer, lærerne i den moderne skole må besidde. Dermed forbereder bogen lærerstuderende til den virkelighed, de uddanner sig til. Forfatterne har meget forskellig baggrund og vinkler på netværksskolens udfordringer, men alle har erfaring med sociale netværk i en skole- og læringssammenhæng. Grundigt f...

This paper contains a small study of empirical data collected between April 19, 2010 and May 19, 2010. The data is the five largest newspapers’ coverage of the ten largest innovation-driven technology companies in the US. The study is presented as a description of the current state of the presence of Innovation Journalism in American mainstream med...

Fremtidens menneske er et netværksmenneske – homo conexus. Hvis man er – sådan ca. – mere end 35 år, er der stor risiko for, at man ikke helt for alvor forstår, at fremtidens mennesker er helt anderledes end én selv. At måden at opfatte sig selv og verden på er forandret. At der allerede findes en ny type menneske, som overtager arbejds-pladserne,...

Om popmusikken i tiåret 1977-1987, der blev et gennembrud for punk, disco, reggae, hip-hop, heavy metal og electronica

En bog om de ungdomsårgange, der aldrig har set en verden uden internet og mobiltelefoni. Generationen kan kommunikere i adskillige medier på én gang - men hvilke krav stiller det til medierne? "Generation Netværk" handler om de ungdomsårgange, der aldrig har set en verden uden internet og mobiltelefoni. Det er generationen, der kommunikerer og an...