I am a second year Master's student at Indiana University in the Department of Telecommunications. In my studies I seek to gain a better understanding of the place where technology and society overlap. Generally, my scholarly endeavors focus on the social and cultural disparities at play in the process of accessing and producing information.
I'm currently working on my Master's thesis which examines the migration patterns of technological artifacts originating in subcultures as they become adopted by the mainstream or dominant culture. In this project, I will reference documented models of subcultural innovation/mainstream adoption in the fields of fashion and language study. I will then apply the models that exist in these fields to the phenomena that have taken place in the development of communications technology to see if commonalities exist. I approach this study from the perspective that technology, like fashion and language, is a cultural artifact and is best understood as a product of a specific historical, cultural and social environment.
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