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How a cheesy joke from the 1830s became the most widely spoken word in the world.
OK is thought to be the most widely recognized word on the planet. We use it to communicate with each other, as well as our technology. But it actually started out as a language fad in the 1830’s of abbreviating words incorrectly. Young intellectuals in Boston came up with several of these abbreviations, including “KC”…
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Personality Crisis? Did the “personalisation of politics” lead to UKIP’s rise?
In the May 2014 European elections, Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party (UKIP from hereon) polled in first place, with 26.6 per cent of the national vote. Despite UKIP’s now ostensible popularity, they are academically under analysed as a political movement. This literature review will examine where I believe there is a major gap…
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China is erasing its border with Hong Kong
When Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, Chinese leaders agreed that Hong Kong would be able to keep its economic and political systems, including some of the civil freedoms denied to China’s citizens on the mainland, for the next 50 years. Although Hong Kong still has nearly 30 years of semi-autonomy left,…
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Facebook risks starting a war on knowledge
Facebook is closing its doors to researchers in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The latest casualty is the app Netvizz, a research tool used by hundreds of academics to gather public Facebook data, that the social network has recently banned. The app has gathered more than 300 academic citations and has been used to produce studies on everything…
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Facebook is restricting search results.
Last year, the capacities of modern technology allowed me to research my great grandfather’s role in World War I. Sadly my investigation reached an impasse. The records of his service were destroyed in September 1940 when a German incendiary bomb landed on the War Office’s Arnside Street depot in London. Now 78 years on, I have been…
Tristan Hotham
Social media, politics and tech policy expert
