Upcoming Presentation at Critical Themes

I’ll be presenting at the 10th annual Critical Themes in Media Studies conference at the New School on April 17th. As you’ll see, I’m working with ideas from Benedict Anderson, Jean Baudrillard, Arjun Appadurai, Bernadette Wegenstein (who is coincidentally our closing keynote speaker), Manfred Steger, and a few more like Maurice Agulhon and Pierre Nora [...]

Global Youth Culture Take II, This Time With More Stats

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about the burgeoning (more like explosion) of global youth culture, a “community of youngish people, roughly from 14 to 35, who share a love of mainstream popular culture including music, movies and fashion and acknowledge a shared mindset with others in their age bracket around the world.” I [...]

Dream Syllabus

I’m not sure why, but I just created the syllabus for a class I just made up called “Intertextual Representations of Resistance and Difference across Global Media.” Of course it could be better, but I’d love to teach it! Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangaremba White Teeth, Zadie Smith The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman Season of [...]

No Easy Answers: M.I.A. and the Politics of Pop

It has been argued that M.I.A., the London-born Sri Lankan Tamil rapper, should not have to explain why her art contains references to the internationally known terrorist organization familiarly known as the Tamil Tigers. But in a recent interview, M.I.A. called the civil war in Sri Lanka a genocide and compared its history of ethnic [...]

The SixthSense Revolution is Coming

I just don’t even know where to begin with how this will change modern life. Just watch and get ready for a glimpse of the future that you didn’t know was coming so very soon, but thanks to Pranav Mistry, has been developed as open source and ready to improve a lot of people’s lives [...]

Poverty Porn: Reinforcing the Imperialist Gaze

There was an interesting post on Sociological Images (introduced to me by Katharine) about the “Slumdog Shooting technique.” I responded to it because I feel rather strongly that the postcolonial response to imperialist representations in modern media has taken a hypersensitized and cynical turn with the critical response to Slumdog Millionaire which originated the term [...]

Where the Nostalgic Things Are

Wes Anderson’s new movie Fantastic Mr. Fox takes a beloved children’s book–his beloved book from childhood I assume–and turns it into a film for adults–I’m hearing tales of kids leaving the theatres disappointed and bewildered. Spike Jones and Dave Eggers transformed Where the Wild Things Are in a very similar vein, bringing the sad weight [...]

Internet as Playground and Factory a Success, Sort of

Yes, it is the rather pitiful truth that after swearing off doing mass amounts of free labor post two internships and countless other volunteer projects, the project that broke down my resolve to never again work for free was a labor conference. Every free moment I’ve had for the past month has been consumed by [...]

Wired Says YouTube’s Bandwidth Bill Is Zero

This article in Wired was a fascinating read especially right after having heard a presentation on the fiber optic cable industry. It seems Google/Youtube is a major player in this arena (I suppose there’s no point in being surprised about yet another area of the web that Google dominates) after having purchased unused fiber optic [...]

So The Hipster Article Format is

Short paragraphs punctuated by numerous images, preferable some animated gifs included in the mix. I really like the deployment of this format on This Recording, where the writing tends to be sprawling, referential, funny, and occasionally deep, a nice mix of the superficial and critical lenses my brain uses to break down life into manageable [...]

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