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 [...]

Information Technology, National Identity, and Social Cohesion: A Response

In 2005, the Center for Strategic and International Studies published a report looking at information and communication technologies (ICT) and national identity politics. The research was initiated by the National Intelligence Council, a think tank within the US government. Written by Sandra Braman, a Professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the report aims [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Labor and the Digital, Tuesday Panel

So much work is being done in the digital realm, from Facebook using members to translate pages for free, to Wikipedia’s volunteer reference work, to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk program.  Not to mention all the creative folk participating in contests for the off chance that their creation (usually based on hours and hours of work) will [...]

Natural Fuse at Towards the Sentient City

All of the projects exhibited at the opening of Toward the Sentient City explore the future of the urban environment. Haque Design + Research created the Natural Fuse project, which wires plants into a network in order to both generate power and offset CO2 created by that power. The project addresses not only power generation [...]

Enjoy Your New Life, Beloved Camera

This year and next, I’m living on a super-fixed income, being in graduate school at the New School in New York and all. Since I’m doing production work as part of my degree, I hemmed and hawed for six months before investing in a beautiful, $4,000 Canon EOS 5D Mark II DSLR camera that shoots [...]

Museums, Academically Speaking

Starting at the Cité de l’Immigration and moving on to the Musée du Quai Branly provides a route to understanding how the role of “primitive” art in France has changed over the past couple of decades. Originally the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens (and where much of the collection for the new Musée du [...]

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