Monday, October 19 2009
Why Does PopMatters Matter?
Pop matters because it is a reflection of how we collectively assign meaning and develop cultural responses to that meaning. Magazines like PopMatters give voice to those meanings and explore the natures of those cultural responses, allowing us all to share in them, and we open the doors for all who have the talent to express those ideas.
Does Criticism Even Matter Anymore?
Answer: it matters more now than it ever has before, as there is simply so much out there that it’s nearly impossible for one man, one publication, or one conglomorate to cover it all.
Thursday, September 17 2009
Princess Tiana’s Blues
Princess Tiana could get Disney out of the race-relations doghouse, but only if they’re true to their vision.
Wednesday, September 16 2009
Happiness Is a Warm Band: An Interview with Emily Haines of Metric
Haines fled to South America, Metric scrapped their new songs, and everyone realized their well-considered Fantasies.
Tuesday, September 15 2009
China’s Factory Girls: A Conversation with Author Leslie T. Chang
Traditional and often sensational coverage of China is only a partial interpretation: the people themselves are being lost in the translation.
Thursday, September 3 2009
Crown Feathers: A Dialogue of Desire in the Urban Marketplace
In a NYC grocery store, Verstehen finds its late-capitalist venue, as we the consumers get consumed by reflections on the allure of passing patrons, of fashion trends, of social customs and taboos.
Monday, August 31 2009
Everything Is for Sale: The Merchandising of ‘Buffy’
Buffy the Vampire Slayer's lasting success tells us that demographic targeting is a complex process that requires both fan participation and forms of merchandising that literally allow everything to be for sale.
Sunday, August 16 2009
Three Days, Forty Years, Six Discs
It's the enticing performances of the smaller acts -- and not the explosions of the big ones -- that made Woodstock such a singular event.
Friday, August 7 2009
“And Now Your Moment of Zen”: The Cultural Significance of ‘The Daily Show’
The Daily Show is an intellectual respite from the self-aggrandizing sensationalism of traditional news sources, and as such, one can’t help but cringe a little at the idea that it, too, may have begun to take itself a bit too seriously.
Friday, July 24 2009
Scratching the Surface: Your Brain on the Internet
What does the ubiquitous availability of digital text mean for the human brain as it processes ever-increasing amounts of information?
The Cultural Logic of Computation
Far from being the great liberator, computers, Golumbia insists, actually serve to fix us in the grid of global capitalism while concentrating power and shifting it upward to those who control the networks we are enmeshed in.
Monday, July 13 2009
The Pogues and Irish Cultural Continuity
Shane MacGowan's awareness and adaptation of trends in the literary world, along with the narrative quality and structural experimentation of his work, should cement his status as both a musical and literary figure.
Friday, July 10 2009
Google and the End of Wisdom
What today’s students do not realize is that what Google provides is sometimes fact and oftentimes opinion – but never answers.
The Public Display of the Private Individual
As a professor of mine once opined, it is the shift from Rockwell's paranoid "I always feel like somebody's watching me" to the insistence that someone need be watching to validate private feelings.
We Are United in Our Digital Isolation
The paradox of the new media is that for each face-to-face interaction we sacrifice, we open up the possibility of connecting with thousands of like-minded people.
Wednesday, July 8 2009
Michael Jackson and the Death of Monoculture
With Jackson's death, we must also say goodbye to the era when an individual pop star had the power to saturate and unite.
Tuesday, June 16 2009
The Power of Story in the Digital Age
In an age where Twitter and Google seem to be taking over the world, how do people communicate information in a meaningful and memorable manner? They tell a story.
Screaming In Digital: The New Media Generation’s Inner War
Both Twitter and Facebook are attempts to inject organic humanity into the cold, artificial realm of networking technologies -- our humanity cannot survive the conversion process.
Friday, June 12 2009
Love Your Big Brother: What Orwell’s ‘1984’ Tells Us About 2009
George Orwell’s seminal book can equip its readers with the intellectual apparatus necessary to see through the routine mendacity and stupefying barrage of euphemism that plagues contemporary political life.
Monday, June 8 2009
YouTube’s Budget Travel Through Space & Time – Yours & Mine
I was momentarily freaked out that I was stuck in the afterglow of The Summer of Love for so long, but I trusted it, went with the synaptic flow, and discovered YouTube’s true power.
