Friday, March 16 2012
Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents
This reprint of the cult classic memoir, based on Ellen Ullman’s early years as a computer programmer, reaffirms the reach and relevance of her thoughts on technology and creativity. Her insight is also foresight, and her story remains immediate, critical – and very entertaining.
Monday, March 5 2012
20 Questions: Ellen Ullman
Technophile, humanist and storyteller Ellen Ullman is touring for her latest, By Blood. The cult classic Close to the Machine and runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award, The Bug, are enjoying a resurgence, as well. From the sterile environs of an airport terminal, Ullman recalls a glorious range of artists and intellectuals (and the work they have produced) that have shaped her.
Monday, March 28 2011
The Night Billy Buddy Died: Dr. Horrible’s Tragicomic Inversion of Spider-Man
The accidental death of Penny, the girl Billy Buddy aka Dr. Horrible loves, has parallels to the deaths of several comic book deaths, though none so much as the death of Spider-Man's girlfriend Gwen.
Friday, March 25 2011
“What a Crazy Random Happenstance”: Destiny and Free Will in ‘Dr. Horrible’
Among other things, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog provides a meditation on good and evil and the role that choice plays in embracing one or the other.
Friday, December 4 2009
MCA’s Heavy News
This is more about the surprise I felt when an hour after my heart ached for my own mother it ached again in a similar way for someone whom I have never actually met. So I’ve spent probably months listening to the Beastie Boys. So what? This gives me the right? The short answer is “Yes. Yes, it does."
Monday, September 14 2009
Music Scrobbling as a Panopticism of Taste
Among social networking sites, it's only Last.fm, only scrobbling -- which, once activated, operates entirely on its own, as an unconscious background function -- that channels the essence of Foucault's social panopticism.
Friday, August 14 2009
‘Funny People’ and the Advent of the Social Network Narrative
If the public prefers disposable, computer generated product about man-babies to dramas about human relationships, then Funny People may be plugged directly in to the zeitgeist.
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.
Wednesday, July 22 2009
I Saw You: Comics, the Internet, and Everyday Life
In this Iconographies feature, I Saw You will be used as a spring-board to understanding how the internet might be examined and made sense of through comics.
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.
Thursday, June 18 2009
The New Games Journalism
The most useful moments for New Games Journalists are ones that occur in multiplayer, describing experiences that could never occur during just a general session of play.
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.
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.
24 Tweets
Having to bop back & forth between Facebook & MySpace & Plaxo & Blogger & Skype & Twitter is just too fucking much & I’m wading thru all thi[0!]
Friday, May 29 2009
The Future is an Empty Room
As digital technology consolidates its conquest of the known universe, emptying our living spaces and assimilating our lives, all that will be left in our future is space. Lots and lots of empty space.
Wednesday, March 18 2009
Does Video Game Criticism Need a Pauline Kael?
Kael, much like video game critics today, was faced with a massive philosophical shift in her chosen artistic medium that large quantities of critics were against.
