Asked by an old and dear friend what I make of the recent “Climategate scandal,” I thought I’d do a quick check on sources summarizing the effect of the hacked East Anglia e-mails on climate change science. To my surprise, the Wikipedia article on the topic is probably as good a place to start as […]
Archive for the ‘Media ecology’ Category
“Climategate” follow-up
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Media ecology, tagged Climategate, ecopolitics on January 12, 2010 | 2 Comments »
neuropolitics & environmental communication
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, tagged affect, cognition, Connolly, environmental communication, Lakoff, neuropolitics on January 11, 2010 | 1 Comment »
My article “From Frames to Resonance Machines: The Neuropolitics of Environmental Communication” is coming out in the next issue of Environmental Communication. Here’s the abstract: George Lakoff’s work in cognitive linguistics has prompted a surge in social scientists’ interest in the cognitive and neuropsychological dimensions of political discourse. Bringing cognitive neuroscience into the study of […]
Invictus & the politics of affect
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology, Politics, Visual culture, tagged film, neoliberalism, Politics, South Africa on January 2, 2010 | 14 Comments »
There are many things one can say about Invictus: about Freeman’s portrayal of Mandela, Eastwood’s directorial prowess and editorial conceits (e.g., masculinity and its transformation through individual experience), the film’s characterization of post-Apartheid South Africa, and the accuracy or inaccuracy of its portrayal of the actual story of the South African national rugby team’s, the Springboks’, stunning rise to victory in the 1995 World Cup. What interests me most, though, is its depiction of mass affect and collective emotion, which are portrayed in two of the main variants these take in today’s world: sports and politics. [. . .]
The film’s crystal moments, those affect-carrying plateaus or peak moments embodying its main tensions, are those surrounding the combat on the field and its emanation into the crowd: slowed down crunches of bodies against bodies (unprotected, unlike in American football), sweat leaping between them out of their crushing impact, rapid cuts between on-field plays that occur too quickly to be followed and can only be enjoyed as sheer spectacle, and crowds leaping for joy, singing, applauding, and dancing, their emotions spreading like waves across the stadium, the streets, and the nation. [. . .]
two democracies… (& planet compost)
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Media ecology, Politics, tagged activism, democracy, ecopolitics on December 19, 2009 | 3 Comments »
The responses to the final COP-15 “deal” from the environmental and social justice communities seem, at this point, to be largely negative. It’s a start, some acknowledge, but it’s pretty late to be starting, and it’s really pretty vacuous — a lost opportunity. My last post tried to put a positive spin on things by arguing that the events in Copenhagen reflect the tension between two models of democracy, and that there is hope for the future in the very crystallization of the second model. Let me expand on that a little.
From Cap & Trade to apocalypse
Posted in Climate change, Eco-culture, Media ecology, Visual culture, tagged apocalypse, ecopolitics on December 2, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Annie Leonard’s Free Range Studios, whose viral video The Story of Stuff made some waves a little while back, has now produced a critique of the Cap and Trade system, some version of which is the most likely outcome of negotiations taking place in Copenhagen over the coming days. Over at Grist, David Roberts claims […]
‘2012’ and all that
Posted in Media ecology, Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged 2012, doom, ecoapocalypse, sacred place, sacred time on November 17, 2009 | 4 Comments »
Back in the mid-1990s when I was researching my book Claiming Sacred Ground — on the ‘sacralization’ of space, place, and landscape, with a focus on two places where it’s been happening at a rapid clip over the last three or four decades (Glastonbury, England, and Sedona, Arizona, which has been in the news recently […]
Heidegger smash-up as live web philosophy
Posted in Academe, Media ecology, Philosophy, tagged Continental philosophy, Heidegger on October 25, 2009 | 3 Comments »
There’s something about the flare-up over Carlin Romano’s Chronicle of Higher Ed article “Heil Heidegger!” that manages to crystallize both the virtues and the potential utter barrenness of the web as a site for direct philosophical action (i.e., constructive debate that contributes, however marginally, to philosophy). Romano’s article takes advantage of the forthcoming publication of […]
case for online publishing
Posted in Academe, Media ecology, tagged digital humanities on June 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Mount Holyoke College political science professor Douglas Amy makes a good case for publishing online in this piece in today’s Inside Higher Ed. Amy is the author of three previous books, The Politics of Environmental Mediation (Columbia University Press, 1987), Behind the Ballot Box (Greenwood, 2000), and Real Choices/New Voices (Columbia U. Press, 2002). His […]
eco-criticism/communication & the future of reading
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology on June 9, 2009 | 2 Comments »
ASLE, Andrew Revkin, blogging
open-source socialism & the politics of self-organizing systems
Posted in Media ecology, Philosophy, Politics, Process-relational thought, tagged autopoiesis, biology, ecology, ecotheory, enactive cognition, political ecology, self-organization, Whitehead on May 27, 2009 | 4 Comments »
(On Kevin Kelly’s “The New Socialism,” Paul Ward’s Medea Hypothesis, Steven Shaviro’s “Against Self-Organization,” and more.) Self-organizing adaptive systems and other networks are more than just the flavor of the philosophical month; they are a model increasingly used to make sense of the natural and cultural worlds. Generally it’s assumed that such distributed self-organization is […]
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