Conspiracy movements like QAnon are a kind of cultural virus that spreads rapidly and widely in the new global media environment. Like invasive species, they spread into diverse cultural ecosystems, colonizing them even as they take on new forms that mimic each environment’s original inhabitants. To understand how they do this, we need to understand […]
Archive for the ‘Media ecology’ Category
A day in the life…
Posted in Academe, Media ecology, tagged "Do your own research", Marc-André Argentino, QAnon, research on December 30, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
I’m working on a lengthyish post about conspiracy theory (specifically, QAnon) and the “post-truth condition,” but in the meantime I want to post a few tidbits from something I’ve been enjoying reading related to that topic. A Reddit conversation with QAnon researcher Marc-André Argentino includes some smart observations about QAnon, but also useful insights into […]
On (not) being human
Posted in Media ecology, Music & soundscape, Spirit matter, tagged artificial intelligence, artificially generated faces, emotional intelligence, emotional politics, emotional practice, emotions, facial expression, fake people, Greta Thunberg, mirror neurons, neuropolitics on November 23, 2020 | 1 Comment »
The New York Times has published an article on AI-generated faces which strikes me as an informal litmus test of our humanity, or at least of neurotypical emotional response. Here’s how to work it. Scroll through the mega-composite image at the top of the article — do it slowly, then quickly, then varying your speed […]
Truth, media trust, and the election
Posted in Media ecology, tagged disinformation, Donald Trump, fact-checking, information war, Interregnum, media coverage of U.S. politics, media ecologies, media hygiene, mediasphere, misinformation, post-truth, QAnon, Qult, U.S. politics on November 9, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
This article is cross-posted from the media ecologies blog e2mc. While last week’s election has resulted in the announcement of a new president and vice-president, with leaders of many countries around the world recognizing those results (and with global markets rallying their apparent support), the current Trump administration has not recognized them. As with the […]
An average (pandemic-era, pre-election) Sunday
Posted in Media ecology, tagged 2020 U.S. presidential election, disinformation, Epoch Times, Falun Gong, Google antitrust lawsuit, Gulen movement, media ecologies, media ecology, media gatekeepers, New York Times, U.S. politics, Wall Street Journal on October 26, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve begun posting updates on media coverage related to the U.S. presidential election (and related issues, such as social media disinformation) on my blog e2mc, which I’ve restarted to accompany my course “Media Ecologies and Cultural Politics.” Here is the latest post, which summarizes some key stories from yesterday’s Sunday New York Times. I may […]
The Qanization of the world
Posted in Cultural politics, Media ecology, Spirit matter, tagged 8chan, AI, Anomalies, artificial intelligence, China, conspiracies, conspiracy culture, conspiracy entrepreneurs, conspiracy theories, conspiratistics, conspiratology, conspirituality, Donald Trump, evil, Falun Gong, Instagram influencers, internet cultures, LARPs, machine intelligence, pastel QAnon, QAnon, redemptive societies, satanic cult, surveillance capitalism, wellness QAnon on October 18, 2020 | 3 Comments »
As I’ve been preparing to cover QAnon in my media course (and trying to keep up with it, since it’s really been ramping up ahead of the election), I’ve seriously begun to think of it is a work of evil genius. Let me explain why. For starters, it’s worth reminding ourselves that QAnon was designated […]
Streaming media’s environmental impact
Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, tagged carbon footprint, data centers, digital media, ecological footprint, environmental impact, industrial ecology, Laura Marks, media ecology, Media+Environment, pedagogical media, streaming media on October 16, 2020 | 3 Comments »
Cross-posted with the EcoCultureLab blog. Media+Environment has just published another article in its “States of Media and Environment” series, and this one should be of broad interest to environmental educators, media scholars, and environmentally concerned media users. “Streaming Media’s Environmental Impact” draws attention to an unpopular but inescapable issue: the adverse environmental effects of streaming media. […]
The new media regime
Posted in Media ecology, tagged Alex Jones, Anomalies, conspiracies, climate justice movement, Cold War 2.0, conspiracy culture, conspiracy entrepreneurs, conspiracy theories, Donald Trump, Facebook, futurism, global media studies, global weirdness, Google, illiberalism, media ecology, media politics, media regimes, QAnon, surveillance capitalism, Trump-Like Derangement Syndrome on July 30, 2020 | 1 Comment »
Here’s a back-of-the-envelope hypothesis on the “new media regime” and some open questions that follow from it. Two groups are faring best these days under the current (new) media regime.* The first is surveillance capitalists, who have developed ways to monetize and harvest new data technologies directly for the accumulation of wealth. (That covers the […]
Mapping identities in global cultural studies
Posted in Cultural politics, Eco-culture, Media ecology, tagged anthropology of globalization, capitalism, cognitive capitalism, colonialism, cosmopolitics, critical realism, cultural identity, cultural studies, cultural theory, decoloniality, ecocultural identity, etic, global cultural studies, globalization, identity politics, modernism, modernity, modernization, multiple modernities, postmodernization, reflexive modernization, reflexivity, sociology of globalization, tradition, traditionalism, traditionalization on May 28, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
People’s identities are an object of study in a range of fields, but it’s the field of cultural studies that has most singularly, even obsessively, sought to understand how identities interact with politics in changing media environments. Cultural studies first emerged in a British milieu marked by very specific relations between socio-economic classes, media industries, […]