January 12, 2021 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
There’s a fairly straightforward narrative about media and cultural hegemony in the United States that most scholarly observers have come to largely agree on (with the usual spectrum of variations in emphasis), but that more of the public ought to be aware of. It accounts for how we got here, into this situation where media is recognized to be a key causal factor shaping the deep polarization of a country experiencing a state of civil crisis — not quite civil war (yet), but something that has edged perilously close to it.
The narrative runs something like this.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Cultural politics, Media ecology, Politics | Tagged cultural hegemony, culture wars, Fairness Doctrine, George Lakoff, illiberalism, media ecologies, media ecology, media hegemony, media regimes, political polarization, Trumpism, Walter Cronkite | Leave a Comment »
January 10, 2021 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Two points of social media use call for more attention as we make sense of this week’s events at the U. S. Capitol.
1) Videos and selfies from Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rallies are circulating online and making it easier to identify those who participated in the attempted coup at the Capitol. Images created and shared voluntarily and eagerly are used against those who create and share them. This is part of what I will call the voluntary mass self-surveillance of society enabled by social media.
2) Donald Trump’s permanent removal from Twitter felt, to many, like a more significant act than his potential second impeachment. Certainly to him, with his 88 million Twitter followers, it was more significant; he was, after all, as much a product of Twitter as it has been a product of him. To top it off, his temporary suspension from Facebook and Instagram, Google’s and Apple’s announcements limiting the alternative, conservative dominated Parler platform, and discussions among his followers about where to go, both to follow Trump and to organize further actions, have been among the biggest news of the last 24 hours. This relates more generally to the social mediatization of politics.
While these two trends are being considered critically by media and cultural theorists, there is a socio-ecological, or ecocultural, or even ecotopian dimension I’d like to add to that critique here.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Cultural politics, Media ecology, Politics | Tagged bioregionalism, Capitol insurrection, cell phones, ecocriticism, ecocultural theory, ecopolitics, ecotopia, ecotopian criticism, Googlization, media ecologies, media ecology, media politics, QAnization, surveillance, surveillance capitalism, Trumpism, twitter, voluntary mass self-surveillance | Leave a Comment »
January 7, 2021 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
I am an academic who researches, writes, and teaches about the human relationship with the ecological environment within which we live and on which we depend. I recognize that that relationship is deeply troubled, and I want to be working on untroubling it.
Politics — the shaping and implementation of policy to steer collective and institutional action — is one of the ways, and an essential way, to do that. (Others include the arts, the sciences, technological innovation, and philosophy/spirituality.) But politics is complicated and nowadays gets in the way of that “untroubling” more often than it facilitates it.
Yesterday’s Trumpist insurrection at the U. S. Capitol is perhaps symbolic of how politics has “gotten in the way.” But nothing that happened yesterday surprised me.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Blog stuff, Climate change, Politics | Tagged 01-06-21, Capitol, climate denialism, disinformation, far right, fascism, hope, image war, information war, insurrection, January 6 2021, meme magic, QAnon, right-wing media, Trump, Trump-Like Derangement Syndrome, Trumpism, Trumplan, U.S. Capitol, Washington D.C. | Leave a Comment »
January 5, 2021 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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 the global media ecology, which is itself so new and rapidly evolving that few understand it well, even if we all participate in it in different ways and to different degrees. And we need to understand conspiracy theory as practice and not only as theory. This post will focus on the role of a specific practice, called “research,” within the spread of the “cultural virus” of the QAnon movement, and on the ways that the “virus” spreads tentacularly, that is, along multiple lines of infection into multiple host bodies. In the process, I will address the question of what QAnon is (referring to its relationship to science, to art, and to religion) and how it fits into the larger “ecology” or “economy” of knowledge, trust, and meaning that some describe as the “post-truth condition.”
Continue Reading »
Posted in Cultural politics, Media ecology, Science & society | Tagged Anomalies, biological metaphors, Catholicism, conspiracies, conspiracy cult, conspiracy culture, conspiracy entrepreneurs, conspiracy theories, conspiratistics, conspiratology, cults, environmental communication, global capitalism, inequality, media ecologies, media ecology, new religious movements, QAnon, Trumpism, Vigano | Leave a Comment »
December 30, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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 the life of a young, underemployed scholar that are worth sharing (grad students, take note!).
Continue Reading »
Posted in Academe, Media ecology | Tagged "Do your own research", Marc-André Argentino, QAnon, research | Leave a Comment »
December 18, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
How best to characterize the past decade in books? This list focuses on three themes: attempts to grapple with the nature of the climate and extinction crises, the “ontological” and “decolonial” “turns” in cultural and environmental theory, and efforts to map out the “multispecies entanglements” that characterize our world and the acute challenges we face.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Eco-theory | Tagged Anna Tsing, Anthropocene, books, books of the decade, cosmopolitics, decolonial turn, decoloniality, Donna Haraway, ecocultural theory, Eduardo Kohn, extinction crisis, Marison de la Cadena, multispecies studies, ontological turn | 6 Comments »
December 14, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
As a humanistic scholar within an interdisciplinary school, I’m often put in a position to distinguish how the humanities differ from the social and natural sciences. There is a long tradition of distinguishing between these “two cultures,” with the most frequent point of focus, for humanists, being that they concern themselves with human meaning and interpretation, not with causal explanation.
Here’s my most recent attempt to articulate this difference into a simple distillation. Comments welcome. (This post is timely, with the humanities being somewhat under attack at my own institution; see below for more on that. If the difference articulated here isn’t enough to make the case for the importance of the humanities, what is?)
Continue Reading »
Posted in Academe, Science & society | Tagged Academe, arts, C. P. Snow, humanism, humanities, interpretation, natural sciences, posthumanism, posthumanities, sciences, social sciences, two cultures, University of Vermont, values | Leave a Comment »
December 10, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Harold Budd’s passing yesterday (from coronavirus complications) has inspired me to create a multichannel chamber of his music, which you can enter into and wander around in by clicking on the tabs below. Try them all at once, or mix channels at your leisure.
His music, perhaps more than anyone’s, lends itself to this kind of multi-mirrored, kaleidoscopic simultaneity. If I could set up 32 speakers around a large hall to play 16 different pieces of his at the same time (rather like John Cage did with his Roaratorio, or Yannis Xenakis with his cavernous electronic compositions), I would. The result, in Budd’s case, would be a kind of soft, velvet-textured, yet massive kaleidoscope of ambient spaciousness. A soundscape suitable for a long wander, which is how I imagine his current (postpartum) voyage to be. RIP.
Click on the links below at your mixing-board leisure.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Music & soundscape | Tagged ambient music, Brian Eno, contemporary music, Harold Budd, Robin Guthrie, soundscape | 2 Comments »
November 23, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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 — while listening to some emotionally triggering music, like, say, Max Richter’s Written on the Sky or On the Nature of Daylight. (Note: You have to be on the Times page to do that. But first click below to start the music. Or your own soundtrack selection.)
- Watch what is happening in your emotional body. (That’s the body that diagrams like this one and research articles like this one attempt to map out.) If that body isn’t triggered — butterflies in your chest, throat tightening, eyes and facial muscles responding, mirror neurons alighting, spine tingling — then you may not be human.
Continue Reading »
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 | 1 Comment »
November 12, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
Trump’s parting electoral tantrum puts the exclamation mark on the fundamental flaw of democracy that his presidency has revealed: that a poorly informed electorate can willingly choose its own demise (even as it recites platitudes to the contrary).
Two institutions are most implicated in this flaw: public education and the mass media. In well functioning democracies, both of those institutions are supported, at least in part, by the state, which is in turn supported by people according to their abilities (through taxation).
Continue Reading »
Posted in Politics | Tagged Bhagavad Gita, democracy, Donald Trump, media, public education, public media, public sphere, Trumpism | Leave a Comment »
November 9, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
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 debate over the scientific veracity of climate change, what we have with this election is two sides, each of which has decried the other as a source of disinformation.
President Trump and his proxies have repeatedly claimed to be victorious and accused the Democrats of “stealing” the election through massive “fraud,” with the “mainstream media” complicit, censorious, and biased in the Democrats’ favor. All of Trump’s supposed enemies—in the Democratic party, among Republican “never Trumpers,” in the media, and ensconced in various levels of government—are taken to make up a “deep state” that is untrustworthy, nefarious, and committed to stopping his administration from continuing what they have “started.”
On the other side, the election has been taken to be fair, having played itself out more or less according to expectations — with in-person balloting showing more support for Trump, and mail-in ballots, which in most states were counted later, showing significantly more support for Biden (albeit with pollster projections somewhat off, as in 2016). (One of the possible reasons suggested for that degree of polling error is QAnon; more on them below.) The fairness of the election, despite known challenges, has been confirmed by international observers. The margin of victory for Biden is clear and Trump’s protestations are taken to be largely or completely unfounded and intended to disinform the electorate and rile up his base of supporters. This interpretation has been more or less accepted by most major media organizations, with governments around the world supporting it through their congratulatory statements to the Biden-Harris team.
As with the issue of climate change (and to some degree with Covid-19), the questions surrounding these election results, especially for media attempting to cover those results, are therefore: which side should we trust, and why? Is there a factual basis for deciding between them, or should both sides be given “equal air time,” with voters and observers being left to “make up their own minds”?
Continue Reading »
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 | Leave a Comment »
November 6, 2020 by Adrian J Ivakhiv
One of the things I study is spiritual practices – which I’ll define (for simplicity’s sake) as the things people do to enhance their capacity to live in accordance with chosen ideals. Those ideals can be defined in religious terms (for instance, as salvation, enlightenment, or unity with God) or in more secular and philosophical terms (as happiness, success, glory, power, longevity, and the like). They can be abstract (salvation, happiness) or concrete, specific, and even personal (Jesus, Guanyin). What makes the practices spiritual is that they cultivate capacity. Their goal includes the assumption that there is something in us that can grow, improve, or increase in its ability to act upon itself in and with others (with those others sometimes being cosmic others).
In the Christian historical context, the concept of “spirit” has been juxtaposed against an opposite — matter, the body, the flesh, “the world” — that is considered inferior and opposed to it. But today’s popular usage has mostly supplanted that idea. When we speak of “team spirit,” someone being “spirited,” or something that is “in spirit rather than in letter,” we acknowledge this more generic use of the word. Spirit is what motivates us, what gives us strength, what makes us lively, vibrant, and connected to the world outside of ourselves.
In the current political moment of “the interregnum before the Interregnum” — where the second denotes the formal period between an election and the new leader’s assumption of power, while the first denotes the informal period between the vote and the announcement of its results — we see all kinds of spiritual practices in evidence.
Continue Reading »
Posted in Cultural politics, Manifestos & auguries, Spirit matter | Tagged alt-right, America is Waiting, Byrne and Eno, election interregnum, election magic, Interregnum, Interregnum before the Interregnum, meme magic, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Paula White, power of prayer, prayer, remix culture, spiritual practices, Trumpism | Leave a Comment »
« Newer Posts - Older Posts »
