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 […]
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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 »
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 […]
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 […]
Covid-19 conspiracies and the media: or, Toward an epidemiology of media trust
Posted in Media ecology, Science & society, tagged Anomalies, Bruno Latour, conspiracies, conspiracy culture, conspiracy theories, Coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, epidemiology of media trust, epistemology, fake news, information regimes, infovirology, media, media ecology, media politics, media theory, media trust, mediasphere, post-truth, Q, QAnon, Steve Fuller on May 17, 2020 | 4 Comments »
The global pandemic of Covid-19 has been accompanied by a proliferation of competing narratives of what the crisis is and means, and how it should be addressed. The UN and the World Health Organization have called this an “infodemic,” that is, an epidemic (or pandemic) of information that, in its confusing diversity, has made it […]
Pandemic epistemology 2
Posted in Science & society, tagged Coronavirus, COVID-19, Ed Yong, epistemology, frontier science, interdisciplinarity, pandemic politics, pandemic response, sociology of science, Thomas Kuhn, transdisciplinarity on May 4, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
I’ve been haunted by Ed Yong’s description of science from the Atlantic article “Why Coronavirus is So Confusing,” which I shared a few days ago: “This is how science actually works. It’s less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that the press often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty. “Our […]
Pandemic epistemology
Posted in Science & society, tagged Anomalies, anomalistics, Atlantic Monthly, conspiracies, Coronavirus, COVID-19, Ed Yong, epistemology, media, mediasphere, pandemic politics, pandemics, public communication of science, public trust, science communication on April 30, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
One of the silver linings about the coronavirus pandemic is that it has made some people, and even institutions, more generous (at least temporarily). Among them are popular and academic journals that have removed their paywalls and offered their publications for free. (I shared one of my own articles in that category yesterday. The irony, […]
The Epistemically Challenged States of America
Posted in Cultural politics, Politics, tagged Algoricene, algorithmic transparency, cultural policy, digital culture, epistemology, fake news, global media literacy, global media studies, information war, media ecology, media hygiene, media literacy, media policy, media theory, political polarization, Russia, Ukraine, Ukrainianization on December 2, 2019 | 7 Comments »
Or, Why Ukraine- and Russia- literacy should now be mandatory studies for every voting American One could start with another question: Why are both the politics of climate change and politics in general so polarized these days? Political polarization, after all, remains the main complaint of Americans, and it has made it impossible to make […]
(Mc)Mindfulness?
Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter, tagged Buddhism, McMindfulness, mindfulness, Peirce, political ecology, practice, process-relational thought, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young on June 22, 2019 | 2 Comments »
A Guardian article making the rounds on social media argues that the mindfulness movement has become “the new capitalist spirituality” — “magical thinking on steroids,” which instead of overturning the “neoliberal order,” now “only serves to reinforce its destructive logic.” This “McMindfulness,” as Ronald Purser calls it, has been “stripped of the teachings on ethics […]
Lyme & beyond: a bibliographic resource
Posted in Science & society, tagged alternative health, Anomalies, anomalistics, Anthropocene, bugs, chronic Lyme disease, complementary health, conspiracies, ecological syndrome, fear of nature, global hum, health scares, hysteria, infectious diseases, institutional trust, Lyme disease, Lyme wars, medical establishment, medicine, modern syndromes, public health wars, scientific controversies, uncertainty on July 31, 2018 | 7 Comments »
Last updated on November 11, 2018 Immanence sometimes dips into areas of controversial or “boundary” science, which means areas of science whose interpretation is both publicly and scientifically contentious. While I don’t consider climate science to be all that scientifically controversial (though it is certainly politically controversial), and the general topics of “fake news,” “information war,” and […]
Skipping an Earthbeat
Posted in Anthropocene, Climate change, Science & society, tagged Aaron Wildavsky, Anthropocene, Bill McGuire, dynamic earth, Earthbeat, earthquakes, environmentalism, fragile Earth, Gaia, geology, Mary Douglas, risk as culture, volcanoes on June 15, 2018 | 4 Comments »
Reading Bill McGuire‘s 2012 book Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes, I came across this description of the annual “pulse” called an “Earthbeat,” which is supposedly responsible for Earth’s preference for volcanic eruptions between November and April (also known as “volcano season”): rather like a beating heart, the Earth changes […]