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Posts Tagged ‘digital media’

No common (sense) world

Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Politics, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 12, 2024 | Leave a Comment »

Here are my thoughts on the US election, and on the challenges it presents us, in four parts. 1. The informational catastrophe, and the sadness of it For all the reasons to be dismayed about these elections, there’s one that saddens me most. It’s that all the people (me among them) who’ve given their professional […]

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The information coup

Posted in Media ecology, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 31, 2021 | 1 Comment »

Shoshana Zuboff’s analysis of “The Coup We Are Not Talking About,” published in today’s Sunday New York Times, is an essential follow-up to her book Surveillance Capitalism, applying that book’s analysis to the situation we are living through. This other coup is the “epistemic coup” which, she writes, “proceeds in four stages”:

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Streaming media’s environmental impact

Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology, tagged , , , , , , , , , , 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. […]

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We are surveillance capital stock

Posted in Media ecology, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 29, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

I’m reading Shoshana Zuboff’s widely lauded The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which some have placed alongside Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century as essential reading for understanding today’s global economy. The big conceptual idea I find most useful in it is its insistence that we are in the midst of a “fourth great transformation” […]

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More conspiratology: the internet as monochord & storm machine

Posted in Media ecology, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 2, 2020 | 5 Comments »

At a time when the U.S. itself appears on the brink of collapse — with riots in the streets, a pandemic crippling the country’s heath care system and wreaking havoc on its economy, a president tweeting out nods of recognition to his QAnon fan base and hinting at “the Storm” that is coming — the sense-making apparatus of digital media is rife with opportunities for disinformational entrepreneurs to make headway in various directions. […]

The internet is like a huge instrument — a hyper-complex, Robert Fluddian monochord, that works by allowing for an infinity of connections through which flow the sounds and vibrations of human emotional and affective contagion. When protests erupt across the country over the senseless killing of a black man in Minneapolis, the time scale in which large-scale action occurs speeds up and become affect-driven time, not a time in which collective deliberation is really possible. This means that informational, and therefore “disinformational,” bursts into that monochord become all the more powerful.

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