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Posts Tagged ‘media ecology’

Observations and a hypothesis on the Harper’s letter

Posted in Cultural politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on July 10, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

So, 150 or so fairly prominent individuals write/sign an open letter defending “justice and open debate.” (We can call them intellectuals, or literati, or academics, or even celebrities of a sort — maybe “intellectual celebrities” — but see point #1 below on generalizations.) In the letter, they single out Donald Trump and the “forces of […]

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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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Covid-19 conspiracies and the media: or, Toward an epidemiology of media trust

Posted in Media ecology, Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 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 […]

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Image ecologies, spiritual polytropy, and the Anthropocene

Posted in Spirit matter, Visual culture, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 29, 2020 | 2 Comments »

An article of mine by that title has appeared in a special issue of the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture on “Popular Culture, Religion, and the Anthropocene.” The article contains the theoretical core of the book I’m currently writing on image regimes. It builds on my work in cinema and media […]

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Media hygiene 102: regulation

Posted in Media ecology, tagged , , , , , , , , , on March 11, 2020 | Leave a Comment »

There are two implicit rules that social media (in their corporate controlled, un- or dis-regulated state) want you to learn. (By “want,” I mean that these are the tendencies being encouraged by the systems themselves. And by “rules,” I mean norms, habits, or learned impulses meant to be followed instinctively.) The rules are these:

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The Epistemically Challenged States of America

Posted in Cultural politics, Politics, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 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 […]

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Media+Environment has launched

Posted in Cinema, Eco-culture, tagged , , , , , , on November 26, 2019 | 3 Comments »

Media+Environment, the new, open access, online, peer-reviewed journal of transnational and interdisciplinary ecomedia research published by the University of California Press, has launched its first issue and thematic stream, on “The States of Media+Environment.” The introduction can be read here. Articles can be accessed here.

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Announcing Media+Environment Journal

Posted in Media ecology, tagged , , , on May 9, 2019 | 1 Comment »

This announcement is long past due… It’s for the new, open access, peer-reviewed international journal that I am co-editing with Alenda Chang and Janet Walker, through the University of California Press. It includes a call for submissions for two special issue “streams”: “Disaster Media” and “Mediating Art & Science.” Media+Environment is an open access, online, […]

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Media hygiene 101

Posted in Media ecology, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on July 2, 2017 | 6 Comments »

My book Ecologies of the Moving Image provides some suggestions into how we can become better consumers and co-producers of media. But these suggestions come couched within a 400-page treatise of media (and environmental) philosophy that includes a history of cinema, analyses of various films, and much else. While the focus there is on cinema and […]

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Parsing the “alternative media ecosystem”

Posted in Media ecology, tagged , , , , , , , on April 3, 2017 | 4 Comments »

We all know the media ecosystem has been changing rapidly, with media scholars scrambling to understand how and where things are headed. “Fake news” and “post-truth” are the glib catchwords of the day; “filter bubbles,” “echo chambers,” “ideological segregation,” “information cascades,” “algorithmic filtering” (along with the all-encompassing “Algoricene“), and “meme magic” are among the more, or less, […]

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Thinking through media ecologies

Posted in Cultural politics, tagged , , , , , , , on February 4, 2013 | 1 Comment »

On e²mc we’re thinking through the various meanings of “media ecology.” The first, chronologically, is the medium theory of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, and others — sometimes called the Toronto School of communication theory. Neil Postman’s “New York school” can be considered a more critical and pessimistic adjunct to this tradition. As a […]

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