At the moment of their retrospectives, which artist is more popular: Cindy Sherman, now at the MoMA, or Damien Hirst at Tate Modern? Opened within 6 weeks of each other, the Sherman and Hirst shows represent two of the most … Continue reading
A huge show of iPhoneography in London will open this weekend. It’s a watershed moment in the history of both photography broadly and iPhoneography in particular. Though hardly the first show to celebrate the aesthetic and cultural implications of a … Continue reading
Wall street, McKenzie Wark recently wrote, is not a place but an abstraction. It’s a host of ideas and projections. It’s what Roland Barthes would have called a mythology, or Foucault may have called an episteme. It is an idea … Continue reading
I’m fascinated by Dutch Manhattan. I like imagining it’s wooden homes and windmills. I am stunned by its perceived closeness with the Lenape tribe, the very people whose primal Manhattan identity has been all but obliterated by the city. I romanticize … Continue reading
It’s time for the tech world to get serious about users. Users, of course, have always been a part of the tech world, and there’s no denying that their tastes, opinions, and preferences have been business and design concerns for … Continue reading
A few months ago, I undertook a study of contemporary social media through a sociological study of the iPhone instagram app. The research project was multidimensional: I used the app for four-weeks, interacting with other users and sharing images I … Continue reading
After six months studying at Cambridge, the time has come to undertake a final dissertation project. As an M. Phil in Modern Society and Global Transformation (just Sociology really), I have been challenged to think about the ways in which … Continue reading
Stewart Brand once said that “information wants to be free.” Most people leave the quotation just there, celebrating the fact that in a world made more natural, the stuff of knowledge, tax returns, and secrets would move unrestricted. But Brand’s … Continue reading
It is the Fifth of November and my Oxford Dictionary of Sociology is dog-earred to “cultural relativism.” Perhaps I should add that I am in the United Kingdom. In Cambridge specifically. Studying, if you must know. The connection between these … Continue reading
There were 36,218 people in a stadium East Hartford, Connecticut on May 25th, 2010. It was impossible to park, as thousands arrived with hours to spare before game time. Inside the stadium, almost everyone in attendance was wearing some form … Continue reading