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
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
or, the perpetual need for binding and boundaries in discourse “You can’t win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.” – Obi-Wan Kenobi The book has not, and will not, die. … Continue reading
the divide between physical reality and the “second,” virtual reality of cyberspace has been overexposed and polarized, constantly imagining the 21st century citizen at first one end of the spectrum and then dramatically shifted to the other. but this is … Continue reading
we are tired of division: media, culture, society, law, meaning, humanity, and so on. these are interconnected terms, defined by one another. they must be re-united. explication has been held prisoner by written language for too long. as if we … Continue reading
If Avatar has changed anything about then movies, then it has changed everything. Let’s begin by considering what depth means to cinema. Historically, depth has only existed as a perspective, the idea taken from painting and camera optics that all … Continue reading
Now that the internet has become an ambience, we have become enveloped by it. Just ten years ago, society traveled to the internet. It was something somewhat site-specific, a cafe, a library, a corporate office. At that point, the internet … Continue reading