Language Is a Virus, and People Could Die
The COVID pandemic seemed to accelerate the spread of new viral media, but viruses mutate, pop culture replicates, and everything’s a cover song.
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The Art of Psychological Warfare
From marketing manipulation to all-out psychological warfare, Stories Are Weapons clarifies how our world – and worldview – is seldom our own.
What Wilco’s ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ Got Right About Music Streaming
Wilco’s net-streaming experiment with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was part of the utopian promise for technology’s future, and it worked.
Gol o Bolbol Go Viral: Iranian Protest Songs in the Age of Social Media
Iranian protest songs like “Soltane Ghalbha”, which lyrically invoke “structures of feeling” connected to the loss and grief of a loved one, achieve an encoded additional layer of resistance when paired with the specific images and stories of lost young Iranians.
‘Tokens’ Pays Attention to the Moneyish Side of Things
Tokens is about all those things that are moneyish—monetary-like exchanges that are tracked and programmable, shady and social, hard coded and beyond borders.
People Like This? Metallica’s Crossover Contribution to Reaction Videos
Watching Chris&RheasiaTv’s reaction video to Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” illustrates the power of these crossover connections.
Only the Surveilling Technology Is New ‘The Listeners’ Contends
In The Listeners, scholar Brian Hochman narrates a history of surveillance in the United States by means of technological cunning up to 2001.
You Better Be Quick When It’s Time to BeReal
Although most social media sites are marked by abundance and expansiveness, BeReal operates on scarcity. Its gamification lies in the almighty two-minute window.
The Russo-Ukraine War Is a Mediated War – Not Just a War on the Media
How the Russo-Ukraine War generated a media dimension of its own and how it linked the myths of the past century to the challenges of our own.
Horror Film ‘The Empty Man’ Unmasks Internet Age Nihilism
David Prior’s 2020 horror film The Empty Man taps into a form of nihilism that might be taking over the world via social media.
The Future Is Funked by Future Funk
The “future” in future funk is removed from any historical sense of time, existing in a digital future that can be forever extended – and always out of reach.
Punk Wouldn’t Have Spread So Far Without the Sh*t Media
Simultaneously inside and outside by either choice or circumstance, punk has always had paradoxical – sometimes hostile – relations with TV, radio, and the internet.