A while back I remarked on Twitter that we needed to embrace Critical Theory into our theory and practice of communications. The stimulus to this was a remark about Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) theory. Lee Bryant picked me up on this and I expanded a little more on the topic on Twitter. Firstly, what do I...

I’ve not posted anything on Žižek for a while so here goes: I’ve been thinking of what Žižek might be like without Lacan. Possibly like the landscape in the PK Dick story where all turns to a cloudy nonethingness – the absence of the symbolic. Or perhaps a new lucidity. Technorati...

More entertaining research on the human brain, this time from University of California at San Diego. According to Roland Piquepaille writing in Emerging Tech Sexy objects stimulate our brain ones brain’s visual areas respond more to ‘valuable objects’. This starts to raise all sorts of...

Resisting all puns and correlations between cargo cults and our own somewhat moribund British attitude to production I was struck by Oliver Marks’ piece on Enterprise 2.0 and those fetishistic religions: Strategic Thinking before Operational Actions: The Enterprise 2.0 Tool Cargo Cult Problem. Oliver...

Every now and again I like to wonder about social search and the semantic web. I have a secret question, which I shall share, my own personal Turing Test to see if the machine is paying attention. I ask it this – “What is Cultural Capital?” The results vary as the algorithms shift,...

There’s something that draws out the thought of the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre in the excellent Monument Project.  A whole series of time lapse cameras generate a 360 degree image from London’s Monument in the City, London: http://www.themonumentview.net/about.php   With the advent...

One element of social media that intrigues me is the apparent lack of engagement between Theory minded people and industrial (for want of a better word) social media. I suspect, in fact I strongly suspect that I’m missing a lot of what’s going on here, but when I search on say Baudrillard and...

There’s something very Heideggerian about the relatiionship between the ‘thing’ and its packaging here. This book, I want and desire.. The ding in sich, wrapped up in its perplexity.   “We have come a long, long way from the kind of thing so beautifully presented in this book. To suit...

Over at Degenerasian, blogger Tracy sardonically remarks that she might get an A+ in porn studies. Background to this is Annanova reporting that the Mass Communications Department at Providence University in Taiwan is running a course in studying porn movies. I note this as I used to lecture on film and...

 One salutary ‘fact’ that’s trotted out on almost every single piece of management training I’ve ever been on is that most communication is non-verbal. Having read me Derrida and his deconstruction of the primacy of the spoken vs the written word I’d always been a bit...