Critical Media – freewill and the web

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...

How to Wrap Five Eggs

How to wrap eggs There’s something very Heideggerian about the relationship 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...

Film Studies

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...

We are not monkeys – the myth of non-verbal comms

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 suspicious...

The Museum of Broken Relationships

Every now and again the interweb delivers news of something that is simultaneously sublime and absurd. The Museum of Broken Relationships fits this perfectly. Update The museum is due to move to San Francisco on, notably St Valentine’s Day 2009. I predict a lot of Twitter activity – but will a...

Žižek replies, Kirsch does too

Slavoj Žižek has replied to Adam Kirsch’s accusations that he’s anti-semitic in pretty forthright fashion. Kirsch replies back. A pretty nast spat. Who doesn’t understand whom in this affair? zizek kirsch...