It’s conventional wisdom that Corbyn’s leadership campaign was the target of brutal coverage by the media. I was interested to learn in The Candidate, by Alex Nunns, that this wasn’t quite how the campaign itself saw the situation. Understanding why… Read More ›
Mediated Matters 
Welcome to Mediated Matters, a regular weekly column series by on the sociology of the media and culture. New installments are posted on Monday.
The causal powers of media
In The Mediated Construction of Social Reality, Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp take issue with the primacy of face-to-face interaction that has so often been assumed within social thought. Our embodied interaction is taken to be primary, often assumed to be… Read More ›
Slavoj Žižek presents
It was only a matter of time really. A new front has just been opened in the Žižek publishing machine:
What is ‘Post-Truth’? What Can We Do About It?
An interesting panel run by Sage.
The Unreality of Reality TV: From “After Dark” towards Twitter, Big Data, and “Big Brother”
The Unreality of Reality TV: From “After Dark” towards Twitter, Big Data, and “Big Brother” Organised by the Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies and Open Media Fri, March 3, 17:00 309 Regent Street Boardroom (RS117) W1B 2HW London Registration: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/unreality-of-reality-tv-from-after-dark-towards-twitter-big-data-and-big-brother-tickets-… Read More ›
All the open culture you could ever need
A fabulous roundup from the always brilliant Open Culture project: Free eBooks Free Audio Books Free Online Courses Free Movies Free Language Lessons Free Textbooks
Debate on Debate: Foucault v. Chomsky (1971) and the EU Referendum (2016)
By Rosie Smith In 1971 a Dutch Television company ran a series of discussion panels with noted intellectuals on a wide range of issues both contemporary and philosophical. One of the most famous debates was between French philosopher Michel Foucault… Read More ›
Virtuous, vulnerable and burdened: how feminism is undermined by making everything ‘a feminist issue’
By Tina Sikka Language, discourse, and other symbolic forms have real, tangible, material consequences. This is something I tell my students over and over and over (and over) again. It is also something I hope readers keep in mind while… Read More ›
3 dystopian visions of the future of gaming (and capitalism)
In a near future America, the world is locked into an inglorious decline while the majority of its population is locked into an intoxicatingly expansive virtual world. Ecological crisis and economic ruin operate hand-in-hand to leave the 99% living in… Read More ›
Obama’s Best Comebacks and Rebuttals
Imagine a comparable round up for President Trump, produced circa 2020? And on a similar(ish) note:
Violence as the expression of Trump’s nascent ideology
I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s been getting a little bit obsessed with Donald Trump in recent months. There’s certainly a risk of overstating the threat that heposes, such that a preoccupation with the man himself risks obscuring the… Read More ›
The Meaning of Donald Trump
A collection of the best essays and articles I’ve found about the rise of Donald Trump:
The Hypnotic Inanity of Donald Trump
I just surprised myself by sitting through this entire 40 minute compilation of Donald Trump’s insults during the Republican primaries: I found them weirdly hypnotic, albeit intellectually deadening. Perhaps this explains the strange quality of Trump’s speech?
A reading list of critical research on self-tracking
A really useful resource curated by Deborah Lupton: https://simplysociology.wordpress.com/2016/01/12/critical-social-research-on-self-tracking-a-reading-list/
The Language of Donald Trump
An entertaining (and accurate) video via Phil BC:
“now listen you queer!”: the origins of contemporary political punditry
I just watched Best of Enemies, a great film about the rivalry between William Buckley and Gore Vidal that was most famously captured in this scene: A subsequent exchange of words in high brow magazines then led to an exchange of… Read More ›
The Sound of 18th-Century Paris
A remarkable soundscape produced by the musicologist Mylène Pardoen (HT Su Oman). See here for more information. Paris as you have never heard it before! This novel experience is offered by Mylène Pardoen, a musicologist at the Passages XX-XXI laboratory,1 through the… Read More ›
CfP: (Dis)empowering technologies
“TransMissions: Journal of Film and Media Studies”, new online academic journal affiliated at the Jagiellonian University, Poland announced its first CfP: (Dis)empowering technologies. The main areas of our interests are: – social movement activism – ethnic, national and religion minorities… Read More ›
Television and feeling the passage of life
There’s an intriguing passage in Difficult Men, an account of television’s ‘third golden age’, concerning the temporality of Mad Men and how it differs from The Sopranos, which is widely acknowledged as the originator of our current glut of quality… Read More ›
The new Apple Watch and the problem of our creeping connectivity
by David Beer One of the most memorable images from my childhood is a suave and leather jacketed David Haselhoff, playing the reluctant but slick hero Michael Knight in the TV show Knight Rider, speaking into his watch. He’d usually… Read More ›
Call for Papers: Mediated Intimacies: Relationships, Bodies and Technology
Mediated Intimacies: Relationships, Bodies and Technology Call for Papers: Special Issue of Journal of Gender Studies to be published March 2017 edited by Alison Winch, Feona Attwood, Jamie Hakim. We are looking for 7000 word completed essays by 31st December… Read More ›
The history of Netflix
This talk by the CEO of Netflix is interesting for many reasons. But one more oblique one which struck me was how he describes his career in gladiatorial terms. His initial pronouncement that luck is the main part of commercial… Read More ›
The Dilemmas of the Consumer
It’s hard being a consumer these days. Do I buy it? Do I not buy it? How many minutes will I have left by the time I’ve blogged about it?
The Problem of the Opaque Subject
In his recent book The Happiness Industry, Will Davies offers an interesting analysis of whiplash and its uneven growth across the world in recent years even as car safety standards have increased. He observes that the “bizarre philosophical status of… Read More ›
The burden of continual assessment in a digital age
Due to my current reliance upon a laptop that’s unsuitable for my work, I presently find myself running a disk cleaning utility on a near daily basis. It’s a very useful bit of software that very quickly wipes caches and… Read More ›
Geek Revenue: The Cultural Industries in the Age of Digital Piracy
Geek Revenue: The Cultural Industries in the Age of Digital Piracy from Simon Lindgren on Vimeo. This video essay uses classical cultural theory as well as current internet research to address the relationship between the cultural industries and the increasingly… Read More ›
The Fallacy of Misplaced Modesty: Why Academics Don’t Become Intellectuals
The fact that you have a Ph.D. — let alone that you teach at a good university — doesn’t make you an intellectual. Being an intellectual means, at the very least, that you can convey ideas in multiple media, thereby… Read More ›
Book Review: Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society
This review was originally posted on the LSE Review of Books Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society is an impressively cohesive collection that seeks to map the intersections between Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Communication and Media… Read More ›