Academia

What this points to is a critical change in the rhythms of everyday life which occur almost as collateral damage of the development in computation and their deployment in art and media. The French philosopher Henri Lefebvre created the term ‘rhythmanalysis’ to discuss these processes. For him, to understand a society you had to analyse its rhythms ... See more

In the two-thousand-tens, there was a brief vogue for “slow TV,” reality television of unedited reality, such as a more than seven-hour real-time video of a train ride from Bergen to Oslo, shot in 2009, and a Norwegian production, in 2016, showing twelve hours of the extreme tidal current in the strait of Saltstraumen. The durational videos inspire... See more

Late 20th century media was a universe of legible, cohesive objects—films, books, shows, albums, people—which audiences largely experienced as complete entities, not necessarily due to anyone’s preference but because this was the most practical way to read them. Today’s media is a tangle of streams, flows, and feeds that mingle promiscuously and of... See more

we have moved from a culture dominated by entertainment, to one that is dominated by digitally mediated distraction, which in turn generates a culture of addiction, or, as Gioia memorably puts it, Dopamine Culture.

In the 20th century, most elites believed that "art" described a rarified sphere of complicated symbolic activity, which stood in opposition to the "mass culture" of bland, sensationalist, lowest-common-denominator works made for profit. There was no confusing the two worlds, because there was a very high bar for what qualified as "art." The avant-... See more

The ambience of ambient TV is often predicated on homogeneity; any diversity or discordance would disrupt the smooth, lulling surface. (“Emily in Paris” almost entirely stars white actors, too.) The lurking subtext of “Dream Home Makeover,” a kind of soft-white capitalist nationalism cloaked in throw pillows, brought to mind for me the architect Re... See more

When we’re attentive to these series, to their form, their narrative structure, their genre, their history, their cultural context, the dynamics of their production, they reveal themselves to us. (This is, of course, what television studies, as an academic discipline, has always done.) It means we can see concretely what’s unique about a given show... See more

The Internet was supposed to democratize everything, do away with gatekeepers and in some cases, craft. We were prepared for that: the masses overtaking the institutions.

But that’s not what happened. The gatekeepers and the craft both changed. And with it, so did ideas around authorship. It wasn’t a simple fight between independent creators and es... See more

Prior to Spotify and Steve Bannon, the collective thinking on pop culture underwent a radical transformation. A new critical consensus demanded that we stop thinking about creativity in a hierarchical way: there was no "high" culture and "low" culture — just culture.

This ideology has become known as "poptimism," although I understand that most crit... See more