Media & Culture
Using media to think deeply about complex issues
Tara McMullin and
Media & Culture
What my students seek is what I sought: not just a place to publish, of which there remain plenty, but a place to aspire to, the kind of established, vital ecosystem within which a writer can learn, play, feud, create meaning, spark conversation, make sense of herself and her world. Rare by definition, such things grow more elusive by the day.
Michelle Orange • How the Village Voice Met Its Moment
I believe that fandom is a wonderful and vital organ of contemporary culture, without which that culture ultimately stagnates, atrophies and dies. At the same time, I’m sure that fandom is sometimes a grotesque blight that poisons the society surrounding it with its mean-spirited obsessions and ridiculous, unearned sense of entitlement.
Alan Moore in The Guardian
Inherent in the concept of moral contagion, then, is the idea that moral-emotion expressions are among the most powerful signals to the self and others about one’s identity. As such, they may be among the most functionally relevant forms of expressions in the context of moral and political discourse online, where moral and political identities are... See more
Just a moment...
Comfort, however, is not the same as healing. The frequently-invoked (pop) culture war framework conjures images of a pitched battle between ‘queer fandom’ interested in social justice and a reactionary fan identity over the soul of the culture industry. In reality what drives our culture industry is not a soul, but two basic functions of its place... See more
Varsity: “Fandom—the highest stage of capitalism?”
But the curation was never about financial reward. It was “there's a small unscalable business here about taste, that people rely on and really like, and everyone who works on it doesn't make very much money, but they're very cool.” We just don't live in a world where that's an acceptable way to live. There's a lot of economic pressures and again,... See more
Dirt: Complicated Culture
Complicated Culture
Daisy Alioto with W. David Marx.
dirt.fyi
why is a restaurant reservation a high status thing? It's because it is in a specific place. It is finite in supply. A lot of times you have to be somewhat connected to get it. It is the opposite of the Internet.
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I simply think we can't keep sleepwalking into hoping the (poptimist) world
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the stakes for preserving our relationship to things that cannot immediately be had have never felt higher. After all, yearning is a subset of authenticity––a specific type of authenticity that comes from wanting. It’s the thing that we turn to after too easily “having” causes us to lose our way. Yearning isn’t like wellness in the way Gwyneth Paltrow or Andrew Huberman would sell wellness because it often feels like unwellness, but then it also feels like healing.
The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless... See more