Media & Culture
Using media to think deeply about complex issues
Tara McMullin and
Media & Culture
Savior Complex is a slyly simplistic title.
Savior Complex Doubles Down
Howard Blum, a former staff writer, is the first to declare the Voice “a precursor to the internet,” an idea that recurs, with diminishing shine, throughout the book’s five hundred and thirty pages. Notes of elegy sound throughout, laments for something too good to last, but also for a moment of honest and urgent revolt. When there seemed no such... See more
Michelle Orange • How the Village Voice Met Its Moment
The stasis debate is actually just about two specific topics: (1) whether 21st century culture offers the feeling of artistic progress, where new styles/practices devalue previous ones, thereby creating clear chapters in the historical timeline, and (2) whether there are new techniques in symbolic activity that expand how we perceive the world and... See more
Why It's Hard to Argue about “Cultural Stasis”
What’s more, art is no longer semblance. It fuses with reality.
Andy McLaverty-Robinson • Walter Benjamin: Art, Aura and Authenticity | Ceasefire Magazine
The aspect ratio of our lives has changed. By narrowing our field of view, cutting off our peripheral vision, the phone doesn’t just remove us from space and provoke a sense of claustrophobia. It isolates us.
Nicholas Carr • Out of the Landscape, into the Portrait
“Toward a phenomenology of the phone”
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
... See moreThe problem with raging against the machine is that the machine has learned to feed off rage
Liv Boeree • Tweet
Your Spotify Wrapped for 2024 is the weight of all these things, whether we want to deal with it or not. AI-powered podcasts are the result of expunging the lives of the real humans who built these ideas, replacing them with a facsimile of human connection. Your data feeds into Google, and it builds you the idea of a friend in return. Artists will... See more
Niko Stratis • Wrapped will never love you back
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