Mediacology

Watch the latest news video at video.foxnews.com

“Cyclonic perpetual emotion machine…” and other prescient observations about Fox from Jon Stewart. Not surprisingly, Stewart eviscerates his nemesis on ‘The O’Reilly Factor.’ But of greater interest is his discussion of TV and radio from a media ecology view (around the 13:00 mark).

I’ve written an extended essay about the conclusion of Battlestar Galactica. I hope you will click through and read the whole piece at Reality Sandwich.

Reality Sandwich | Battlestar Galactica Mystique:

Spoiler alert!
“Earth, a dream we’ve been chasing for a long time.”–Admiral Adama
So concludes one of the greatest epic runs of sci-fi on TV: Battlestar Galactica (reimagined). [...]

In the digital media class I teach we have been talking about the “consumer sublime,” which is the idea that people seek increasingly more stimulating media to “awe” their senses in the same way we once encountered the sublime within nature. The clearest example is comparing the experience of going into the Grand Canyon versus [...]

I’ve been very interested in understanding the amount of power we consume with our televisions. Well, the Sierra Club offers this little quiz to test your knowledge. I found it quite enlightening and learned something new (spoiler alert): even though TVs are becoming more energy efficient, they are also getting bigger and include more add-ons [...]

Just because someone on YouTube said this is the first McDonald’s ad, doesn’t make it so. Regardless. This is creepy!

Know thy enemy.
Think Progress:
Lesson 1: The Public Won’t Support You, Unless You Do Things “Harshly”: Soon after 9/11, according to Bob Woodward, Ailes sent a “back-channel message” to President Bush, suggesting that he needed to take “the harshest measures possible” in retaliation for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He added [...]

A meditation on on TV. Alhough I think TV and how the viewer experiences it is a lot more complex than what this video depicts, I like the visuals.
PS TV as we knew it– as a one to many form of industrial media– is dead. Time to rethink our critique.

The above video clip happened live during an Italian evening news broadcast I was watching a few weeks ago. Don’t worry about the language, it’s not necessary to know Italian to understand what’s happening. This goes to show what an echo chamber the news is. Rather than the news coverage itself being important, instead the [...]

If you are feeling inundated by political ads, you may better enjoy the experience if you make a game of identifying the various persuasion techniques used to make their arguments. This brilliant little video is a great primer on how to do it.

One of the best things I like about watching this version of Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman’s “Television Delivers People” (1973) is the distortion of an old video tape from broadcast TV. This video inspired a show currently running at The Whitney:
Television Delivers People
on view December 12, 2007 – February 17, 2008
Television Delivers People [...]

I’m reluctant to use the term “mass media” because so much of what we call “mass” is actually being composted by the blurring distinction between consumer and producer, and the transition from the one to many paradigm of media broadcasts to the many to many model of networks. Nonetheless, both ecologies still exist simultaneously and [...]

Sometimes you have to thank the media gods for providing free resources to deconstruct their world. So welcome to Super Bowl Monday Planet: Firebrand, a ridiculously conceived Website that can be likened to a content-free television network, i.e. all ads, now shows. But if you are like me and are infinitely curious and attracted to [...]

Air Force Academy chapel, Colorado Springs, CO

Cylon Resurrection Ship, somewhere in outer space
In case you haven’t seen Sci-Fi network’s Battlestar Galactica (I highly recommend that you do), the premise of the story is that a race of robots created by humans decides to destroy their creators. The cyborgs, called Cylons, have developed a theistic [...]

How do you turn mat art into a viral video? Sci-Fi’s Tin Man series has this wormhole site that draws you into its various worlds– one after another. It’s a compelling visual fantasy; you have to give the creators credit for having cajones to tackle the Oz story and contemporize it with darker themes. [...]

I’ll admit that watching this short video made me cry. Not because I believe all of its arguments–that war and our opinions can be controlled virtually, or that journalism is the answer to our problem of war–but because our military technological mind is getting so out of whack that it increasingly is turning people into [...]

An interesting commentary on new animal programs with their shifting narrative arcs designed to satisfy human agendas. I think wildlife programs are a double-edge sword. On the one hand it gives us a more intimate understanding of the animal world, on the other hand if further promotes a sense of separation, first by “othering” [...]

From Showtime, the fantastic NPR radio program, This American LIfe, is now a TV show. This short clip is a beautifully poignant tale of how play acting and media soon corrupted an innocent playground. The animation is by the great comic book artist, Chris Ware.

Technorati Tags: Chris Ware, Showtime, This American LIfe

Truthdig – Interviews – Media Critic on Why It’s Only Getting Worse:
Once upon a time, TV news put journalists on camera. Today, cable news has on-air “talent”—who are “cast,” not just hired. A Walter Cronkite would have big trouble getting a job today in TV news. But an actor? No problem. CNN a few years [...]

Watch it online.
FRONTLINE: news war: introduction | PBS:
Bergman traces the recent history of American journalism, from the Nixon administration’s attacks on the media and the post-Watergate popularity of the press to new obstacles presented by the war on terror and changing economics in the media business and the Internet. The topic has special resonance for [...]