Mediacology

*spoiler alert*

With 2012 Roland Emmerich has crafted a perfectly pitched disaster film. I don’t mean “perfect” in the sense of meaningful art, but in the ultimate mega-zeitgeist sense that it captures so much about our current historical moment. We can think of this film in same way that Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia or Triumph of [...]

A contrast in life’s inconveniences: Hangover vs. Sin Nombre

Somewhere between Rome’s train station and JFK airport my wallet was lost/stolen. This is a problem when plastic is the sole means of transaction inside nonplaces like airports, where only multinational corporations are granted the right to do business. So without cash or credit cards, I was [...]

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[If something is "pure," you think] that it’s one hundred percent pure. Like pure granulated sugar, pure white bread. Meaning unsoiled, unsullied, undamaged, unconnected with dirt. So white people are “pure” and clean. And black people are “dirt.” If you want to get into the psychoanalysis of this, I think there [...]

Is Google Making Us Stupid?:

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described [...]

© Gleison Miranda/FUNAI

As a cultural meme, photos of the so-called “lost” tribe of the Amazon circulated more rapidly in the mediasphere than electrons buzzing through duel processors. But now that the images have been revealed to be a “hoax,” we should kick back in our collective armchairs and probe what happened. To be clear, the [...]

MC Lars does “Download this Song.”

Via Henry Jenkins