Concerned Netizen

Full-Stack Media Ecology

Category: Uncategorized (Page 3 of 5)

Misreading Marshall—Default Friend Exclusive

August 9, 2022 / / 0 Comments

My friend Katherine Dee has asked me to write regularly for her Substack blog, and I’m thrilled to accept! She’s been covering the internet history beat for a while now with wonderful research and gathering lots of momentum. Here’s my first piece.

Ezra Klein—founding editor of Vox, contributor to the New York Times, and, where I knew him best, former MSNBC pundit—has made two distinct moves aiming to launch Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) back into the public conversation. I was nine-hundred words into a written analysis of these last night when this little gem of a tweet popped up on my timeline….

🫴Click here to read more on her Substack!👈 …

Media Ecology of Source Code Access

April 7, 2022 / / 0 Comments

That was a lot of fun! Here’s my presentation to the Free Software Foundation at this year’s LibrePlanet conference. The audio, it seems, was being picked up by the wrong microphone, so I’ve plans to re-work and expand the topic in a series of videos, having benefited from a lot of helpful feedback and criticism. So keep your eye on this space, follow me on Twitter or YouTube, and buckle up for a content-ful 2022! 😀…

TODAY! I’m speaking at Libreplanet 2022!

March 18, 2022 / / 0 Comments

A4:20 Eastern (😏) I’ll be giving a talk about media ecology and McLuhan to the great group of folks at Libreplanet 2022, the annual convention organized by the Free Software Foundation! You can find my talk streaming in the Neptune Room (the third video tab). Come check it out!

Viewers interested in learning more about Media Ecology can visit:
The McLuhan Institute (run by Andrew McLuhan): https://themcluhaninstitute.com/
New Explorations Journal (academic journal): https://newexplorations.net/
The Media Ecology Association (annual conventions): https://www.media-ecology.org/
The McLuhan Foundation (educational resources): https://mcluhanfoundation.org/

Conversely, read more about free software at https://fsf.org!

In my talk, I am suggesting Free Software users and Media Ecologists alike delve into the rich past of computing, and uncover the “anonymous history” of our digital world. Here are three highly-recommended books, each available free online courtesy of their authors:

Those unfamiliar with …

Ambient Music Arrives Too Late

December 10, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I’m listening to Klaus Schulze and he’s really good at creepy ambient stuff.

I feel like, had technology been around to allow the production of this sort of music, it would have been perfectly on-time 50 years earlier. That’s a mismatch between the artistic aspiration and the faculties of the time to meet the requirements. Maybe painting and stage-play was then at where this music arrives later.

We have to consider the time-fractured sensorium, owing technological disparities, as a player in the defeat over the holistic human individual and their own coherent emotional expression. This is the trauma of the bomb, and the post-war ear.

Jackhammers and machines created Jazz with all its discontinuities out of environmental impetus. Le Corbusier called the staggered skyline of Manhattan “hot jazz in stone.” But perhaps ambient music was something ideal to counteract all …

Media Shamanhood

October 7, 2021 / / 0 Comments

I was asked by the Maniphesto Media Academy to give a talk on Marshall McLuhan, and decided to take the opportunity to be as radical as possible in re-writing the book!

I want to re-record this with a pre-written script, so as to avoid all the umming and stuttering, so please provide as much feedback, corrections, and opinions as you can to help me make this a solid introduction to Media Ecology!…

Movie Poster for A Glitch in the Matrix

Stitched Into the Matrix: A Review

March 7, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Since the industry’s pivot to peacetime in the late 1940s, computers have come to constitute our modern material environment literally, metaphorically, and aesthetically. Like a store-front window marketing display by Frank L. Baum, the ground-floor, street-facing show-room of IBM in the 1950s offered New Yorkers (regardless of outdoor conditions) a brightly-lit, unchanging view into the timeless, abstract world of computing outside of our own (Harwood, 46). Engineers in white lab coats moved spindles of tape and decks of cards, literally working inside the computer as they bused data between shiny large cabinets for curious onlookers twenty-four hours a day.

And there went everybody. The nature of the data being processed—demographic, financial, the results of opinion polling and sales data and audience testing and tracking—placed newly-minted “consumers” even deeper inside of computers. Not as components within the computer’s functioning, but as …

Two new long video interviews

January 26, 2021 / / 0 Comments

In the past two weeks I’ve been interviewed twice on two different excellent podcasts.

The first was for the first McLuhan Symposium on the Parallax Podcast Sweeny vs Bard hosted by Alexander Bard and Andrew Sweeny.

And the second was with James Kourtides on his podcast The Rooster’s Crow.

Check them both out!…

Lots of new off-site Activity

December 6, 2020 / / 0 Comments

Hey folks!

I know it looks like not much has happened here lately, but that’s because I’ve been working on lots of larger projects.

First and foremost: I’m very pleased to take on the responsibilities of Journal Production Manager and Associate Editor for The New Explorations Journal out of the University of Toronto. This peer-reviewed academic journal assumes the mission statement of Marshall McLuhan and Ted Carpenter’s original Explorations journal. We also run a regularly-updated blog (linked to above) to which I’ve been contributing new writings!

But what about the podcast?

I’ve had lots of ideas about what to do with Life in the Foam. However, once again, I haven’t been inactive. The New Explorations Journal also has a podcast which has already released three episodes (at the time of this posting).

When the next copy of the journal …

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 Concerned Netizen

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑