Associate Professor of Media Study at the University at Buffalo
It’s rare that my personal interest in football overlaps with my academic interests. The recent debacle surrounding the proposal of a “super league” is one of those moment. It even made national news in the US. First, here’s my take on the larger situation. Football is deeply intertwined with the cultures of most European nations. […]
UB’s faculty senate sent out an email today recommending (imploring) faculty to find ways to “reduce student stress levels while preserving learning outcomes.” No one needs to be told it’s been some hard months tacked on to a hard 2020. And now it’s getting to be crunch time here and at many colleges as we […]
Today there is little need to make a specific reference for the first term in this list. We are in the midst of an impeachment trial over an attempted insurrection. More locally, in my class, we are in the midst of How We Became Posthuman and N. Katherine Hayles’ historical investigation of how we got […]
This is the second in a series of posts about Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman aimed primarily at my students this semester, and this one focuses on chapter three, which traces the Macy Cybernetics Conferences in the 50s and 60s and discusses, among other things, the challenges of observation and the “man in the […]
n.b. I’m teaching a course on media theories and approaches this semester, and this post is, in part, designed for them. Right now, we are reading N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman. This post focuses on Chapter 2. Hayles straightforwardly announces the thesis for this chapter, writing “The contemporary pressure toward dematerialization, understood as […]
This is becoming a bit of a recurring theme here. So, the first amendment… what ontological commitments are invested in the first amendment? what material-historical values regarding rhetoric? what understanding of media technologies is embedded here? Let’s start with the last question. Obviously there was writing and the printing press. Far less than half of […]
The removal of Trump from various social media platforms has been big news, as is the de-platforming of Parler by Apple, Google, and Amazon. There’s a lot of conversation about this in relation to the first amendment. I’m not a constitutional law expert, so I’m not going to focus here on the strictly legal aspect. […]
As you probably learned in high school or college, the different races of humans with which we identify today have no biological basis but are social constructions. A brief refresher on the matter is here. Basically though there are few starting points for this construction. One occurs in the 17th century when American colonists decide […]
Material thus has three principal characteristics: it is a molecularized matter; it has a relation to forces to be harnessed; and it is defined by the operations of consistency applied to it. Finally, it is clear that the relation to the earth and the people has changed, and is no longer of the romantic type. […]
In the new materialist approach I take up, all assemblages (i.e. all people, groups of people, animals, plants, things, objects, etc.) have properties, tendencies, and capacities. Properties are singular and historical. For example, my smartphone (an iPhone XS) has its own unique history. To butcher a line, “there are many iPhones but this one is […]
