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Scratching the Surface #72: Shannon Mattern

I used to kind of deify these peo­ple, pre­sum­ing that they were pre­sent­ing some gospel that I just had to work and work and work to try to under­stand so that I could like, put on their glass­es and see the world through their lens­es. But ulti­mate­ly I real­ized that these are fal­li­ble peo­ple, often ego­ma­ni­acs, often real­ly bad writ­ers. And that’s why I can’t under­stand it. So it’s not to give up on them too quick­ly. If you put in the work to try to under­stand what they’re say­ing. But not to regard their work as gospel. 

Media, Technology & Culture 1.3: So, What’s New?

So, how do we make sense of new media? How can we guard against our temp­ta­tion to assume, our implic­it sense, even, that every­thing in our expe­ri­ence of today’s emerg­ing dig­i­tal media is brand new and unprece­dent­ed? And how do we do that while also appre­ci­at­ing the things that real­ly are new or unique to our cur­rent cul­tur­al con­text and moment in history?

Media, Technology & Culture 1.2: Yesterday’s New“s

We’re con­tin­u­ing our series of install­ments, focus­ing on what makes new media new. Or put anoth­er way, how new are new media, really? 

Media, Technology & Culture 1.1: Messages about the Medium

We’re going to talk at length about new media. And in our first few install­ments we’re going to begin by think­ing for a bit about what makes a medi­um new.

Meme Warriors and Media Viruses: Theorizing the Persuasive Political Power of the Web

[The] per­sua­sion mod­el advanced by Rushkoff and Lasn is par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful for think­ing crit­i­cal­ly through a vari­ety of recent politically-oriented web phe­nom­e­na like pro­file pic­ture chang­ing cam­paigns, polit­i­cal viral videos, hash­tag activism and the like.