Once declaring that an individual is a “montage of loosely assembled parts,” and furthermore that when “you are on the phone or on the air you have no body” (p. xxix), Marshall McLuhan (1962) dismembered the body. Our media might be extensions of ourselves, but they’re also prosthetics, amputating parts as they extend them, turning… Continue reading Beyond the Body with Rosi Braidotti
I grew up moving around. From my birth to my high school years, my family moved at least once every two years. There’s no way to gauge how much that forced mobility shaped me as a person, but it certainly made me unafraid to pick up and go somewhere else. The day after my last… Continue reading Keep Your Distance Close: Maps and Monographs
Some of my favorite records are the ones where a band leaps outside the bounds of their past and tries something their fans might not dig. I’m thinking of post-Until Your Heart Stops Cave In (Jupiter polarized their existing fans, while Antenna proved they were onto something new), Corrosion of Conformity’s definitively metal years (starting with… Continue reading Rotten With Perfection: Deafheaven’s Sunbather
“The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place,” playwright George Bernard Shaw once quipped (quoted in Caroselli, 2000, p. 71). Whether Shaw was being silly or snarky, the impossible exchange of meaning and messages is troublesome for communicators and communication scholars alike. Critiquing the standard Shannon and Weaver model… Continue reading Ill Communication: Gary Genosko on Models
I began my journey into computer use with the local library’s Apple II and my own Commodore Vic-20. It wasn’t long before I learned BASIC and upgraded to a Commodore 64. As advanced as those machines were for the time, they had no operating systems or internal storage to speak of. I mowed lawns and washed cars… Continue reading Of Data Sets and Digital Humanities
