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Occupying the Brooklyn Bridge
Normally, after I teach a four-hour class on Staten Island, which takes me two hours to get to and two hours to get back from, I go straight home and take a nap. But there’s no denying that something...
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Two Social Media Paradoxes
Paradox Number One: Social media foments revolution, but a sudden removal of social media can increase mobilization and create even more unrest. We can all stand witness to the ways in which social...
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Social Platforms on the Web: How Fashion Brands Benefit from Using...
Since the late 1990s, fashion brands have been using online storefronts as a means of promoting and selling clothes and accessories. Today, online storefronts are firmly embedded into the fabric of...
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Occupation Communication
The Occupy Wall Street protests (which my colleagues have written about here and here) started to gain traction as a national news story this past week. Coverage of the protests increased as more...
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The Politics of Specialized Knowledge
What are the possible relations between knowledge and power? On the one hand, it is obvious how specialized knowledges frequently become intertwined with social hierarchies and used to prop up unjust...
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The Trobriand Islanders Never Friended Malinowski on Facebook
It used to be that the anthropologist traveled far from his/her home, conducted research in a foreign culture, and wrote up findings which never made it back to those who were studied . Globalization...
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History Re-Tweets Itself
This semester, my students and I have been struck by a series of uncanny synchronicities between the course material we are covering and national events. First, the Penn State/Sandusky/Paterno...
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The National Conversation
One of the points frequently made about Occupy Wall Street is that it has shifted the national conversation by putting income inequality and financial deregulation back on the table. At the same time,...
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Generation Y
Last week, I paid a visit to my doctor for a routine physical exam. Having gone to this doctor for years, he asked me about my research, hobbies, and other such things. When I somehow brought up the...
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The Aftermath of Kony 2012, or How the Internet Rejected a Simple Message
The internet has bred a culture of skepticism that pushes back against all of the sourceless bits of information that get distributed online. And then, even if a source is cited, internet users will...
View ArticleThe Last 100 Miles
Or, Back: meet Wall. David and I have recently discussed our respective strategies for hailing those winsome and fickle scholarly muses. You can explore this topic more by checking out this episode of...
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Prolegomena to failure
We used to read liner notes like they were Bible verses. I am prone to lamenting that texts like these are gone in the virtual space from which we fish for mp3’s these days. Long before we could...
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If you see something, tweet something
I watched the first two presidential debates at my friends’ apartment. Sasha and Sam have a projector and a screen, so watching was a regal affair, like watching a movie, but way more depressing. The...
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Tearing Down the Academic Paywall
There are cracks in the great academic paywall. I’m not talking about academic article torrents, though they do exist (I will not link to them here). I’m thinking of how many humanists are cultivating...
View ArticlePerfect Strangers, Alone Together
This past Valentine’s Day, a once viral video from 2006 re-made the rounds online: Ben Coonley’s Valentine for Perfect Strangers. I never get tired of Coonley’s video, described as “a romantic e-card...
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Be Interested?
A few weeks ago, at the SUNY Council on Writing Conference, I heard Richard E. Miller give a fascinating keynote called “Who’s this for?: Audience in the Classroom without Walls.” What I found most...
View ArticleIdealism, Pragmatism, and Evolution (or, Grappling with Academia.edu)
I confess I joined Academia.edu for the same reason I joined Facebook: my friends pressured me into it. There are also, of course, professional and philosophical arguments to be made in the scholarly...
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On Smartphones and Journalism
For the past two semesters, I’ve worked with students as they reported all over the five boroughs and Long Island for the Multimedia Journalism class. They’ve produced photo slideshows, videos, and...
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Looking the Part: “Representative” Black Men in New Media
While re-reading a chapter of historian Kevin K. Gaines’ important book, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture, in the Twentieth Century (1996), I came across a passage that I had...
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The Netflix “Canon”: Taste as Absence of “Taste”
Sight and Sound’s 2002 “Greatest Films Poll” was voted on by the “world’s leading film critics.” See http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/polls/topten/ Here are the results: Citizen Kane Vertigo...
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