Over at his blog Pop Theory, Clive Barnett has written an excellent post working through some of his recent thinking on publicness. In the post, Clive questions the frequent tendency of debates about publicness to either explicitly or implicitly rely on a substantive and singular sense of ‘the Public’ being exposed or not exposed to … Continue Reading
Category
Readings
Without irony, city ranking magazine Monocle tells us how media makes a city
London-based travel and lifestyle magazine Monocle has published its annual ranking of what it describes as the top 25 liveable cities around the world. Coming out on top this year is Zurich, and no doubt happy to edge into the 25th spot of this top-flight group is its French Swiss cousin Geneva. If we regionally … Continue Reading
New video on the death of the university, English-style
One of the more valuable interventions vis-à-vis the Browne Review (alongside Stefan Collini’s excellent article in the London Review of Books) has been Nick Couldry and Angela McRobbie’s ‘The Death of the University, English Style’. I liked their paper because it is succinct and also has a helpful focus on the implications for media and … Continue Reading
Does ‘neoliberalism’ help us understand media?
Is ‘neoliberalism’ a concept that works for understanding media? As I left a workshop last Friday at University College London, on the subject of ‘postneoliberalism’, I asked myself this question. My initial, rather impulsive, answer at the beginning of the workshop was no. But I need to put that answer into context. The workshop was … Continue Reading
Coupland gets inside McLuhan’s head
I, for one, had no idea Canadian author Douglas Coupland was writing a biography of Marshall McLuhan. Medium theory anoraks must have known for months. Well, the biography has arrived, and the Canadian media has entered into one if its wild yet rare fervours of Canadian intellectual commemoration to mark the occasion. The biography sounds … Continue Reading
Intermingling McLuhan, Latour, Harman and Kittler
In the lead up to starting this blog I have kept a list of possible future posts. Call it a repository of best intentions. One of those best intentions was to think through – probably in more than one post – the connections and disconnections between recent relational materialist writing like actor-network theory and writing … Continue Reading