During ICA’s 2015 Preconference titled “Stuart Hall and the Future of Media and Cultural Studies,”* I gave a talk exploring the intersections of Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model and the notion of affordances as used in new/emergent media studies. An edited version of the talk is below along with images from some slides, but as this is […]
Interrogating Crystal’s Design Flaws Highlights Options for Technical Advocacy
I recently got a call from the CBC asking if I’ve heard about Crystal Knows and whether I’d be open to an interview. I quickly agreed. Little did they know that anyone I bump into these days will have trouble getting me to stop talking about mobile apps! At the recent ICA Mobile preconference in […]
Discourse matters: designing better digital futures
As I write this in June 2015, a United Nations committee in Bonn is occupied in the massive task of editing a document overviewing global climate change. The effort to reduce 90 pages into a short(er), sensible, and readable set of facts and positions is not just a matter of editing but a battle among […]
Media Scholarship and Digital Time
The recent Culture Digitally essay by Jeff Pooley on iterative article editions as a solution to the problem of digital speed has attracted a lot of attention, and rightly so. Unlike a lot of the nonsense peddled by gurus looking to disrupt higher education, Pooley’s piece speaks to a lived problem for many in the […]
Media Scholarship Needs Updating: Iterative Article “Editions” for a Sped-Up World
The undergrads in my Social Media and the Self class laugh on cue whenever MySpace surfaces in the scholarly literature that we’re discussing. And MySpace appears all the time—as does Dodgeball, Flickr, and Orkut. Even the nods to Digg strike the students as hilarious—a whole fall-and-rise cycle later. I understand. It is a little ridiculous, […]