Grokster took a dump this week in the high court.  The cultural forces are indeed clashing.  While corporations are capitalizing on the "free flow" of information and selling it back to us as liberatory, they are making every effort to control that flow for their best interests.  Free navigation through the labyrinth makes money; interactivity […]

Categories: network

On page 48 of Moby Dick, Ishmael is describing his new "savage" friend Queequeg: "Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South.  It is not down in any map; true places never are."
It this simple description, Melville seems to get at what one of the most important distinctions […]

Categories: Travel

M. Christine Boyer, in her essay "Labyrinths of the Mind and City - Real and Virtual" makes the connection between the spaces of Walter Benjamin’s arcades and the spaces of virtual reality, claiming that each determines the outside through the combination of interior elements.  Benjamin imagined the arcades to represent all of Paris; Boyer imagines […]

Categories: mediated urbanism

M. Christine Boyer’s essay "The Imaginary Real World of CyberCities" in her collection CyberCities is a wonderful polemic against the threats of a thoughtless postmodernism.  While she claims that cities have experienced a shift form the mechanical city to the cybercity that corresponds with a shift from modernism to postmodernism, she also warns against too […]

Categories: mediated urbanism

Just had a thought: The content of all media is the consumption of space.
not sure what that means yet, but it sounds awfully good.

Categories: Media Theory

Friedrich Kittler argues that "culture cannot be had without technology, and technology cannot be had without culture" ("The Perspective of Print").  This seems like a fairly simply idea, but Kittler makes it complex.  What he’s trying to get at here is that they these two discourses (technology and culture) are always already the same thing.  […]

Categories: network · Kittler · Media Theory