A special issue of Information, Communication and Society just hit the stands and it’s worth a mention here. Yeah, yeah, I have an article in it, but more importantly, it’s a fantastic collection of work on the topic of “Urban Informatics: Software, Cities, and the New Cartographies of Knowing Capitalism.” Here’s the […]

Categories: placeofmedia · surveillance · Media Theory · mediated urbanism · mobility · cities · maps · web 2.0 · ubiquitous computing

In Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology, he makes the distinction between instrumental technology and techne.  The current concept of technology is anthropological or instrumental, in that it is a means to an end, it accomplishes something.  That, according to Heidegger, will get us nowhere. 
So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain […]

Categories: Media Theory

In N. Katherine Hayles book How We Became Posthuman, she suggests that one of the cultural struggles emerging in the post-human discourse is the shift between two structuring binaries: presence / absence and pattern / randomness.  She argues that the floating signifier theorized by Lacan, one based on the anxiety-ridden divide between presence and absence […]

Categories: Media Theory

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