Blog

Following up on NPR’s ear-stabbing economic coverage, here are some interesting comments from Brad Delong in response to David Weigel’s firing. I think they apply equally well to the kind of obligatory false balance that has become par for the course from NPR. [They] never wanted to be perceived as impartial in the sense of… Read more »

NPR’s latest economic coverage makes me want to stab my ears with ice picks. Here is the formula: misconstrue side A as only wanting to improve the economy through stimulus without concern for the deficit, then misconstrue side B as having a reasonable argument that deficits are scary so lets stop feeding the kids because… Read more »

Adam Greenfield wrote a great post about urban environments as a kind of “software under active development.” While he’s not the first to express these sorts of ideas, he unfolds the metaphor of city-as-software in a particularly compelling way. What if we imagined that the citizen-responsiveness system we’ve designed lives in a dense mesh of… Read more »

I just started using prezi, and something just occurred to me… [prezi width=480″ height=”360″]http://prezi.com/lwxhkofwgnyb/view/[/prezi] As you fly across various words and phrases and layout architectures of prezi, it’s not just the frames, words, or objects that you zoom into that count. It’s the spaces in between and the stuff that’s gets passed over that structures… Read more »

Over at my blog on the Interactive Media site I’ve been recording my assignments for the Experiments in New Media course with Elise Co and Nikita Pashenkov. Here is the latest proposal that I’m doing with Michael Annetta. This particular design exists for a future world where traffic is a kind of thematic commodity. I… Read more »

[youtube urZKX4kk6zI] (If you read the whole thing, this will all tie back into Maury Povich. I promise…) I last posted about how I’m in the middle of reading Stephen Duncombe’s Dream: Re-imagining progressive politics in an age of fantasy. Duncombe (like Lakoff) is concerned about progressives’ inability to frame empirical reality within a compelling… Read more »

After having read a compelling interview of Stephen Duncombe on Henry Jenkins’s blog, I decided to order Duncombe’s book Dreams: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy (for more info see his website). I’ve just started reading the book, but so far I’m finding it a fascinating compliment to the arguments of Lakoff and… Read more »

[vimeo 9101669 400 225] So much has happened since I last posted that I have developed a bit of the writer’s constipation. Instead of a comprehensive update then I’ll just dive right in. I recently presented the Synaptic Crowd project in one of the HASTAC panels at the recent AIS conference. The video I presented… Read more »

On April 19th I’ll be presenting a version of my project, Synaptic Crowd: Vox Pop Experiments, for the HASTAC III conference, Traversing Digital Boundaries, at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). I’m interested in understanding how identity performance adapts to the contextual uncertainty of online media where audiences are distributed unpredictably across space and time. The… Read more »

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVBE7L37bgw] In the previous post I talked about how Palin uses folksiness to signal a particular kind of community engagement—one that often doesn’t make sense to those on the left. I borrowed from Robert Putnam’s writing about the decline of community engagement in America in order to point out a fundamental difference between what he… Read more »