Biofinance

Biological foundations of capital imaginaries

Capitalism has been the subject of too many conflicting definitions for any of the claims that follow to have any purchase on truth -- understood as an adequation to the real. Beneath the numerous disagreements, however, a common substratum can be gleaned between the liberal Smithian, and the classical Marxist ...
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Biofinance

Putting Journalistic Ideals Back in the Service of Practice

Al Jazeera and the problems of media today

The following was presented as the Plenary Keynote for the International Federation of Journalists and the Human Rights Commission of Qatar, Doha, July 2017. When journalism comes to mind, the tendency is to think West, to think settled democracies, autonomous institutions, reasoned deliberation, transparent decision-making, and a unified and stable public. But ...
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Putting Journalistic Ideals Back in the Service of Practice

Writing about Factual Media in an Age of Extremes

Our ‘Manhattan Project’ moment

Several months ago, my friend and colleague Daniel Kreiss and I were discussing something extraordinary: communication research, and communication researchers, suddenly seemed to be everywhere. Prompted by the role played by digital platforms in the election of Donald Trump and the undeniable power of media and communication companies in establishing ...
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Writing about Factual Media in an Age of Extremes

Why We Need More Essays About Media

And what we offer to democracy

Conversation may or may not be the soul of democracy -- but the essay is. Essays are about grey-zones, multi-layered meanings, ambiguity. These are all qualities any good autocrat detests. The autocrat wants you to absorb his one-liner, his all-encompassing propaganda slogan, his simplistic social media post. He wants you to be with him, his ...
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Why We Need More Essays About Media

The Ever-Expanding Field of Media Studies

Ideas for understanding the mediated world

While poetry and prose, motion pictures and maps, listicles and landscape paintings, audiobooks and animated GIFs have all been reduced to “content” on our screens, the mechanisms that deliver that content to us are now revealing their own complexity. Substrates and filters and cables, we have come to see, possess ...
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The Ever-Expanding Field of Media Studies