Where Next for Media Theory?

Where next for media theory? I’m thankful to Geert Lovink for his recent provocation on this question. Lovink thinks we have entered a post-Snowden era of media. So called ‘new’ media is dead, just as God is dead. Or, to vary the frame of reference, the ebullient schizo era of ...
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No More Master Thinkers

How often it transpires that the interesting thinkers were monsters. Heidegger was a Nazi. Schmitt was a Nazi. De Man was a collaborator, a thief, a liar and – to cap it off – a bigamist. Or, case of a different kind: Althusser strangled his wife, and was probably none ...
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Marxism for Unicorns

Benjamin Kunkel is having a moment. New York magazine has called him a “Marxist public intellectual.” This caused steam to shoot out of the ears of Gawker, who can’t get over the fact that a “Marxist public intellectual” went to a fancy-pants liberal arts college and has a pied-a-terre in ...
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RIP Stuart Hall

I was studying law when I first encountered the work of Stuart Hall. There were, and are, lots of ways into his work. The way he could find the tactical purchase of a concept or a tranche of historical data was one of his special qualities as an intellectual. Taking refuge ...
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Humor and the Social Condition

In a series of posts, Jeff Goldfarb and I have been sketching an outline for the study of the social condition -- the predictable dilemmas that haunt social life. We argue that one of the core intellectual missions of sociology is to account for the ways in which social patterns ...

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Humor and the Social Condition