In an arresting chapter in Carolyn L. Kane’s new book, Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code, she analyzes the movie Predator, which gives expression to ...
Tag: Digital
The Best of 2015
It’s finally spring and we’ve settled comfortably in 2015’s controversies and think pieces, its soundtrack and landscape, its must-sees and many of its premieres and releases. But never fear: There ...
Drone Poems
The protests of Hong Kong’s 2014 “Umbrella Revolution” were marked in early days by the intermittent appearance of a helicopter drone flying high above the crowds, looking rather like a pizza box ...
Adventure Capitalists
William Gibson has become a reluctant prophet for cyberculture. Although his early work failed to imagine some technological particulars (like the smart phone), he foresaw that cyberspace—a term he ...
Justice for “Data Janitors”
What is at stake in hiding the delivery people, stockroom workers, content moderators, and call center operators laboring to produce the automated experience?
Terms of Service
In a comprehensive survey of how technological advances will “creep” into everyday life, computer expert and technologist Thomas Keenan guides the reader through a slew of increasingly ubiquitous and ...
Writing Technology
Read my blog, please, but don’t dare peek into my diary. Even though these two genres employ some of the same conventions—a diurnal relation to time, a preoccupation with subjective experience—one is ...
The Democratic Surround: A Conversation Between Fred Turner and Clay Shirky
Last December, Public Culture senior editor Fred Turner sat down with Clay Shirky, the author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age and Here Comes Everybody: The Power of ...
What’s So Social About Social Media?
Social media is possibly the worst thing that’s ever happened to media scholars. I’m not referring to the phenomenon of Facebook, Twitter, and other brand-name-as-verb online platforms—experienced ...
Don’t Throw Anything Out
First, a disclaimer. I am too old to review this book. It aims to address media scholars, communication professionals, as well as active and curious members of the new participatory culture. I belong ...
Books On Books
You need a birthday present, let’s say for your cousin’s boyfriend. You’re bad at guessing shirt sizes, so it might as well be a book. You find a bookstore (if you’re lucky). You make for the section ...
Game of Chance
The narrator of Alexandra Chasin’s novella, Brief, displays a close rhetorical kinship with Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert. An art vandal of indeterminate gender, s/he defends an act of ...
Churches of Vinyl: Archive and Authenticity in the Pop Music Novel
The recent publication of yet another big novel centrally preoccupied with popular music—Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue, one of whose key locations is an East Bay record store in 2004 specializing ...