January 2020 archive

Media, Pictures, and Lisa Gitelman’s Always Already New

In the introduction to her book Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture, Lisa Gitelman explains that media are plural, that they exist as “socially-realized structures of communication” (7). This definition is important because it deals with two ways that people tend to talk about media. The first, as outlined by Gitelman, …

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Which Is Your Favorite This Time? A Reader’s Perspective

Several years ago during a class discussion about favorite stories and composition, a student asked me to identify my favorite line or scene from A Christmas Carol, and I couldn’t answer. Try as I might, I couldn’t pinpoint one. After class, the question haunted me. Why wasn’t I able to answer a simple question about …

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Viewing Deep Time as a Means of Technological Immortality

Cyberpunk, as an emerging genre in the late twentieth century, opened up a new side of humanity–a digital humanity the politics of which are still being hashed out today. Siegfried Zielinski frames cyberpunk genre and techno-romanticisim as ushering in a new lebensgefühl–a term which is tied to the vital feelings of the human body. Expanding …

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J. Butler: Response to Introduction: The Idea of a Deep Time of the Media

Siegfried Zielinski is appropriating “Deep Time” from its original uses in geology – the act of literally going deeper into the Earth’s layers to date and learn more about the past, and present. In his appropriation of this terminology, Zielinski aims to do much of the same when he calls for a “different perspective from …

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