Mentioned this old old essay from 2003 in the theory reading group on Virilio so I thought it would nice to re-air it here.  This essay was actually an interactive multimedia presentation where clicking on …

In his book Within the Context of No Context, George W. S. Trow fights with ideas of television culture, through television culture, if they’re ideas at all.

There is a time for abstract science and then another one for things…the works of my youth…I henceforth find old, precisely because they are very learned or strictly under surveillance. Luckily, the more one writes, the younger one becomes. Finally, no more surveillance; finally, I can play truant – no more school at all (Serres)

Listening to a lecture on the New Social Media by Goldsmiths’ lecturer Natalie Fenton, I want to share a few thoughts and outline some assumptions and highlight some presuppositions that underlie the discussion.

The idea of flat earth news owes a lot to Herman and Chomsky’s ‘propaganda model’. The basic premise is that due to increased corporate ownership and focus on profits (with associated redundancies, cost-cutting and targets) journalists are no longer able to check stories like they used to. Here are its 10 rules.

We have now finally gotten peer-review comments back from a book that I have been co-editing the past year. The book “Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change” will now be published sometime 2010 after a few relatively standard changes / edits / modifications. My chapter passed without any edits required so quite happy to avoid the extra work.

For those especially theoretically inclined, a recommended event in recent trends in Continental philosophy.

CENTRE FOR RESEARCH IN MODERN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY

Subject and Appearance
On Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject and Logics of Worlds
Friday 20 November …

Should the media be an influence on the public? How democratic can that be?

Or perhaps, we should word it the other way around, make the issue more “free market.” Should the public let the media influence them? One argument is that journalists are supposed to be experts in their respective beats and so, should be able to inform our decision-making.

But there is a thin line between informing and shaping.

No One Knows About Persian Cats – So, what do we know? Who are we? What Persian cats
anyway? – Questions opening up new questions. A (more or less) critical inquiry into
Bahman Ghobadi’s film which is being widely discussed in seminars and other public
spaces

Fair & Lovely is a product extremely well-known and easily available in many non-white countries of the world. What is being sold here in physical terms and in ideology? Why is buying such a product problematic and what can we learn about societies through this?