Search Results for theory

Jussi Parikka, author of Insect Media among numerous other books, recently posed a series of questions about object-oriented ontology. Levi Bryant has already responded, as has Paul Caplan, and I like both of their responses. I thought I’d offer my own here, so here goes. (The block quotes are Jussi’s questions.) Is not the talk of “object” something that summons… read more

Below is the CFP for a conference to be held by the Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, on May 3-5, 2012. Confirmed invited speakers include me, Jane Bennett, Bill Brown, Wendy Chun, Mark Hansen, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Tim Morton, and Steven Shaviro. Hope to see you there! This conference takes up the “nonhuman turn” that has… read more

The author Steven Johnson has an essay in the New York Times today, I Was an Under-Age Semiotician, about his younger years as a Semiotics major at Brown. It’s worth a read for anyone who did or still does philosophy or “critical theory,” to use an annoying term. But I want to pull out a specific excerpt from Johnson’s essay:… read more

Two seemingly unrelated things happened to me yesterday, which further reflection revealed to have surprising connections. First, I spoke on a panel at the Online News Association conference about games and news. Julia Schmalz (now of Bloomberg, formerly of USA Today) and Rajat Paharia (of gamification vendor Bunchball) were the other panelists. I presented my approach to newsgames and offered… read more

My latest book, How To Do Things With Videogames is now shipping from Amazon.com in the US. For those of you in Europe, it’ll be a little while longer. And before you ask, a Kindle edition has been created and should show up Amazon any day now. The book is a little different from my others. It offers a tiny… read more

In his short treatise On Bullshit, the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt gives us a useful theory of bullshit. We normally think of bullshit as a synonym—albeit a somewhat vulgar one—for lies or deceit. But Frankfurt argues that bullshit has nothing to do with truth. Rather, bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce. Unlike liars, bullshitters have no… read more

Cross-posted from PBS Idea Lab Earlier this month a group of journalists, game designers, and academics gathered at the University of Minnesota for a workshop on newsgames. I was there, as was fellow Knight News Challenge winner and San Jose Mercury News tech business writer Chris O’Brien. After the event, Chris wrote a a recap of the meeting. In turn,… read more

Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next is a book with a stark premise: historically, cities have developed and thrived around transportation technologies. The present age is that of the airplane, and cities will be built for and around them. What seaports were to the eighteenth century, railroads to the nineteenth, and highways to the twentieth, so airports will be to… read more

There’s a nice persuasive game making the rounds, called Spent. It was made by ad agency McKinney for the Urban Ministries of Durham. The game attempts to illustrate how easily financial hardship and low income work can devolve into homelessness. It does a pretty good job, too, taking the same basic method as did Tenure, the 1975 PLATO game about… read more

Adam Kotsko’s little book Awkwardness is a pleasurable and insightful read, yet another reminder that Zero Books is quickly becoming the trusted source for short, punchy works on philosophy and cultural theory. In the book, Kotsko offers a tiny theory of awkwardness: “The tension of awkwardness indicates that no social order is self-evident and no social order accounts for every… read more