Is Neuroscience the New Humantities?

How did the humanities lose out to neuroscience in making culture seem interesting? I’ve been listening to a lot of NPR and podcasts lately. I’ve given my historical favorites a little break (sorry, This American Life and Sound Opinions), and I’ve been listening more and more to Planet Money and Radiolab (as podcasts), and to [...]

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Why Wikipedia? or Why, Wikipedia? or Why? Wikipedia!

Whenever someone (often on the internet, but not always) wants to emphasize how smart the collective masses are, or point to the effectiveness of the “hive mind,” they always end up looking at Wikipedia. But why hold Wikipedia up as a bastion of either mass-generated wisdom or productivity? Why make Wikipedia the pinnacle of the [...]

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The Lonely Network

The great irony of the The Social Network, of course, is that its central theme is not connectivity but disconnection.  A film about the genesis of a technology designed to bring people closer together features a main character who experiences the painful dissolution of social bonds. The plot is driven by protagonist Mark Zuckerberg’s exclusion [...]

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Sell Music, Buy Shoes

The conversation about “selling out” in popular music has been dead for some time. And I’m not interested in reviving that conversation now. The last time it really flared up was around 1989, when Nike featured the Beatles’ “Revolution” in a commercial. Since then, it’s basically been a done deal. So, today’s New York Times‘ [...]

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The Trouble with Choice: Web 2.0 Edition

I don’t have a T.V. but I do have access to TV programming, thanks to my Netflix subscription and various other online sources of traditional broadcast entertainment. As a result, I found myself watching HULU the other night, and as after I selected the sitcom I wanted to watch, the screen went dark and I [...]

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You Don’t Have Mail

A few weeks ago I reorganized my bedroom closet.  This alone may be worthy of a blogpost, but I won’t bore you with recounting the small joy that this task brought me.  What struck me about the process, from a cultural perspective, was the sheer volume of paper memories I found myself sorting through and [...]

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Meet the New Laws, Same as the Old Laws

Hours before Sunday’s broadcast of the Oscars, whole swaths of the New York viewing audience were cut out because ABC pulled its affiliate stations. In the wake of this event, a coalition of broadcast providers submitted a petition to the FCC, asking that the current rules that govern broadcasting and redistribution are ripe for reassessment. [...]

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Romance and Technology in the Digital Age

A number of media stories have appeared recently dissecting the ways in which technology and social networks have transformed our culture of dating, romance, and breaking up.  For example, a few days ago NPR reported on “Digital Tears: Breakups and Social Networks,” the New Yorker online ran a short piece on “The Importance of Email [...]

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I Don’t Watch TV. Or Do I?

For three years now I have not had a television.  I enjoy telling people this, as friends and family (as well as strangers I’ve met at parties) will readily testify.  Whenever they talk about some commercial or new show, I always say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.  I don’t watch TV.”  The pleasure [...]

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Twitter is (kinda) the new Ham Radio

I frequently find myself caught somewhere between the criticism of twitter as full of mindless blather and the praise of it as a new venue for communication and information sharing (see: protests in Iran as examples of the latter and just about anywhere else as examples of the former). But as someone trained as an [...]

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