Hi. This post lists and links to my first 50 posts on this blog, indexing 50 brief critical essays on contemporary media culture. Topics include The Leveson Inquiry, Occupy Wall Street, Privacy, Music, Food, Economics and more. Try one. 1. Happy Birth Day! my blog is born 2. Gifts and Books, Books and Gifts books as... Continue Reading →
EDIT to this post: as you'll see if you check the comments to this post, someone has informed me that in fact the Girl Scouts/Guides had nothing to do with the suing of Men at Work and in fact it was an Australian publishing company called Larrikin Music that pursued the suit. I apologize to... Continue Reading →
A few weeks ago I gave a talk at the Toronto Reference Library as part of an excellent series called Treehouse Talks. It was a lovely event, attended by about 100 people and held in the spectacular 5-story atrium of the library. I gave an updated version of the talk that I call Know Your... Continue Reading →
Yesterday I introduced the idea that the greatest transformative potential for any social initiative lies in creating feedback loops between OS1 and OS3. By OS1 I mean oral culture and technologies and by OS3 I mean digital culture and technologies. I also said that in order to effectively implement such strategies, which I refer to... Continue Reading →
The National Basketball Association (NBA) is in trouble. The league locked out the players months ago, bargaining has failed, and now the players have disbanded their union and are taking the league to court to contest the most basic notions of player-league business relations. Things like player drafts and even the notion of 'owning a... Continue Reading →
Part 3 - The Uncertain (previously: The Bad) (previously: The Good) Strangely enough I want to start with certainties. Knowing what I know about Occupy Wall Street should help me to know what I don't know. So what am I reasonably certain about? I am certain that America is approaching the status of Police State,... Continue Reading →
Part 2 - The Good (previously: The Bad) Saturday was a glorious fall day with blue skies and bright sunshine. At 3:30 pm I was in The New Schools' Wollman Hall, having just given a talk on post-literate activism at the Mobility Shifts conference, when we started to hear the unmistakable sounds of the Global... Continue Reading →
PART 1 - The Bad Cops, cops and more cops. Cops on horses. Cops in vans. Cops on motorcycles. Cops on scooters. Cops in paddywagons. Cops on foot. Cops on bikes. Cops in portable security towers. Cops everywhere. Watching. Waiting. Working. Thoroughly controlling the park perimeter. So much so that entering the park felt a... Continue Reading →
So I've been in New York for a few hours now and plan to head down to do my Public Gifting action at Occupy Wall Street this evening (Friday) after I attend a talk by Geert Lovink at the New School. Yesterday, Geert, a Dutch new media activist, and his collaborator Franco Berardi released an... Continue Reading →
Tomorrow I'll be arriving in New York where I'll be staying for a few days. I'll be speaking at (and attending) a cool conference on the future of digital culture and education called Mobility Shifts at The New School. (My talk is Saturday at 2:30 pm, Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Building 65 West 11th St.,... Continue Reading →
YOU ARE YOUR MEDIA 