I’m teaching our introductory graduate course on “Media Theory” in the fall. The stereotype of these courses is that they are like a week-long tour of Western Europe (it’s Tuesday it must be feminism or Rome or whatever). While we anoint certain people as “theorists” in the humanities, that’s not really a job. It’s certainly not a job at the assistant professor rank. I remember reading Baudrillard’s America as an MA student and thinking I’d love to have a career writing stuff like that! He was 57 when was published and had 11 prior books. IOW, it’s not a first book kind of thing. As I got a gr ..read more

A familiar cautionary tale about AI is the paper clip maximizer, where an AI destroys the world in pursuit of its seemingly banal task of making paper clips efficiently. The story imagines an AI with general, even superhuman, intelligence and agency. The debates continue about whether or not AGI will ever be achieved. But what about the more limited, though rapidly expanding, AIs we have now that operate on large language models? Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin have an interesting presentation on this they term the “AI Dilemma.” Here’s some of where this is coming from. In the last decade, machi ..read more

On Friday night I attended an intermedia performance of faculty and students. It was an impressive array of concepts, techniques, and expertise varying from dancers performing music with wearable computing devices to the sonification of data about sunsets and much more. There was (what I’d call) a posthuman DJ experience going on, where the interfaces for the performer as digital–software and hardware. It is my own predilection, foible even, to turn toward the conceptual rather than the aesthetic experience. But that’s what I’m thinking about here: specifically, how forces (and information, if ..read more

The University at Buffalo has been in the news (and social media) over an upcoming event involving a controversial speaker invited by a conservative student group on campus. I’m not here to discuss the particulars of this case or how to respond to it. I’m sure Google can help you learn more. My interest is the in underlying principles. Specifically, UB explains that as a public university it cannot legally stop a student group from inviting a controversial speaker except in very narrow circumstances. As the ACLU would explain it, one of the principles of free speech is that more speech is good ..read more

Writing a post analyzing the moral panic surrounding the latest digital media technology is nearly as boring as participating in the moral panic itself. Let’s not worry too much about ChatGPT. In a decade it will probably seem as quaint as Clippy. So I’ve got a tangent here and this Harry Potter-esque post title. I’ll start with the model of understanding. This is a term used in AI research to describe how machine learning processes (i.e., algorithms) operate to develop models that allow AIs to identify objects, generate media, and other tasks. Basically if you want an AI to identify bicycles ..read more

The FIFA World Cup has had a recent habit of introducing new media technologies into the sporting world. That’s not surprising given its status as a global spectacle. Given the many controversial aspects of this year’s event in Qatar, the introduction of the “semi-automated video assistant referee” is relatively mild. However, it’s an excellent example of the way in which emerging technologies create new spatiotemporal regimes.  Basically, the semi-automated video referee consists of 12 tracking cameras mounted around the stadium that track 29 data points on each player on the pitch along ..read more

There are a number of ways to understand the term “computational rhetoric.” In no particular order, the first might be something like critical code studies in that one studies the rhetoric practices of coding. A second would be akin to machine reading in the digital humanities, doing rhetorical analysis of a large textual corpus, or doing sentiment analysis on tweets. A third could be “procedural rhetoric” (e.g., Ian Bogost) and look at the persuasive capacities of digital interactions. Perhaps you can think of others. I am interested in a fourth option related to computational media. Computat ..read more

I imagine it comes as no surprise to academics across these fields that instrumentalism is typically a dirty word. It is epithet applied liberally including the rejection of coursework that is overly practical or focused on “how-to” (e.g. teaching writing), of degree programs deemed to be too focused on preparing students for specific careers, and of the study of works or topics viewed as commercial, popular, or mundane. Ironically (or perhaps not), our fields suffer from their own lagging instrumentality. That is, they. no longer function as well as they once did. A recent Washington Post pie ..read more

This is a kind of inside-baseball question, I think. For the typical English speaker, theory means something like speculation. In more academic/research contexts, theories are the conceptual basis for the work we do: e.g., a theory of evolution. The OED provides this helpful definition that is closer to what I had in mind as a starting point: An approach to the study of literature, the arts, and culture that incorporates concepts from disciplines such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences; esp. such an approach intended to challenge or provide an alternative to crit ..read more

There’s a 2004 video interview of Katherine Hayles conducted by Arthur Kroker for C-Theory, where she discusses How We Became Posthuman, Writing Machines, and My Mother was a Computer. Her 1999 book traces the posthuman back to the beginnings of computers and cybernetics. Considered differently though, posthuman theory as we encounter it gets some start with Foucault but really comes to the fore in the 90s, in other words during the decade Hayles is writing this book. There’s a moment in the interview (right around the 18-minute mark) where she halts an exchange they’re having about Baudrillar ..read more