media publishing

Now that it’s summer, I can read from that precarious pile of books on my desk. First up, Hello Avatar! There is much to recommend here, but let me begin by noting Coleman’s play with design and format, a necessary and successful experimentation in the writing forms that might be better suited for scholarship on networked experience.... read more »

I got a notice from Google on my “Learning from YouTube” YouTube channel. Apparently I passed some metric and have enough traffic to qualify to money-up with Google. While I am quite worried that I’ve signed away more than I’ll ever know, I felt that the learning mandate of this course demands that I go for it. We’ve been talking about Google’s (and corporate and money’s reach) on YouTube in class, and we can now watch how (or if) that happens in real time.... read more »

According to Ryan Bowles and Rahul Mukherjee, in their introduction to “Documentary and Space,” Media Fields Journal, Issue 3: “New forms, modes, and genres of documentary have sparked their own debates and raised their own particular issues. And it is perhaps this moment of changing modes, technologies, and practices that draws our attention to the importance of considering documentary space.... read more »

“In response to what labor leaders see as an exploitative situation, on March 17th, the Newspaper Guild and the National Writers Union both called for bloggers to refuse to blog at the Huffington Post and join an electronic picket line against the Huffington Post.” Mike Elk... read more »

An essay that I wrote, reflecting upon my experiences in online digital scholarship and publishing, has just been published at Inside Higher Education.

I begin:... read more »

I’ve returned from SCMS and Louisiana (having seen two alligators in the wild on a hike and eaten crawfish and shrimp in innumerable yummy formats) and would like to briefly mention a few of my more memorable media encounters: like the alligator, anxiety-defined all.... read more »

Toby Miller, Chair of Media and Cultural Studies at UC Riverside, chatted with me over tofu for his podcast, CULTURALSTUDIES. Since last summer, Toby has recorded meandering, lively and detailed conversations with scholars, artists, and activists and he releases them in unedited real time on his podcast to 1000 or so subscribers, all probably three men and their dog in Sweden, according to Toby.... read more »

I’ve been on the road with the video-book: CAA, NYU, University of Toronto and OCADU. I’ve been having fun, and learning a lot too during long and intense Q and As where people are actually critical and productive (in this sense it feels more like a film screening than my image of a book tour, but maybe that’s because showing the video-book is more filmic in that it is screen-based, live, loud, and defined by images).... read more »

My colleague at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC, Virgina Kuhn, has just published Filmic Texts and the Rise of the Fifth Estate which “maps the use of a documentary film as a main text in an undergraduate course, explaining its practices and elaborating its theoretical underpinnings before gesturing toward some of the more salient unresolved issues that offer avenues for further research.”... read more »

YouTube is baked; its video forms and conventions badly done. We’re stuck with corporate media-like “stunts, pranks, violence, gotchas, virtuosity, upsets, and transformations.”

Sure, every video holds its own small surprises and variations, but this is expressed in a vernacular and melody with which we are already comfortable.... read more »