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Eve Sedgwick on Paranoia
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on paranoia, one of the best things I’ve read recently and which I’ll be incorporating into a chapter for sure. If you want to understand much of what goes on, both online and off, and particularly to do with activism, then look to understand paranoia: The first imperative of paranoia is There…
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[talk] Flarf ‘poetry’ and the Facebook tagging algorithm
So I gave a short paper at CODE last week entitled ‘Flarf ‘poetry’ and the Facebook tagging algorithm’ and got lots of positive comments and questions afterwards. Here’s an embed of the audio, and here’s a direct download. The slides to accompany the talk can be found here.
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Some comments on, and two reservations about, #AltLit
I’ve recently joined (found?) the massively distributed online (sub?)culture that calls itself (is called?) Alt.Lit. My journey of discovery is not so important, but it started on twitter, moved to Facebook and now I see it everywhere. And let’s be honest, it’s not really a literature movement anymore; it’s become a cultural juggernaut steamrolling everything…
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MLG[PRO] 420 FANVIDs
There’s a strange, and relatively new, genre of YouTube video, based on parodying the over-serious, über-gamer culture that surrounds professional gaming, and in particular the MLG (Major League Gaming) circuit. The typical MLG fragvid is full of over-the-top special effects, in-text commentary, and often accompanied by a dubstep soundtrack, oriented towards demonstrating a certain Pro…
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On the unintended consequences of anti-snark internet culture IRL
In our era of the Internet – an era in which memes and chain emails alike cross from screen to the world and back again – has the encroachment of snark from the internet undermined our ability to properly mock those deserving of mockery in so-called meatspace? Compare and contrast two entirely unrelated pieces – the…
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The New Situationist International
I read the introductory few pages of McKenzie Wark’s The Beach Beneath The Street and was immediately inspired to organise or join an artist/philosophical collective like the Situationist International. I don’t have a great understanding of them, their goals and practices, having learnt virtually everything about them everything through reading Wikipedia, a couple of chapters…
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Rhetorical Questions
Initial responses to my off-hand reference to an analytic/persuasive divide in the critical videogame blogosphere ranged from incomprehension to ardent agreement, and even a blog post ‘In defence of trolling’ (about which I’m still not sure how to respond other than to say I’m flattered the author thought my ideas worth responding to). In my…
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An Exhausted Blogosphere
Last time we looked at the early period of the videogame blogosphere as Dan Golding’s blog post ‘Mapping the Brainysphere’ and I both saw it emerging, and we also looked at the forces of formation from an Actor Network Theory perspective. One of the things that ANT turns on its head is the idea of…
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A brief Actor Network Theory history of the videogame blogosphere
After a very productive meeting with my PhD supervisor today I want to try distil some of the renewed focus my project has gained. My PhD project, tentatively called ‘An Actor Network Theory assessment of online community creation’, is all about the critical videogame blogosphere and how it came about. There’s a bunch of assumptions…
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No hablan Español
In case you were under the mistaken impression that the videogame blogosphere proliferated solely under the purview of English-speaking users, let me disabuse you of that notion right now. ‘Ars Ludica’ is an Italian videogame website that has categories for news, reviews, thoughts and insights. I stumbled across it because someone in a comment linked to…