Sometime in December I mentioned some politics in the National Communication Association (US) around the San Diego conference. Beyond the whole Horowitz silliness, there was the fact that the Hyatt was in the middle of a labor dispute and was funneling money into the campaign to oppose Prop 8. This YouTube video isn’t exciting but …
Author Archives: Jonathan Sterne
Coupland on the financial crisis:
it’s all in our minds. We just need to snap out of it. Like Y2K. Sure, that’s true to a point, but the more frightening prospect is that all the prosperity that people felt coming up to the crisis was also in their minds, largely fictional, and therefore incredibly dangerous. I know it was just …
On Managed Interdisciplinarity
In an earlier post, I discussed the evacuation of meaning from the term “interdisciplinarity” and some forms that I consider to be more authentic attempts to get beyond limits of traditional–and nontraditional–disciplines. One question often left unasked is why universities are now so interested in fostering certain kinds of interdisciplinarity. When I was first learning …
Goodbye 2008
The joy of New Year’s is that it’s the most obviously arbitrary of holidays (as opposed to all the rest which are less obviously arbitrary), but that’s also its downfall. People always complain that New Year’s Eve always has too much pressure to have fun and not enough fun. That’s probably true. Nevertheless, we are …
Housecleaning
I’ve done a little housecleaning in the links bar. I deleted everything that hasn’t been updated in 6 months or more. If the blogs or sites come back to life, I’ll put them back. Of course I also added some new things. –The Montreal Sound Map is part of an internet phenomenon around acoustic …
Criminalization of Chemistry
Annalee at io9 posted a story about a Saskatchewan university student arrested for having a chemistry lab at home. What’s most disturbing to me is that a few years earlier, Saskatchewan police evacuated a Salvation Army community centre after finding chemicals for a darkroom. One interesting and unfortunate side effect of the consumer-electronicsification and digitization …
Ready to Fight Back, Only Too Late
Despite my vegetarianism, one of my favorite attractions at the Minnesota State Fair (which, if you don’t know, is the best state fair in the world) was always the bad taxidermy. Although I would say bizarre is a better term for it, Carrie and I passed by a barber on Liège while walking around the …