Super Bon!

subject: defective product
re: Order #xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Dear Amazon.ca Customer Service,

My order arrived just fine. However, included with my brand new copy of Judith Wajcman’s Techno Feminism was a “promissory note” for “eternal life” “by the authority of God” for the “forgiveness of sin [presumably mine], public and private through faith [again, presumably mine] in the blood of jesus christ [presumably from inside his body and not purchased on the black market]” [material in brackets added for clarification].

Now I realize that I did order an expressly feminist book. The subtitle of the last chapter is entitled “The Clitoris is a Direct Line to the Matrix,” which might be shocking to someone who believes in transubstantiation and has never considered alternative narratives, like those of science fiction. Am I to conclude that someone in your employ thought that my godless feminist reading choice needed some balance and kindly offered me a few bible quotes to liven up my day?

This is quite an interesting policy. I would be curious to know if Amazon is concerned about rounding out the tastes of all its readers. For a fee (naturally), I could design a bookmark containing aphorisms from Friedrich Nietzsche about the death of god and Shulmith Firestone about the superfluidity of men for including with any devotional literature or new chapters in the “Left Behind” series you might happen to sell. Of course, perhaps you are already doing this and have hired another consultant, in which case, I applaud you but would ask how much you are paying. I might be able to give you a better price.

Alternately, you might consider training your employees not to proselytize on your dime.

Sincerely,
–Jonathan Sterne, Montreal

Sometime in the next couple months, I’m going to do an overhaul to the blog site. It might be mostly cosmetic, but I know I need to add rss and I’m going to take a moment and at least consider any number of other changes. I’m also going to look into some kind of comment spam filter, though there haven’t been any problems of that sort lately. I know I need to arrange it so that it’s easy to add links (so I can like to you, dear reader). I’ve thought about just paying livejournal or blogspot and mirroring, too, so that’s a possibility as well.

If you have any requests or suggestions, now would the be the time to make them — here or in email.

I’ve decided it is a sensible thing to make a note on this blog when material of mine appears in print. Most of it will only be of interest to the academics or academically-inclined, but hey, it’s my blog, so why not?

I’m probably forgetting stuff, but this summer features two book chapters.

1. A short essay called “Communication as Techne” which argues for a conception of communication as, well, techne. The essay is in Gregory J. Shepherd, Jeffrey St. John, and Ted Striphas, eds., Communication As. . . : Perspectives on Theory. It’s a neat book because it sits between a theoretical text and a textbook. As in, you could easily teach with it, but it also is a good read in a “state of the field” sort of way to see how people are trying to define communication studies’ master terms.

2. A chapter called “Dead Rock Stars: 1900” that’s kind of an off-the-wall comparison between discourses about voices of the dead authenticating sound recording’s status as a cultural technology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (readers of The Audible Past will recognize some of this material) and uses of recordings to prove that dead rock stars, like Elvis, are in fact “alive” from the 1970s to today. It’s in Joli Jensen and Steve Jones, eds., Afterlife as Afterimage: Understanding Posthumous Fame. Looking forward to receiving my copy.

here and here.

In an environment where the federal government does nothing to protect the free exchange of ideas (to my knowledge, the preceding sequence of 5 words is not currently owned in the U.S.) from corporate raiders who want to turn it all into a profit-making enterprise, Kembrew’s attempt to shut down Stoller is a refreshing turn of the table.