The perfection of clocks and the invention of watches have something to do with modern nervousness, since they compel us to be on time, and excite the habit of looking to see the exact moment, so as not to be late for trains or appointments. Before the general use of these instruments pf precision in time, there was a wider margin for all appointments; a longer period was required and prepared for, especially in travelling… men judged of the time by probabilities, by looking at the sun, and needed not, as a rule, to be nervous about the loss of a moment, and had incomparably fewer experiences wherein a delay of a few moments might destroy the hopes of a lifetime. (page 103)

Beard, G. M. (1881). American nervousness, its causes and consequences: a supplement to nervous exhaustion (neurasthenia). Putnam.

American Nervousness was published in 1881 and it reminds me of the regular panics surrounding smartphones today.

While listening to a Guardian podcast episode about why people hates vegans I came across this quote:

Alicia Kennedy considers it troubling that the internet has transformed something with such a rich political history into “a wellness thing” that allows would-be consumers to label themselves vegans without having to engage with the “excess baggage” of ideology.

This nails the whole slacktivism argument so elegantly, seeming political without the “excess baggage” of ideology.

Of course social media allows for this form of poseur to thrive. But this does not mean all that looks like a pose is hollow. The challenge is identifying the difference.

In New York next week? Come and join us for Post Truth discussion! 

Next Friday, October 18, the McGannon Center will host Johan Farkas for a lunchtime discussion from 12:30pm to 1:45pm in Room 7-119 at the Law School. Farkas, who is a PhD Fellow in Media and Communication Studies at Malmö University in Sweden,will talk about his book, Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy: Mapping the Politics of Falsehood. 

Mathias Klang of Fordham’s Communications and Media Studies Department will moderate the conversation. You can learn more about Farkas and his book here. 

I’ve got a new position as Book Series Editor at the Fordham University Press! Yay!

We are looking to revitalize the McGannon Book Series, and looking for books that “…interrogate the ways in which media and networked communication technologies (1) constitute social, economic, cultural, and political arrangements and (2) affect the distribution, regulation, and control of information flows.”

If you have an idea you would like to discuss, reach out!

This is quote was worth saving, maybe?

“When I was young there were beatniks. Hippies. Punks. Gangsters. Now you’re a hacktivist. Which I would probably be if I was 20. Shuttin’ down MasterCard. But there’s no look to that lifestyle! Besides just wearing a bad outfit with bad posture. Has WikiLeaks caused a look? No! I’m mad about that. If your kid comes out of the bedroom and says he just shut down the government, it seems to me he should at least have an outfit for that.” 

– John Waters on the sorry style of today’s rebels  

This course will explore the effects of surveillance technologies from the everyday devices to the most sophisticated. It will analyze the effects of technology on society, culture and law. Students will gain insights into the impact of surveillance and technological empowerment on communication. Through the study, analysis and application of privacy & surveillance theory the participant will develop a firmer understanding of the role of surveillance on society and its impact on privacy.

In order to cover the topic in five weeks the course will cover one topic each week.

• Privacy & Surveillance Theory,
• Privacy, Surveillance & The Body
• Privacy, Surveillance & The Home,
• Privacy, Surveillance & The City,
• Privacy, Surveillance & Digital Technology

Check out the syllabus here.

This is from an article arguing against our fetishization of counting calories and BMI but the conclusion contains an important truth that should be applied more broadly:

Humans come in many shapes and sizes. Some people can truly eat whatever they desire and not gain a pound; others chew on leaves and remain portly. The lengths we go to calorie count isn’t a sign of health; it’s orthorexia, which creates cortisol, another factor in weight gain.

Don’t be fooled by the arrogance of simplicity.

Derek Beres Do Caliries Even Count

It’s all too easy to fall for simplistic solutions and slogans. It’s also a reminder to question established truths.

How media has changed and what it means, by David Roberts

The internet changed all that. There are no longer supply constraints — it is trivially cheap and easy to publish something on the web — and there are virtually no constraints left on the supply of information. Libraries are online. Government records are online. Every public figure’s every move is blogged or tweeted.

Two things follow. First, with supply constraints gone, there is no reason to confine web journalism to the length and formal constraints of journalism developed for paper. Any story can be as long as it needs to be, whether it’s 200 words or 2,000. Not every journalist must choose between the view-from-nowhere voice of the objective journalist and stale aphorisms of major newspaper editorial pages. There is room for a greater variety of length, form, tone, voice, and subject on the web.

And second, there’s more need for explanation. Because they were supply constrained, newspapers and newspaper journalists focused on what was new, what just happened, the incremental development. But lots of times, readers had no way of making sense of those developments or contextualizing them. They were getting the leaves, but they’d never gotten the trunk.

Especially as information and incremental developments explode in quantity, there is increasing public hunger for understanding — not so much what happened, but what it means.

The great question of our age is simply, WTF? WTF isn’t asking after what happened. It’s easy to find out what happened these days. Rather, it’s pointing at what happened and asking, well … WTF?

What’s the deal with that? How does it work? How good or bad is it, really? How does it connect with these other things? What can we learn from its history?

People want to know how the world works. They want to know why the things that are happening are happening. They don’t stop wanting to learn when they get out of school.

So journalism is inevitably shifting. These days, it is less about producing new information than it is about gathering information already on the record, evaluating it, and explaining and contextualizing it for an audience, perhaps with some analysis and argumentation for good measure.

Don’t get me wrong: There’s still plenty of information to be dug up. Investigative journalism still very much exists, though it is under-funded everywhere. I look on it with great admiration and some awe, but it’s not what I do. And though many are loathe to admit it, it’s not what most US journalists do these days

Again, if the Chinese surveillance state is more far-reaching than what we know to exist in the West—at the moment—this is largely because China has already done what the West is currently proposing to do.

Brian Hioe – Technoleviathan: China, Silicon Valley, and the rise of the global surveillance state.