Video now available for Conditions of Mediation preconference

Note: below you will find more specific links, through which you may advance to the remarks of specific speakers After much behind-the-scenes fidgeting and arranging, I’m happy to say we can finally make available an edited video recording of the two keynote symposiums from Conditions of Mediation, the ICA preconference I co-organized with Tim Markham, … Continue Reading

Interviews and more at Figure/Ground

I’ve just noticed an interesting and relatively new website: Figure/Ground. Originally a personal academic blog, it has now evolved into a student-led collaborative project. The site aims to bring ‘philosophers, historians and critics of media, literature and technology into a conversation’ and to be ‘a virtual salon or coffee house, creating a democratic space for … Continue Reading

Coupland gets inside McLuhan’s head

I, for one, had no idea Canadian author Douglas Coupland was writing a biography of Marshall McLuhan. Medium theory anoraks must have known for months. Well, the biography has arrived, and the Canadian media has entered into one if its wild yet rare fervours of Canadian intellectual commemoration to mark the occasion. The biography sounds … Continue Reading

Remembering Roger Silverstone

Academic events come and go, and are sometimes quite unremarkable occasions; at their worst, there can be an underlying feeling of ‘going through the motions’. Attending ‘The Work of Roger Silverstone’ at the University of Sussex yesterday, I felt very far from one of those mundane academic gatherings. This was Silverstone encapsulated in a very … Continue Reading

Intermingling McLuhan, Latour, Harman and Kittler

In the lead up to starting this blog I have kept a list of possible future posts. Call it a repository of best intentions. One of those best intentions was to think through – probably in more than one post – the connections and disconnections between recent relational materialist writing like actor-network theory and writing … Continue Reading