Despair & The New “Anti-Media"

So, to end on a mildly dismal and “current” note about the world of blogging, if you’re a reader of Gawker or any of the blogs in the ever-growing Gawker Media stable, or ever briefly entertained the dubious idea of spending your early 20s working for near-minimum wage as a writer/blogger in a misguided post-collegiate haze, then perhaps you’ll find Vanessa Grigoriadis’ recent cautionary tale in New York Magazine, “Everybody Sucks: Gawker and the rage of the creative underclass,” of slight interest. If not, the moral of the story is simple: stay far away from blogging, especially in New York, unless, of course, self-destruction is your thing.

Syllabus Revisited

My favorite readings of this quarter have been:
• Mizoeff’s “Teletubbies: Infant Cyborg Desire and the Fear of Global Visual Culture”
• Sterne’s “Sounds Like the Mall of America”
• Anderson’s Imagined Communities
• Warner’s “Publics and Counterpublics”
• Adorno and Horkeimer’s “The Culture Industry”
• Appadurai’s “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”

Mizoeff’s “Teletubies,” essay, by far, takes the prize for the best essay of the syllabus, or, at least, the most fascinating and engaging in its approach, subject matter and tone.

As for my least favorites, I don’t really have any particular articles that I feel so strongly about to label as such. I did feel, however, that the enthnography-focused articles that came primarily towards the end of the quarter could be a little longwinded and tiresome at times. So, I would advocate trimming those from the syllabus, perhaps just one or two essays for each section instead of the standard three.