Sianne Ngai’s concept of minor aesthetic categories was developed to think about “aesthetic experiences grounded in equivocal affects”. I worked to think through the concept of ‘meta’ as it circulates in popular culture as a similar minor aesthetic category. Like Ngai’s three examples — the cute, the zany, and the interesting — ‘meta’ is characterised […]
Category Archives: Media
Towards a post-normative communication and media studies
Twitter has announced a call for research submissions that helps them “identify indicators of conversational health that are even more specific to Twitter and its impact.” I expressed my skepticism about this on Facebook and so I am writing up some notes here. ‘Conversations’ are one way to examine interactions on social media. We looked […]
Critical News Literacy and Young People
There is a study released today about news consumption habits by young people 8-12 and 13-16 years old: News and Australian Children: How Young People Access, Perceive and are Affected by the News. The first point made in the key findings of the report is about how young people receive news from family and friends, including […]
Breitbart and American Sniper
I scraped Breitbart’s all posts from Facebook page. This is a representation of all ‘engagement’ (likes, comments and shares) for each month. The first six months of 2015 saw tremendous growth in engagement and it would be worth exploring what actually happened in that period, so I did a search of the Nexis service for […]
Why did the harrowing personal essay take over the Internet
The ‘strap’ for the Slate article on the rise of the first-person journalism genre asks the question: Why did the harrowing personal essay take over the Internet? But it does not actually answer the question. Writer Laura Bennet points out the positive social and political shifts of the rise of first person journalism. That there is […]