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: Consumption
Tinkering with e-bikes
In terms of balancing convenience with healthy lifestyles and environmentally conscious modes of mobility, e-bikes are at the top of many lists. Here is a good account of the benefits of e-bikes in Slate. The main problem for consumers is that most quality e-bikes are $2000 or more and often in the $3500-4000 price range. […]
#thedress for journalism educators
Black and Blue? Gold and White? What does #thedress mean for journalism educators? At the time of writing, the original Buzzfeed post has just under over 38m visitors and 3.4m people have voted in poll at the bottom of the post. Slate created a landing page, aggregating all their posts including a live blog. Cosmo copied Buzzfeed. Time produced a quick post […]
Rough Notes on the Techno-Aesthetics of Cattle
Other permutations of the title of this post could have been techno-aesthetics of ‘living standards’ or techno-aesthetics of ‘the future’. Mike Konczal’s piece in The New Inquiry on the work of ‘standardization’ in processes of ‘financialization’ was shared across my social networks the other day. In it he suggests that financial markets have in part […]
Nihilist Pop Culture: Consumed by the Insignificant
What I am now going to relate is the history of the next two centuries. I shall describe what will happen, what must necessarily happen: the triumph of Nihilism. (Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power) One of my goals for the course is to render students incapable of watching TV and film in the passive, mildly […]