Why rethinking memes might help inoculate against the viral marketing disease. A meme is rather like pornography — you don’t necessarily know what it is but you know it when you see it. And yet, it is possible to set out some general descriptions of the kinds of meme that circulate online and upon which business empires […]
Author: admin
It’s been some time since I’ve written about my PhD – I’ve been far to busy actually writing it instead (and teaching). In that time, the whole concept has shifted quite a bit – somewhat under its own weight and somewhat due to my own interests. This is a ‘catch-up’ post, partly to keep me […]
An essay formerly known as ‘How to say “sophomoric wankery” in High Valyrian.’ I once wrote a thinkpiece that clumsily linked an obscure theory of philosophy with the fantasy worlds created by George RR Martin and his contemporaries. Old Valyria (source) I was pleasantly surprised by the relatively high readership of that piece, due in no […]
There is a clear pattern of thinking about the value of higher education in purely economic terms. Questions about how much graduates earn dominate mass media discussion of the industry (1, 2, 3) while university marketers talk almost endlessly about employability (4, 5, 6). Meanwhile, academics themselves squabble about higher purposes. The mismatch in this […]
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It’s Not You, It’s Me(dium)
What happened, Medium? You changed. I don’t think we can go on like this. Medium, Your home stream is full of urgent whispers let out into a world that doesn’t want to hear them. A million voices crying out at once. Asking, wondering, ‘what happened?’. Experimenting with it and playing around, filling the stream with mindlessness. […]
We tend to put a lot of stock into numbers, even those of us who don’t like them very much. Numbers make life seem graspable, comparable, measurable and observable. Trees in the forest (‘The complexity of life’ by Flickr/tomsaint) Amongst the numbers that matter most are those preceded by currency signs, especially in this digital […]
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Favourite Places
There is a hospital in Sydney that ranks amongst my most checked-in places on Facebook. But what makes this place so special? It’s on the other side of the city from where I live, closer in distance but further in travelling time than Australia’s capital city, Canberra. It is most definitely not my closest hospital, […]
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Sporadic Publics, Sporadic Places
Light on the Louvre, by Flickr user Photophilde, is just one fragmentary and incomplete image of the place that is Paris. Every tweet, newspaper article, television program, speech, presentation, app and street sign has some sort of assumed audience. In political discourse, “The Public” reigns supreme as the target of all of these media types […]
In 2016, we moved beyond the Fermi paradox and the great filter theory. This is how the world reacted when we uncovered definitive proof of intelligent life beyond Earth. Some favourite aliens Day 1: A NASA employee, probably the PR intern, leaked the news well before the press conference and we variously frothed at the prospect […]
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The Objects of Westeros
The worlds of fantasy fiction are full of important objects, and they deserve a little more scrutiny. From the maps printed at the front of epic fantasy novels and used by characters to famous swords and the eponymous Rings of J.R.R. Tolkein’s work, the objects of fantasy worlds are as much drivers of the story […]