IMDB Travis Holland, Charles Sturt University In June 1993, director Steven Spielberg released a film that unleashed a wave of technological change in film-making and simultaneously helped to revive popular interest in dinosaurs. Jurassic Park, based on Michael Crichton’s novel, spawned five blockbuster sequels as well as a multitude of spin-off games, toys, novels, and […]
Category: Pop Culture
Travis Holland, Charles Sturt University Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, will speak at the Sydney Opera House this weekend on the secrets of the show. Now in its 28th season, The Simpsons is one of the mostly widely lauded, and enduring series in TV history. But has it peaked creatively? Is it time […]
New York City has always been a shimmering mirage of television, cinema, radio and newsprint. It only ever existed in ribbons of Seinfeld, Friends, The Simpsons, 30 Rock, Elf, and news coverage like that of September 11, 2001. Though this is an account of my personal mediascape, millions of others would have a similar view. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Categories
#CSAA14 by the numbers
I was at the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA) annual conference last week, which gathered around the hashtag #CSAA14 on Twitter.
Categories
Two Definitions of Pop Culture
From the same page of an excellent book called YouTube ((Burgess, J. & Green, J., 2009. YouTube, Malden, MA: Polity Press, p.12.)), two competing academic definitions of popular culture: “popular culture is most commonly thought of – often pejoratively – as mass, consumer culture – reality TV, shopping malls, celebrity gossip, the Top 40, and […]