Archive: The Gnovis Blog
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When Rich Meets Reality – Depicting the Benefaction of the Wealthy
In such a hyper-mediated society, it’s only fitting that watching television is one of America’s favorite and most time-consuming activities. The middle-class American family is a historic character of the small screen, immortalized in such classics as All in the Family and The Simpsons – reassuring the most robust, yet simultaneously fragile social class during bouts of racial strife and economic turmoil. Yet, as wealth disparities grow and the middle class suffers, television offers a new type of reassurance – one that proclaims that rich people are just like us.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Aesthetics and Artifice
Most of my musings here on gnovis stem from my desire to address our everyday relationship to both the production and consumption of visual ephemera, often leaning on linguistic analysis in order to raise questions regarding the way sociocultural standards enter into our reading of visual materials; defining “what counts” as a legitimate visual move.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Interdisciplinarity Anyone? Part Deux.
In my last blog post, I discussed President Obama’s State of the Union and America’s current treatment of international students in relation to Jane Jacobs’ book, he Death and Life of Great American Cities. The focus of the post was the idea that, much like the city planners in Jacobs’ book who wanted to clear people from city streets due to an unsubstantiated fear that busy streets meant danger, the powers that be here in America have erroneously instilled a belief that allowing international students to remain in the USA will somehow damage our way of life.
Categories: Globalization Column, The Gnovis Blog
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Say it Differently?
The following video was produced by JESS3 for The Economist and highlights, in 6 minutes, the main points of a 150 page report called the “Women’s Economic Opportunity Index.” Two things struck me about the video, the first being the content and the second being the form. The discussion of what form to use when communicating development and economic data is a critical conversation to have.
Categories: Globalization Column, The Gnovis Blog
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Issues with inevitability in info tech discourse (pt. 1)
This post originally appeared, in a less-edited form, on The Socratic Librarian .
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Napster Part II?: The MPAA, a Former Senator, and You
It was announced Tuesday that Chris Dodd, the former five-term Democratic Senator from Connecticut, will be taking over as head of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), the trade organization that oversees the nominally voluntary MPAA ratings system. Dodd had recently announced his retirement from government, declining to run for a sixth term in office. At his new post, the former senator’s main concern will be curtailing internet piracy.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Dancing to a New Beat: Gender Performance and New Orleans Bounce
Music and dance permeate the cultural and subcultural realms of society. They blend together myriad cultural cues and signifiers that together work to create a sort-of performative expression; and, when dance and music work to define a culture away from the psyches of the everyday, it’s more than mere expression – it’s exclamation.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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The Grad Student and the Vicodin Bottle
One of the troubles with chronic pain conditions is that they tend to be considered less authentic as disabilities. They are often invisible, existing such that they may go virtually or entirely unnoticed. Specific conditions, such as fibromyalgia and myofascial pain syndrome, the ailment with which I’m inflicted, are even doubted by doctors: “Because [doctors] can demonstrate no local cause, they conclude that the disease does not exist” (<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=Z5s9_g42e1gC&printsec=frontcover&dq=wall+pain+the+science+of+suffering&source=bl&ots=bN38Z9
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Google Alert: Art Project, Take 2
Even while the buzz behind the Google Art Project , or GAP for short, has expectedly died down (as the 24/7 news cycle naturally does), as a technology, it continues to pose important questions. Most importantly, perhaps, are the possibilities for ways in which GAP will now continue to surreptitiously affect the methods and means by we come to view and understand art and the “original.”
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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The Dogs That Can Do Algebra
Noted science fiction author (and attractive brunette with a Ph.D. from Harvard in Chemical Physics ) Catherine Asaro recently made an appearance in my futures-predicting class. That’s futures with an s because, as we often discuss, at any given moment there is an inordinate amount of possible futures that can happen given the present parameters.
Category: The Gnovis Blog