Archive: The Gnovis Blog
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Photography: Experience Versus Expectation
I’m still six weeks or so away from my end-of-semester vacation to Budapest and I’ve already compiled a mental list of the must-haves. I’ll be packing a week’s worth of clothes, those 99-cent toiletries you find hidden in the back corner of a pharmacy, a few cynical books on media theory (yes, I read them for pleasure), my running sneaks, two iPods, a travel guide book, avocado flavored lip balm and, most, importantly, my camera. And all this got me thinking about the last few class discussions we’ve had in Mark Crispin Miller’s Media Criticism course.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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NYT, WTF? (In defense of Socrates)
A recent column in the NYT about morality has me outraged. In The End of Philisophy, Brooks distinguishes the ‘old’ view of morality originally championed by Socrates, and a ‘new’ view of morality put forth by contemporary psychologists, cognitive scientists and “even philosophers.”
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Wrap-up: Media for the Good and the Goofy
This week on gnovis, the use of media (from the hipster glasses to old-school Museums) was the topic. We have filtered the Fools to bring this week’s wrap-up.
On gnovis
Lauren tackles the ephemeral and ever changing tastes of the hipster. “Asking how the modern hipster came to be begs many questions around the diffusion of cultural meaning via new media technologies, the paradoxes inherent with trying to create a counter-culture within a capitalist model, and whether a true counter-culture is even possible at this moment in Western society given our increasingly globalized world.” I was particularly fond of her historical account of the changing definition of the term on UrbanDictionary.com.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Machine in the Museum: new media and the traditional museum
After reading these two very different new interactive approaches to museums,
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Internet pranks, hoaxes, and jokes
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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What Can We Learn By Learning About Hipsters?
Hipsters, we’ve all seen them, and most of us can probably point them out in a crowd. At the moment, the term “hipster” calls to mind a certain breed of twenty and thirty somethings that exist in most metropolitan cities in America.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Wrap-Up: Wrestling with Academic, Economic, and Scientific Complexities
This week on gnovis, around CCT and beyond the halls of academia, issues of complexity emerged as a common thread of popular discussion. Authors reflected on the ever-growing complexity of our globally-linked economy, the commodification of everything (including the presidency!), and the future of interdisciplinary research. Some thoughts on the ways in which complexity is complicating our lives…
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Zittrain was on to something
It seems Zittrain was on to something. As I watched Apple’s announcement of the iPhone 3.0 OS, I was happy as an iPhone user and developer that they were making definite strides in their SDK and user experience. However, I sat there and thought “Zittrain was right”.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Profiting from Progress
I was thumbing through the pages of a recent issue of Newsweek when a full-page ad snatched my attention. The words “commemorative,” “keepsake,” “collectible,” and “one-of-a-kind” adorned the ad, which evoked patriotic rhetoric and powerful imagery. This pitch could have been selling the American people a million things – a model airplane, a stamp collection or a vintage train set.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Researchers at LANL Invite You to Celebrate the Interdisciplinarian Within
One particularly illuminating aspect of the thesis writing process has been situating my interests in the existing disciplines. Right now, I would say I fit somewhere in the intersection of human geography/economic sociology/anthropology of markets with an STS twist. Very exact, I know. For those of you similarly confused about where in academia you might find a home after graduation from CCT (and taking into consideration whatever unrelated major you studied in college and whatever odd or professional position you may have held), scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) have a tool that can help: a detailed graphical chart showing the interconnected relationships between the various academic fields.
Category: The Gnovis Blog