In his introduction to The Overton Window, Glenn Beck insists that he is writing "faction", that is to say, factual fiction, and you'd be pardoned for giggling at the evidently unintentional and apparently unnoticed neological homophone that's produced in the contraction. Among the Window's many faults--plot points telegraphed so far in advance as to suggest that a time machine is at work; dialogue that makes the Saturday cartoons of my youth sound like Shakespeare--its persistent infelicity is the most vexing. Proper nouns are capitalized and the punctuation, although idiosyncratic, is mostly correct, so I've got to believe that there was an editor. Maybe a few. And yet:The moon was bright and his eyes were well adjusted to the darkness.(Well, maybe I'm giving the punctuation too much credit. That compound sentence desperately wants a comma.) No description escapes its own undermining. The sentence I diagrammed last week works just as hard against itself. After a jumble of images notable mostly for their increasing specificity, the conscious source of the sensation says that he's not sure he heard anything at all. It's one thing to say, "I thought I saw a car pull away, but I couldn't be sure." It's quite another to say, "I thought I saw a car pull away, definitely a late-model BMW, looked like it had a sport package with low-profile tires, and it was red, with PA license plate ABC-1234, and there was a black man approximately 6'3" driving and a white man who weighed about 155 lbs and had a scar over his eye in the passenger seat, but I couldn't be sure." In real life, of course, eyewitnesses tend to confabulate, to add details that they never saw, but as a descriptive device in a story, especially a "thriller," it's a fat fucking dud, draining momentum and urgency, fading into soft focus and filling everything with haze.Anyway, I come not to bury Beck, but to praise him! Sort of. The Overton Window, for all its manifold failures as a book, for all its infelicities and inconsistencies, for its schizoid sensibilities, actually--I swear to the baby Jesus--makes a simplistic but acceptable Marxist critique of the American state. I am not kidding. You have to look beyond the superficial stage dressings of American nationalism and generic anti-tax activism. In fact, the book convincingly identifies the political establishment as a subsidiary set of a more diverse ownership class who, through manipulation of public sentiment and political processes, have created a system of wealth expropriation for their own benefit. Haha, they're capitalists! It is a sign of the success of their real-life counterparts that Beck sings the praises of capitalism and calls them elites. But seriously, change the terminology and keep the lousy writing: this coulda been a freshman paper at Oberlin.

The primary goal of this class is to teach students about the culture of "print media" in an era when that culture is being joined (and in some cases, overtaken) by a culture that we might variously call digital culture, online culture, or the culture of the web.

William Empson's review of Raymond Williams' _Keywords_. "The book is continually interesting; never more so, from my point of view, than when it is plainly wrong; but it is usually right, I could not deny."

This wiki is a catalog of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction. We dip into the cauldron of story, whistle up a hearty spoonful and splosh it in front of you to devour to your heart's content.

The purpose of this project is to address theoretical questions relating to the digital production and storage of material contributing to the biography of a city, and the co-construction of digital representations of the city and the city itself. Moreover, it studies the web-based participation of experts and non-experts in the future policies, planning and cultural heritage of cities from an international perspective.

Finding the Celtic is an experiment to create an online digital humanities collaboratory for Celtic Studies funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This cultural search engine will give you access to artworks from several museum collections.

More than 7,000 items relating to Irish culture and heritage.

The ultimate irony of Watts's research is that, if you really buy it, the most effective way to pitch your idea is ... mass marketing.

Omeka is a simple and flexible system for organizations, cultural institutions, and individuals to manage and publish items, collections, and exhibits on the web.

When critical thinking becomes a way to condemn the system of production we depend on, to cast both business and pleasure as "evil", it can indeed be a bad thing: a sort of judgement without discovery.

People are even more powerful than information.

For more than a quarter of a century, Andrews McMeel Universal and its divisions, Universal Press Syndicate, Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, uclick, and AMUSE, have helped define American popular culture.

Prominent Virtual World designers, cyberpunk authors and the editor of a cyberculture magazine will engage in discussions with the audience and social scientists.

Sites documenting the changes made to various anime series when they were exported to the US.

A brief history of the office as a specialized building type.

Design and evaluation of digital record-keeping, archival, museum and other evidence-based information systems; metadata for recordkeeping, preservation, and cultural information.

In Atlanta, focus group participants liked the low cost of living, an airport hub that allowed easy travel and what they perceived as a diverse and open culture.

Textop will be a set of projects, managed by a strong collaboration among a global group of scholars, with the aim of organizing the information contained in books, dictionaries, opinionated essays, and news articles--and perhaps other sources--into a sin

How must we rethink network culture with a renewed emphasis on technical media and social software?

The objective of this project is the development of a set of e-culture demonstrators providing multimedia access to distributed collections of cultural heritage objects.

Whaling in the Faroe Islands has been practiced since at least the 10th century.

Bound By Law reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture.

Complete recordings of The Economics of Open Content Symposium held at MIT in January 2006.

The world suffers a silent phenomenon of "digital decay". This quirky realm is mostly populated by librarians, archivists and museum curators, plus the occasional anxious scientist and panicky megacorporate record clerk.

Because America has mortgaged it's social and cultural capital for less durable, less valuable financial capital, it is less and less able to innovate in a world, where the economic is deeply enmeshed in the social, the cultural, and the creative.

A specialist in the areas of media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities.

On March 11-12, 2006, Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society will host a symposium to explore the development and expansion of the metaphor of "cultural environmentalism."

A community site where people filter up the best videos on the internet.

Releases are signals now, ways to announce your identity or your culture's identity. Ways to differentiate yourself from what came directly before, to comment and flow futuristic with it.

Proposes several themes for the study of the blogosphere: economic influence, the convergence of sender/receiver roles, class and cultural representation, the constitution of digital identity and the limitations imposed by a digital divide.

There's a new restriction on content waiting in the wings--a "webcaster's right" that allows websites to control the dissemination of content they put up.

DJs may "not mix, remix, Segue, edit, change or otherwise manipulate the sounds of any Sound Recording so that the sounds on the Dubbed copy of the Sound Recording are different from those on the original Sound Recording."

Faceted classification of BBC Creative Archive clips.

For the first time in its history BBC News is opening its archives to the UK public for a trial period.

This website has been created to show the progress of an academic research into the netlabel scene and its social and technical consequences for our reality and putting it in perspective with the open content movement .

where are you GOING today? what did you LEAVE behind? what things did you BRING? how do you WEAR these things while youíre in motion? where do you PARK them when you stop? do you think you may have FORGOTTEN the most important thing?

This seminar will combine readings in theories of globalization and cosmopolitanism with case studies about the formation of a global consciousness through cinema and other audiovisual media.

We will take up themes—partially overlapping—that are connected to everyday life: codes of conduct (etiquette), taste, style, self-presentation, (house) work, time, space, privacy, and resistance.

It includes a knowledge model of intertextual studies, a standardised hypermedia document model and a prototype multimedia authoring tool for use in the publishing life-cycle.

Nearly a million programmes are catalogued, with descriptions, contributor details and annotations drawn from a wonderfully detailed controlled vocabulary.

Debates over the creative and emancipatory potential of vernacular culture will move us towards a critical theory of everyday life.

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia

A 92 minute 'round the world motion picture encounter with power objects and how people believe in them, filmed in dazzling High Definition digital video.

I decided to embrace the budgetary limitations of the project and create a flick using "trailing-edge technology" and all the detritus from our quickly accelerating technological culture.

Much as the growing strength of digital technology was tied to the rise of geek chic, the growing visibility of otaku culture worldwide seems symbiotic with the ascendancy of visual culture and communication in the 21st century.

Fair Use--"a privilege in others than the owner of a copyright to use the copyrighted material in a reasonable manner without his consent, notwithstanding the monopoly granted to the owner...

Conducts research in the social, ethical, and political dimensions of information and communications technology.

Collecting, storing and displaying one's entire life, for private use, or for friends, family, even the entire world to peruse.

Social theory for fans of popular culture. Popular culture for fans of social theory.

Interested in new technology, urban sociality, place and visual methodologies. She has worked on various commercial and interdisciplinary research projects within the fields of visual culture, art, technology design and sociology.

Our experiences developing the Habitat system, and managing the virtual world that resulted, offer a number of interesting and important lessons for prospective cyberspace architects.

The mission of INCITE is to provide a creative interdisciplinary space for research projects which explore the socio-cultural dimensions of technology use and design.

The people who make, download, and circulate mashups articulate a certain kind of cultural politics: one that imagines cultural expression not only as reflecting contemporary social relations but informing them.

A cultural anthropologist who studies new media use, particularly among young people in Japan and the US.

"Today, an endless, recombinant, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of creative product (another antique term?)."

The TAP KB is a shallow but broad knowledge base containing basic lexical and taxonomic information about a wide range of popular objects.

"If we are to encourage new kinds of creative expression, we have to accept that this will only happen if we allow our content to degrade into dust. Remix culture requires flexibility – the ability to reduce content to the single atom."

Could there be a pattern, a general structure to the way that cultural artefacts evolve?

Multicultural eating, rice boy, fashion diffusion, everyday power, urban graffiti, symbolic creativity, graffiti writing, everyday spaces.

Against commercial indie porn we demand a truly independent, open source pornography. Pornography should be made by all, a radically populist pornography of collectively produced, purely formal codes.

Dysfunctional business and political leaders cause the social, political and economic malaise afflicting America. It produces an MBA mindset that embraces the robber baron culture and Social Darwinism of market and Christian fundamentalism.

The interdisciplinary study of the design, uses and consequences of information technologies that takes into account their interaction with institutional and cultural contexts.

If you're at all interested in this book, ignore Hoan Chau's review...

This book came highly recommended to me...

This book attacks a fairly narrow question, "Why does a society with such a reputation for conformity chase such outlandish fads?" Donald Richie, a long timer writer on Japanese culture, tackles this in a series of essays on pachinko, the culture of...

In many ways this massive Yellow Pages-sized book sums up what I have always suspected about the visual arts in our time as such: That their greatness comes from the collective force of one-liners which are not all that arresting taken individually...

If you became stranded in the wilderness could you build a fire without the aid of matches or a lighter? If your car breaks down can you fix it? Could you build a house or even a cabin? Do you have the necessary knowledge to grow a garden or recognize...

As a literature professor, I have a professional responsibility to know about literary theory...

I started this book with high hopes that were quickly dashed...

Why more people don't know his name is beyond me...

Is it the music or the events surrounding the music? In any case, Greil Marcus' MYSTERY TRAIN is perhaps the most unusual rock criticism book in existence...

This is yet another wonderful collection of strange Japanese Comics...

This is a comprehensive survey of the anthropological study of human universals, human nature, culture vs...

Vacuous, mediocre, trite, cliched, dull...

Baudrillard's book will disturb you...

Judging this book by it's cover it must be a Ray Johnson Perfection with a P...