42 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2024
    1. On X, meanwhile, there is a self-propagating system known as “the culture war”. This game consists of trying to score points (likes and retweets) by attacking the enemy political tribe. Unlike in a regular war, the combatants can’t kill each other, only make each other angrier, so little is ever achieved, except that all players become stressed by constant bickering. And yet they persist in bickering, if only because their opponents do, in an endless state of mutually assured distraction.
  2. Jun 2024
    1. Overall, this alternate cri-teria of assessment (in relation to Rubin) is indeed tenable because,as Menand noted, by the mid-1960s “the whole high-low paradigm”would “end up in the dustbin of history,” replaced by a “culture ofsophisticated entertainment.”25

      This would seem to be refuted by the thesis of Poor White Trash in which there was still low brow entertainment which only intensified over time into the social media era.

    2. Middlebrow Culture

      this nudges me to ask the question: what sort of culture was John Waters creating in the early 1970s onward?

      He was juxtaposing queer culture with that of the prurient, the comedic and the ideas of "trash" and counter-culture to subtly shift the cultural milieu in which he was living and participating. His satire and subversiveness made his content more palatable for the masses which also allowed him to make more mainstream material which still pressed the boundaries while allowing him greater access to audience.

  3. Feb 2024
  4. Sep 2023
      • for: doppleganger, conflict resolution, deep humanity, common denominators, CHD, Douglas Rushkoff, Naomi Klein, Into the Mirror World, conspiracy theory, conspiracy theories, conspiracy culture, nonduality, self-other, human interbeing, polycrisis, othering, storytelling, myth-making, social media amplifier -summary
        • This conversation was insightful on so many dimensions salient to the polycrisis humanity is moving through.
        • It makes me think of the old cliches:
          • "The more things change, the more they remain the same"
          • "What's old is new" ' "History repeats"
        • the conversation explores Naomi's latest book (as of this podcast), Into the Mirror World, in which Naomi adopts a different style of writing to explicate, articulate and give voice to
          • implicit and tacit discomforting ideas and feelings she experienced during covid and earlier, and
          • became a focal point through a personal comparative analysis with another female author and thought leader, Naomi Wolf,
            • a feminist writer who ended up being rejected by mainstream media and turned to right wing media.
        • The conversation explores the process of:
          • othering,
          • coopting and
          • abandoning
        • of ideas important for personal and social wellbeing.
        • and speaks to the need to identify what is going on and to reclaim those ideas for the sake of humanity
        • In this context, the doppleganger is the people who are mirror-like imiages of ourselves, but on the other side of polarized issues.
        • Charismatic leaders who are bad actors often are good at identifying the suffering of the masses, and coopt the ideas of good actors to serve their own ends of self-enrichment.
        • There are real world conspiracies that have caused significant societal harm, and still do,
        • however, when there ithere are phenomena which we have no direct sense experience of, the mixture of
          • a sense of helplessness,
          • anger emerging from injustice
        • a charismatic leader proposing a concrete, possible but explanatory theory
        • is a powerful story whose mythology can be reified by many people believing it
        • Another cliche springs to mind
          • A lie told a hundred times becomes a truth
          • hence the amplifying role of social media
        • When we think about where this phenomena manifests, we find it everywhere:
  5. Jun 2023
  6. Mar 2023
  7. Feb 2023
  8. Oct 2022
    1. A recent writer has called attention to apassage in Paxson's presidential address before the American Historical Associationin 1938, in which he remarked that historians "needed Cheyney's warning . . . not towrite in 1917 or 1918 what might be regretted in 1927 and 1928."

      There are lessons in Frederic L. Paxson's 1938 address to the American Historical Association for todays social media culture and the growing realm of cancel culture when he remarked that historians "needed Cheyney's warning... not to write in 1917 or 1918 what might be regretted in 1927 and 1928.

  9. Aug 2022
  10. Jun 2022
    1. The second was “makedance pay for the dancers.” I’ve always been resentful of the fact that some of theso-called elite art forms can’t survive on their own without sponsorship andsubsidies. It bothers me that dance companies around the world are not-for-profitorganizations and that dancers, who are as devoted and disciplined as any NFL orNBA superstar, are at the low end of the entertainment industry’s income scale. Iwanted this Broadway-bound project not only to elevate serious dance in thecommercial arena but also to pay the dancers well. So I wrote my goals for theproject, “tell a story” and “make dance pay,” on two blue index cards and watchedthem float to the bottom of the Joel box.

      Given the importance of dance in oral cultures, what, why, and how has dance moved to be one of the seemingly lowest and least well paid art forms in modern society?

      How might modern dance regain its teaching and mnemonic status in our culture?

  11. Apr 2022
  12. Feb 2022
  13. Jan 2022
    1. “youth culture”

      Definition: Youth culture refers to the societal norms of children, adolescents, and young adults

      • today's societal norms I feel like would revolve around the likes of something such as Tiktok. The app that blew up over quarantine is definitely something that I feel creates modern "youth culture". Almost everything from the hottest celebrities, and fashion and makeup trends, to sabotaging political activities is found within this app.
  14. Dec 2021
  15. Nov 2021
    1. The purpose here is not to reinvestigate or relitigate any of their cases. Some of those I interviewed have behaved in ways that I, or readers of this article, may well consider ill-judged or immoral, even if they were not illegal. I am not here questioning all of the new social codes that have led to their dismissal or their effective isolation. Many of these social changes are clearly positive.

      This sounds a lot like the article How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life though in that case it was a single instance and these examples here may go beyond social media.

      Though I'm curious if all of them will entail social media as a (major?) factor in how they played out.

  16. Sep 2021
  17. Jul 2021
  18. Mar 2021
    1. So Substack has an editorial policy, but no accountability. And they have terms of service, but no enforcement.

      This is also the case for many other toxic online social media platforms. A fantastic framing.

  19. Feb 2021
  20. Dec 2020
    1. SOC is added to E. coli cells to aid recovery after exposure to high salt concentrations and heat shock in many chemical-based DNA transformation protocols

      Elbing and Brent, 2002, Green and Sambrook, 2012

  21. Oct 2020
    1. Human evolution produced gossip. Cultural anthropology sees gossip as an informal way of enforcing group norms. It is effective in small groups.

      Gossip evolved as a strategy to enforce group norms and it is effective in small groups.

  22. Sep 2020
    1. Nutrient Agar is a general purpose, nutrient medium used for the cultivation of microbes supporting growth of a wide range of non-fastidious organisms.
    1. Different nutrient media were used for selective cultivation of bacteria: kanamycin esculin azide (KAA, Merck Eurolab, Darmstadt, Germany) for enterococci, and Chromocult® agar (Merck) as a selective agent for Enterobacteriaceae. For the heterotrophic plate count the bacterial dilutions were plated on R2A agar
    1. R-2A Agar is formulated as per Reasoner and Geldreich (5). Stressed or injured organismsduring water treatment are unable to grow on high nutrient media, since the faster growing organisms outgrow the former(2). Therefore the use of a low nutrient medium like R-2A Agar incubated for longer incubation periods allows these stressedorganisms to grow well.
    1. MacConkey agar is selective for Gram-negative organisms and helps to differentiate lactose fermenting gram-negative rods from non-lactose fermenting gram-negative rods. It is primarily used for the detection and isolation of members of family enterobacteriaceae and Pseudomonas spp.
  23. May 2020
    1. In medieval learned cultures (all the material in this volume was producedin learned, even academic circles for purposes of reading and new compo-sition), such a thorough mixing of media, especially the visual and the ver-bal, was commonplace

      This sounds much more like the "learned" world in the modern era using multi-media on the internet.

  24. Jan 2019
  25. Feb 2018
    1. While it’s foolish to assign coherent political meaning to Rodriguez’s film, it cannot be denied that the machete is a powerful symbol of violent, popular revolt, a tool/weapon freighted with centuries of significance.

      Media shapes culture, culture shapes society, and society can shape politics. It is cultural examples such as these that really show how influential media can be. Especially in movies that glorify tools to be weapons. Haltman states that there are metaphysical aspect that embody culture.

  26. Apr 2016
    1. massmediarefers to those means of transmission

      When I ask students to post on Youth Voices, I'm asking them to participate in mass media. It's a big jump for some who do very little by friend-to-friend communication.

  27. Sep 2015