Archive for the ‘Not Quite TV’ Category
The Scared Is Spread
I have a video to share with you: If you haven’t seen it, take the eight minutes to watch & enjoy. But there’s a good chance you’ve seen it, as it’s been viewed over 72,000 times (and counting) in the three days it’s been online. It’s been written about on Buzzfeed, Jezebel, CBS News, CBC, Yahoo!, Mashable, and many other […]
Filed under: Academia, Middlebury, New Media, Not Quite TV, Teaching | 10 Comments
Tags: spreadable, viral video
In my 18 years in academia, I’ve never been to the MLA convention – until now. For those who don’t know, the Modern Language Association is the largest humanities organization, and their annual convention is an iconic event, known as a massive academic job meat market and an object of mockery in the press for […]
Filed under: Academia, Conferences, Film, Narrative, Not Quite TV, Television | 2 Comments
Tags: David Lynch, MLA, MLA13, Mulholland Drive, seriality
Recently, my friend Annie Petersen took advantage of one of Twitter’s best functions for academics: crowdsourcing syllabus recommendations. Annie was looking for readings that provide a good introduction to semiotics, but are not impenetrable to novice students. I recommended this online visual essay by Tom Streeter (another friend of mine), which I’ve found quite useful for […]
Filed under: Academia, Media Studies, Middlebury, Not Quite TV, Teaching | 12 Comments
Tags: cultural studies, pedagogy, theory
In my pre-Germany post, I mentioned that one of the goals of the year was to provide some “productive disorientation” on the aspects of life I take for granted back in Vermont. Now that I am in my last week in Germany, I can see it has certainly achieved that goal in a wide range […]
Filed under: Academia, Not Quite TV, Sabbatical | 2 Comments
Tags: Göttingen, germany
Unmotivated Reading as Work
One of the most circulated and discussed articles in online academic circles last week was Bruce Henderson’s Chronicle piece arguing for the importance of acknowledging reading as a key part of our scholarly labor. I really liked this article, less for his coining of the awkward neologism “consumatory scholarship” to describe the practice of academic reading, […]
Filed under: Academia, Complex TV, Media Studies, MediaCommons, Not Quite TV, Open Access, Publishing, Reading | 2 Comments
Tags: peer review
One of the reasons I most enjoy studying the fan culture side of media studies is that fans can come up with some fascinating stuff, a boggling array of creativity discovered through the contraints provided by the source texts. I document some of the most interesting examples I’ve found in my chapter on “Orienting Paratexts,” […]
Filed under: Fandom, Film, New Media, Not Quite TV | 1 Comment
Tags: fan fiction, Under Siege
One of my academic hobby horses is Open Access, the movement to make scholarship freely available online. I’ve tried to model what embracing open access looks like through my own choices of where to publish, my practice of posting essays here pre-publication (and pulling the print publication when necessary), and my work with MediaCommons. I […]
Filed under: Academia, New Media, Not Quite TV, Open Access, Publishing | 6 Comments
Toy Story 3 and Serial Pleasures
On the eve of the Oscars, one of many award ceremonies that I’ve grown tired of watching, Inside Higher Ed posted an interesting little feature asking film scholars to weigh in on Best Picture. While I varyingly agreed, disagreed, and laughed at their points, I was shocked that none of the seven academics mentioned the […]
Filed under: Animation, Film, Narrative, Not Quite TV | 3 Comments
Tags: toy story
The other day a friend of mine Tweeted about the misuse of Marshall McLuhan in discussing the role of Twitter in recent political uprisings like in Egypt. As I often do, when I hear mention of Marshall McLuhan, my thoughts turn to one of my favorite scenes in one of my favorite films, Annie Hall: […]
Filed under: Media Studies, New Media, Not Quite TV | 7 Comments
Tags: annie hall, global village, mcluhan, twitter
The following post is only tangentially about television, being about the state of academic publishing as seen through the lens of one essay of mine (which happens to be about the television show Veronica Mars). So if you read this blog primarily for television thoughts and are not interested in the politics of academic publishing […]
Filed under: Academia, Copyright, Media Studies, New Media, Not Quite TV, Publishing | 21 Comments
Tonight in my Television & American Culture course, I screened Buying the War, an excellent Bill Moyers PBS feature detailing how the press allowed themselves to be co-opted by the Bush administration to enable the fraudulent war in Iraq. (If you haven’t seen it, check it out online.) The screening reminded me of this piece […]
Filed under: Media Politics, Not Quite TV | 3 Comments
Name one thing…
I write this on a day I’ve awaited for eight years: the final day of the George W. Bush presidency (also known as the Dick Cheney Vice Presidency). It’s hard to fathom how much has transformed over the past eight years, and thus I believe that Bush’s tenure will be regarded as one of the […]
Filed under: Media Politics, Not Quite TV | 14 Comments
Tags: bush, presidency
