After a decade of teaching at the university level, David Preston decided to stop ignoring the ills we all know haunt those halls and dropped back to high school. He’s now trying to reform a place that desperately needs it. I got the chance to participate in a discussion with his literature and composition classes, thanks to David, Ted Newcomb, and Howard Rheingold, all of whom are hacking education in various ways. I can tell you with no reservations that David is making the difference. I want to keep this …

Grant Morrison describes his growing up through comics books as a Manichean affair: “It was an all-or-nothing choice between the A-Bomb and the Spaceship. I had already picked sides, but the Cold War tension between Apocalypse and Utopia was becoming almost unbearable” (p. xiv). Morrison’s first non-comic book, Supergods (Spiegel & Grau, 2011), is one-half personal statement, one-half art history. It’s an autobiography told through comic books and a history of superheroes disguised as a memoir. His early history of superhero comics is quite good, but it gets really, really …

It’s December and time to reassess the year, and 2011 is a joy to revisit. It was easily my best year ever personally. I signed a book deal, spoke at several conferences with some of my best friends, got engaged to a wonderful woman, built some new bikes, redesigned my website (finally), and finished coursework and comprehensive exams on my way to a Ph.D., among other things.
This year was crazy, from the death of Steve Jobs and Occupy Wall Street to the ramping up of some sort of political …

I spent my undergraduate years working at record stores. Not surprisingly, the lulls behind the counter were largely spent talking about and sharing music. We’d all bring in our small CD cases, each stocked with a dozen or so discs for the shift. There was a lot of judging and clowning, but even more sharing and putting each other on to new sounds.
When I first got an iPod in 2003, I thought the practice would continue. Around the time that I procured my refurbished player, my friend Chang came out …

In our most tranquil dreams, “peace” is almost always accompanied by “quiet.” Noise annoys. From the slightest rattle or infinitesimal buzz to window-wracking roars and earth-shaking rumbles, we block it, muffle it, or drown it out whenever possible. It is ubiquitous. Try as we might, cacophony is everywhere, and we’re the cause in most cases. Keizer (2010) points out that, besides sleeping (for some of us), reading is ironically the quietest thing we do. “Written words were meant to evoke heard speech,” he writes, “and were considered inadequate until they …

In 1997, I wrote a piece about turntablism for Born Magazine called “Band of the Hand.” Years later, I wrote a related piece for Milemarker‘s now defunct Media Reader magazine, called “war@33.3: The Postmodern Turn in the Commodification of Music.” I’ve been revisiting, remixing, and revising these previous thesis pieces ever since. I eventually combined the two and posted them here, but I’ve also written other things that spin off from their shared trajectories.
This week, I am proud to be guest-tweeting for Mark America’s remixthebook (Univeristy of Minnesota Press, 2011). In addition, I posted …

Yep, nearly five years after its release, Follow for Now is now available at BookPeople in Austin, Texas. As you can see in the photo below, it’s in the General Science section, and I am quite proud.

It’s also in Cyberculture & History, and right now, in the New Arrivals.

So, if you’re in Austin and don’t have a copy, stop by and get yours.
Many thanks to Michael McCarthy and everyone at BookPeople for their support. And to you for yours.

Since I attempted to brand and explicate the Advent Horizon idea, the following clip has been circulating online. “The new generation is growing up with more digital than print media,” deigns The Huffington Post. “They play with their parents’ smartphones, tablets, laptops. We guess It’s only natural that they examine items that don’t respond to touch — and then move on to the things that do.” Danny Hillis once said that technology is the name we give to things that don’t work yet. I think this baby would disagree with that statement …

The passing of Steve Jobs has sent millions of people into reflection and reverie, and begs questions of the possibilities of repeating his vision and success. “Will there ever be another Steve Jobs?” asks one publication. While another contrarily claims that he “was not god,” still others iconize him, call him a tech-messiah, and lament his passing with something just short of worship. As agnostic as I’ve been computer-wise, I’ve always been a fan of the man, but does the death of Steve Jobs mark the end of a human …

Though he’s better known as the paragon of paraspace, in the Sprawl of his numerous novels, William Gibson has explored the future of cities as much as any urban theorist, expanding upon the topography of late 20th-century exurban development with astute accuracy. “The record of futurism in science fiction is actually quite shabby,” Gibson says in an interview in the Paris Review. “Novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written. As soon as a work is complete, it will begin to acquire a …