From Kembrew McLeod:
Word up! I want to introduce my alter ego, RoboProfessor, who just finished a dance music video about digital sampling and copyright law, with an interactive component. Here’s the website: http://www.robotainment.net/musicvideo
Also, below is all the info you need about next week’s launch of Copyright Criminals. Please forward this to any interested parties, and feel free to post anywhere!
Best,
-KM
Can you own a sound?
Copyright Criminals, a documentary produced by Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod, examines the commercial and creative value of musical sampling, including the ongoing debates about artistic expression, copyright …

Culture is technology-driven William Gibson once said, and, with the proliferation of digital media, the aphorism is less and less debatable (if it ever was). If technology is indeed the engine and infrastructure of our culture, then understanding it is tantamount to understanding ourselves.
The books written on the topic could fill a library, and two recent ones caught my eye. The first attempts a broad-reaching macro-view. Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves (Free Press, 2009) promises not only to get to the bottom …

In the mid-1990s my friend Dave Allen published a zine called “The Clutter of Pop” (followed by a record of the same name). In one of them he wrote an essay about the glut of entertainment media choking our attention spans. I’ve long since lost the zine and I can barely remember Dave’s insights, but I do keep thinking about it in light of the ever increasing glut since its publication.
It is often said that  we only use ten percent of our brains. While that’s not exactly true, we often …

“The tape cassette is a liberating force…” proclaimed Malcolm McLaren thirty years ago. “Taping has produced a new lifestyle.” Cassettes made recording and customization possible. Cassette players made listening on the go possible.

More than any other subset of culture, youth culture was created — and is enabled — by technology. The telephone supposedly created the Teenager, and even if it didn’t, those formative years of the socialization process wouldn’t be the same without the dialtone (even metaphorically), and for my generation, the same could be said for the cassette tape.
“Home …

In the early 90s, AT&T ran a series of commercials that posed some futuristic, technologically enabled task (e.g., “Have you ever borrowed a book from thousands of miles away?”), and then answered it emphatically (“You will.”), claiming they’d be the company to technologically enable such a task. I believe they’ve all come to pass except one. As Stewart Brand once said, “Technology marches on, over you or through you, take your pick.”

I can’t help but think that many of the technological advances we debate and marvel about were downright inevitable. …

For my latest piece for Daniel Pinchbeck and Ken Jordan’s web publication, Reality Sandwich, I poached and updated a few things I’d written about here. Here’s an excerpt:
Technology curates culture. As such, the alienation we feel from our technologically mediated “all-at-once-ness” (as McLuhan called it) comes from a disconnection between physical goals and technology’s “help” in easing our workload.
“For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life,” Alice Kahn once quipped, “please press three.”  I’m not anti-technology, but I have been trying to …

Sandra Ordonez from OurBlook, which is named after a portmanteau of “blog” and “book” and whose tagline is “Today’s Voices, Tomorrow’s Solutions,” asked me a few questions about citizen journalism and whether or not it could save newspapers.

In his book Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (Pantheon, 1999) James Gleick described the need for natural pause. Email allows one to heatedly and immediately respond to an off-handed message, where even FedEx gives one a day to cool off, to think it over, to sleep on it.

I was raised by record stores. That’s where I went when my mom was grocery shopping or whatever. I was in Peaches or Coconuts or Camelot or whatever suburban chain had the racks. It was a childhood of digging in the crates, gawking at album covers, and occasionally buying a 12×12 cellophane square to take home, open, and spin.

In 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006),* Daniel Pinchbeck extends Heisenberg’s idea that observation influences the observed into a Hegelian wordview that consciousness constitutes the core of reality, as if the physical world and our perception of it are merely two sides of the same phenomenon. Taken wholesale, it’s not quite solipsism, but it’s close. Either way, the veneer between the two is definitely permeable, but one needn’t believe in magic to see how.