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 …

Significant advances in technology are disruptive. They are beginnings. They are bifurcations. They are the initial conditions from which our media is born. As Jean Cocteau once put it, “The public does not like dangerous profundities; it prefers surfaces” (1972, p. 316). Feared and disparaged at first, technological contrivances are eventually welcomed in and change our world. They literally change our minds. They change our relationship with our world and with each other. Not unlike learning new words, every new advance is a new addition to our media lexicon. Our media …

In 1986, Tony James’ post-Generation X outfit Sigue Sigue Sputnik released a record that included advertisements between its songs (If you haven’t heard it, you probably should. It’s called Flaunt It). James explained the move saying, “Commercialism is rampant in society. Maybe we’re a little more honest than some groups I could mention… Our records sound like adverts anyway.” Though it was taken with the appropriate amount of irony twenty-five years ago, the idea was disruptive. Well, my good friend Dave Allen invited me to join him on a panel at SF MusicTech Summit this …

The turntable is easily the most iconic cultural artifact associated with Hip-hop, but the advent and adoption of the boombox had as much to do with its spread and tenacity. Before raps were on the radio, they were on the tapes. Think of the turntable and the microphone as the senders and the boombox and the cassette as the receivers: without recording and playback, Hip-hop wouldn’t have lasted long. The already choked socioeconomic conditions from which it sprang could’ve buried it like so much tape hiss. Two recent books explore …

With the recent finding that ants’ social networks are similar to our online social networks, “insect media” sounds like less of a metaphor and more of a direct analogy, but Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media: An Archeology of Animals and Technology (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) is much more than either. He hedges from writing metaphorically preferring to show how the evolution of technology is a system of assemblages and flows, much like those found in the insect world. Conflating the two presents its own problems (see my own rather cavalier …

Here’s the latest version of my “How to Do Stuff and Be Happy” talk, this time for Laura Brown’s “Professional Communication Skills” class at The University of Texas at Austin on April 29, 2011. The last few times I’ve done this talk, I’ve incorporated my thoughts on Tyler, The Creator and Odd Future, including his “Yonkers” video as an example of many of the things in the talk. The sound is still not great, but this is the best version I have so far.

Many thanks to Laura Brown for recording …

Zizi Papacharissi is an academic powerhouse. Whatever you’ve been doing for the last fifteen years, she probably makes you look lazy. She holds a Ph.D. in Journalism from my own University of Texas at Austin, an M.A. in Communication Studies from Kent State University, and a B.A. in Economics and Media Studies from Mount Holyoke College. Since getting those, she’s been busy: She is a professor in — and the head of — the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois-Chicago, the author or editor of three …

A wing is a bridge. Flight is a ride on that bridge from take-off to landing. Dinosaurs became bipedal, balancing their large bodies on two legs via counterbalancing tails. Eventually the same biological process—or set of processes between biology and environment—morphed wings, and thereby, flight. Using this transition as a metaphor is an trip we might do well to take.
Write to the nth power, the n-1 power, write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots! Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicities! Run lines, never …

I finally have a new piece up on the ESPN BMX site. This one is about the generational differences between first and second generations of riders. Heraclitus once wrote that generations turn over every thirty years. Well, it’s about that time.

You’re right, Roy, you’re hopeless. Hopelessly obsessed with a time in your sport that died a long time ago… — McGoo

Here’s an excerpt:

The experience of a BMXer today is much more likely to be mediated by technology than it was in the ’80s. Given the proliferation of technology …

There have been plenty of people touted to carry the mantle left behind by Marshall McLuhan — Neil Postman, Douglas Rushkoff, Paul Levinson, even Jean Baudrillard, but no one has been working more behind the scenes and under the radar to keep his legacy alive than his own son and sometimes co-author Eric McLuhan.

Eric McLuhan has amassed a significant body of work in his own right, including Electric Language (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998), The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake (University of Toronto Press, 1997), the forthcoming Theories of Communication (with Marshall), …