The Onion

Here's a useful image and caption from The Onion satirizing hypermediation.

Glenn Beck

Glenn Beck's War Room seems to perfectly exemplify premediatory logic. In fact, the show begins with a warning that Beck is not providing "predictions of what will happen, but what could happen." Even though Beck assures us that he's "not doing this show to scare [us]," the hypermediated environment is awash in explosions, natural disasters, and other apocalyptic imagery clearly designed to modulate affect rather than provide information. (Incidentally, this new media landscape is brilliantly satirized in Stephen Colbert's Doom Bunker).

GeeWiz: Mobile Tagging

I was flipping through a magazine when I came across this symbol. If your phone is "smart" enough, you can take a picture of this tag and it will tell your phone's browser to take you to the associated website. It also allows you to remember the location of this tag (i.e. a poster on a bus stop) for later. Microsoft's website (yes, this development is one of theirs) notes that this type of tag is smaller and more versatile because it requires less space to store the same amount of information compared to older barcodes and tags. You can also make tags and adhere them to your own personal swag.

This seems like a pretty powerful development that goes hand-in-hand with smarter phones like the iPhone and recent Blackberries. I like how it makes possible a deepening of our print media, and beyond that, a deepening of physical space. Since I have yet to find an image search engine that is not text-based, this seems like a first step in that direction as well. Assuming these, or some similar form of tagging takes off, it seems like a big step toward a new type of connectivity.

Redacted Rebuttal

Since we screened Brian De Palma's Redacted in class, some of you might be interested to know that Gary Sinise is helping to produce a rebuttal film called Brothers at War. The article in the print version of the Detroit Free Press indicates that Sinise is convinced that "Brian De Palma hates the American military." What I found most fascinating, however, is the fact that "Sinise says he never saw Redacted."

This is nothing new, of course. In my field of religion in film, this happens often; for example, many of the Christians who protested the release of Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ or Ron Howard's The Da Vinci Code refused to see the films. But I still find the phenomenon difficult to explain. Is it defensible to be offended by a film you haven't seen? What psychology underlies such a reaction?

"Kings" Should be interesting

When I saw the trailers for NBC's new series, Kings, I was intrigued. Every week, the trailers changed to provide more insight into what a viewer might expect from the show. At first, I thought the narrative might fit into the apocalyptic mode, but after a few weeks, I saw something different and came to a new conclusion.

Doubting myself, I hesitated to write about it on this or any other blog for fear of being incorrect. Time Magazine eclipsed me in their next issue as they write to confirm my suspicions.

Kings is a remediation of the Biblical story of David and Saul found in the books of I and II Kings.

I will wait until the show actually debuts tomorrow on NBC before I add to my thoughts.

Justin, this show and Big Love (on HBO which I have never seen) might be of some interest in your heretical studies.

Have a good break, everyone.

Grass-Mud Horse

Check this out:

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/03/02/china-more-on-grass-mud-horse/

Rush Limbaugh's GOP?

Does it matter that the Obama administration has conflated an agent of the media with a political party? Does mass media = political party? Is this a change in the topology or structure of the media?