In my research on nerd culture, I have been trying to distinguish between, on the one hand, an understanding of subculture as a kind of identity position or “imagined community” (Anderson 1983) and, on the other hand, a “subcultural scene.” The distinction here is between an abstract and trans-local field (the subculture) and a...
For those of you who know me, it’s no secret that I’m a great admirer of the work of cartoonist Joe Sacco. For years now, Sacco has been producing what he calls “comics journalism,” a mix of auto-biography and reportage in the style of the “new journalists.” These are, to me, some of the...
Although my friend and colleague, Jay McKinnon , has pointed out in no uncertain terms its limitations and weaknesses, I couldn’t resist trying out the Google N-Gram Viewer. For those of you even farther behind on the digital humanities bandwagon than I am, this application allows one to search for keywords in the Google...
The latest issue of the graduate communication studies journal that I helped found, Stream: Culture/Politics/Technology, has been posted. It has the proceedings of this year’s Nelson Conference, where I presented a paper called “Subculture Theory and the Fetishism of Style.” The article contains a rough and ready introduction to the “post-subcultures” critique of the...
Colleagues and I just completed reading Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. We had all been seeing scads of references to this book and were quite keen on reading it. However, we were all rather underwhelmed by Hardt & Negri’s account of the emergent possibilities...