Author: basildababneh

In her essay “Poor Meme, Rich Meme,” Dean states that “blackness was always ahead of its time, always already a networked culture and always already dematerialized, thanks to the Middle Passage.” Dean further ends her piece by a turn to queer ways of being and knowing in a networked world, suggesting that “the meme teaches … Continue reading The Queerness of Rendering Blackness in a Networked World

The Get Me Roger Stone documentary was quite baffling to me, not particularly because of the content or its titular character, but primarily its tedious form and uncritical production. As Nick mentioned in class on Wednesday, the documentary’s exposé form seems to be generated by the filmmakers’ excitement about their unprecedented access to the interviewees … Continue reading Montaging News Clips in Get Me Roger Stone

This week I was particularly intrigued by Ian Bogost’s “Gamification is Bullshit” piece in The Atlantic. In his polemical essay, Bogost outlines an anti-gamification argument on the grounds of its popular use as a recent marketing gimmick. Bogost even re-labels gamification as “exploitationware” created by marketing consultants with the sole purpose of deception and profit, … Continue reading On Gamification and Generating Concepts

In the first chapter to Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige characterizes subcultures as classed youth formations. He articulates the ways in which subcultures challenge hegemony through resistant and “unnatural” style rather than simply through overt ideological articulations. I am particularly curious about Hebdige’s investment in the first chapter in drawing a lineage from … Continue reading Hebdige: Style, Subculture, and the Unnatural