Author: klsanders

Aria Dean situates black social media, and in particular black memes, in a larger historical circulation of blackness. The African diaspora prefigures the mediated, deterritorialized self of the contemporary black internet user, and blackness continues to be disseminated “through the aggressive circulation of videos that document black death or violence in general against black people” … Continue reading Black Memes, An Archive

I’m interested in the concept of meaning making in games and the boundaries for meaning in regard to the game and the world. In “Game Mechanics, Experience Design, and Affective Play,” Patrick and McDonald discuss two theorists on opposite sides of the spectrum: McKenzie Wark and Steven Jones. For Wark, the procedural rhetoric of a … Continue reading Make Meaning, Look at a Landscape, Take Down Capitalism

The chapter “Toward a Method/ology” in Whitney Phillips’ book This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (2015) led me to think more explicitly about the methods employed in this week’s reading in relation to the written component which acts as a medium through which the researcher translates and transfers their findings to a reader. … Continue reading Detachment Versus the Gravity of Lulz

In the first chapter of Subculture: The Meaning of Style, Dick Hebdige argues that subcultures use style as a means of resistance against societal norms and expectations. Already-coded materials are reappropriated from mainstream culture to create an often fragmentary and contradictory set of ever-evolving practices (gestures, clothing, etc.). These practices constantly change because they are … Continue reading Style and Genre?