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The recent coronavirus outbreak both in China and worldwide has become a breeding ground for conspiracy theories. According to a recent Washington Post article, “roughly 2 million tweets peddled conspiracy theories about the coronavirus” in a period of three weeks since the outbreak began to spread across the world. In “A Riot of Conspiracies”, Fine … Continue reading Conspiracy Theories and the Coronavirus Outbreak

Perhaps this is a knee-jerk reaction, but while we've seen many times and in different contexts how games can obviously be incredibly useful for pedagogical purposes, I'm not sure how to feel about Quest to Learn School approach using such an encompassing level of gamification. The use of interactive chatbots or "teachable agents" to test … Continue reading McGonigal, Duolingo, Gamified Education

CMST 67XXX Media Heterotopia Course Description This course explores the current digital media environment through the lens of cinema and media on a global scale. It questions how media works have been presented, represented, produced, circulated, and consumed and theorizes the current temporality with readings from film and media studies, new media studies, race studies, … Continue reading Media Heterotopia: A “Syllabus”

The two chapters of Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken assigned for this week provoked extremely different responses in me. The systems she describes in chapter 7—the "life-management" game Chore Wars, the "organizational ARG" of NYC's "Quest to Learn" curriculum, and the therapeutic "concept" ARG Superbetter—produced flashbacks to my own dabblings with "gamifying" aids in attempting … Continue reading Collective speculations and unnecessary obstacles (re: McGonigal)

The emergence of the digital economy creates new questions on work, labor and class. The conceptual difficulties in approaching digital labor, in part, is due to the increasingly blurred boundary between production and consumption. Cultural products designed to be consumed (such as online games) transforms into a site that both affective and traditional labor takes … Continue reading Workers of China, Unite (On GitHub)!

In “Weibo, WeChat, and the Transformative Events” by Deluca et al, the authors discuss the power of social media to generate “wild public screens” and give rise to activism and free expression, in spite of the active and often overwhelmingly powerful censorship apparatus employed by the authoritarian Chinese state. In this post, I wanted to … Continue reading China’s Social Media and the “Fifty-Cent Party”

Jane McGonigal's introduction to Reality is Broken is utterly refreshing, as it dares us to think about direct, generative potentials of games for our current reality. After working through last week's readings on employing small tactics to disrupt reality, or inventing our freedom as dividuals within flows, it's cool to hear someone just flat out … Continue reading Let’s Fix Reality! but like the most neutral version, without the culture and stuff.

Tiziana Terranova writes that “far from being an ‘unreal’, empty space, the Internet is animated by cultural and technical labor through and through, a continuous production of value that is completely immanent to the flows of the network society at large” (33). Another way she phrases this is that the internet relies on “free labor” … Continue reading “Free Labor” and the Semblance of Free Labor

A good amount of the reading this week felt overly dense to me, but the Wendy Chun reading touched on some issues relating to identity in the age of the Internet as it specifically relates to the gig economy. When she describes "'We' as a temporary network weapon," in a way, I feel like that's … Continue reading Wendy Chun and the Gig Economy

I originally wrote this as a reply to Sasha’s post, but subsequently realized that it was large enough to post on its own. So, that’s what I’m going to do! I’ve been thinking a lot about the use of the notions like ‘surfing’ and ‘surfaces’ in the readings for Wednesday. Sasha pointed out in his … Continue reading Surface/Depths in Massumi’s Politics