The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet it is the greatest of our miseries. - Pascal Met the creator of this video at a Media Ecology conference a few years ago. The idea comes from the book Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman. Read it.

The revolution will not (just) be televised.

… roughly a third of the most blatantly anti-Muslim films of the last century were made in the 1980s alone. These movies used sporadic atrocities committed by individual Islamic extremists (the Lebanon bombing, the Berlin bombing, etc.) to demonize all Muslims. Consequently, Hollywood’s go-to villain in the 1980s became the Muslim terrorist—whether it was “Iron [...]

Worth a read. “To be honest, so much of the rhetoric around the use of social media in Egypt and Tunisia makes me want to scream — folks act like these American tools just dropped from the sky like humanitarian food rations, set to save the people from their (American-supported, natch) dictators.” http://jilliancyork.com/2011/01/27/how-are-protestors-in-egypt-using-social-media/

ain’t really your life, ain’t really ain’t nothing but a movie. Repeat. Ad infinitum. Was reminded today, after reading a superb review of Thomas de Zengotita’s book Mediated, of how much my life resembles a B movie.  A really, really unoriginal B movie.  Thoroughly mediated.  Thoroughly cliche. Can you think of any moment in your [...]

great friends that I don’t deserve. I say this because despite how aggressively I might want to seek and create authentic connections in my life, I’m terrible at actually doing it. That ultimately means I’m terrible at cultivating friendships and giving them the attention they need to survive. It’s most likely a combination of my [...]