The Amulet Culture of Thailand (A free, 9-page article from 2021)
Tags: #Modern #Buddhastatue #MediaStudies #ThaiBuddhism
https://buddhistuniversity.net/content/articles/amulet-culture_mcbain-paul
What is scandalous today and what dynamics can be unleashed online to pull users into a #scandal? In this new article, we analyzed a feud between Andrew #Tate and Greta #Thunberg as a case of "self-scandalization" in which outraged #audiences affectively contribute to cross-platform attention for polarizing figures. This is the first publication from our project "EXPOSING: The Public Value of Socio-Mediated Scandals in the Digital Age". https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13675494251329722
#Commodon #mediastudies
TikTok’s Viral Monks Are Clashing With Buddhist Authorities (A free, 6-page article from 2023)
Tags: #Cambodia #Modern #Monk #MediaStudies
https://buddhistuniversity.net/content/articles/tiktoks-viral-monks_kelliher-fiona
How do recommendation algorithms shape science content on social media? Weizenbaum scholars Clarissa Walter & Sascha Friesike have investigated this question in a two-year ethnography at a German Public Broadcast Service.
Read their paper via JCom: https://jcom.sissa.it/article/pubid/JCOM_2402_2025_A02/
How do we teach #students to search beyond #Google?
Our new #OpenAccess article in the spotlight shows how teaching students to move beyond Google-style searching can lead to unexpected discoveries and more in-depth engagement with archival content and tools.
Read our interview with the authors:
https://www.rug.nl/library/open-access/blog/open-access-publication-in-the-spotlight-for-the-month-april-2025
Another pre-print from me: "»I Program my Home Computer«. Discourse and Computer Archaeological Localizations of a Technology" - where I try to define "home computer" as a term, a technology, and a media historic event:
U.S. media history is pretty straightforward, honestly.
PhD Students at the Universität Basel!
Fields of Study:
- #History
- #ArtHistory
- #AncientHistory
- #Egyptology
- #English
- #GermanLiterature
- #LatinStudies
- #MediaStudies
- #Musicology
- #Philosophy
Deadline: April 27, 2025
OUT NOW: My new monograph: Feeling Colour: Chromatic Embodiment in Film Culture, 1950s–1960s. Explore how midcentury cinema's vibrant colours reshaped sensory engagement, emotions & cultural perceptions. Blending media studies, biology & emotion theory, this interdisciplinary study is perfect for film scholars & beyond! Discover here: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0380
#filmstudies #mediastudies #colourTheory #colourculture @OpenBookPublish
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Today is the deadline for submitting chapter abstracts for the book proposal "Victimhood Identities in Mediatised Politics and Culture".
Follow the link for more information and submit a short 200 word abstract. 
https://affectemotionandmedia.wordpress.com/publications/
#Commodon #mediastudies
Come to Lisbon and let's talk about affect, emotion and media 
Submit your abstract until 28. February to contribute with your research! https://www.icnova.fcsh.unl.pt/call-for-abstracts-2025-ecrea-workshop-of-the-temporary-working-group-affect-emotion-media/
Of the many directions one's thoughts could take in listening to this, I'm thinking most of Andrew McStay's book, "Emotional AI." Quick thread… 1/8
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/25/podcasts/the-daily/ai-chatgpt-boyfriend-relationship.html
Ana Knežević explores the intersection of internet memes and art history, analyzing how memes appropriate classical artworks and redefine their meaning in digital culture. Read her study in the INSAM Journal: https://doi.org/10.51191/issn.2637-1898.2022.5.8.150
Also by her:
“Writing and Reading Digital Art History” by Ana Knežević examines the evolution of art history in the digital age, highlighting changes in media while arguing that core methodologies remain unchanged. It explores authorship, collective writing, and distant reading in digital projects.
https://www.academia.edu/38335846/Writing_and_Reading_Digital_Art_History
In 1973, a brilliant critic named Stuart Hall created a diagram that changed the way we study media, and could help you survive this moment. Just dropped: the second letter in my series about how to analyze the media in a time of crisis. It's all about codes. https://buttondown.com/thehypothesis/archive/the-man-who-discovered-media-codes-and-how-to/ #media #stuarthall #mediastudies #discourse
I'm (hopefully) finishing my book manuscript this semester and have started a blog where I'll informally post ideas I'm working through. If you're having a particularly boring Saturday night, here's the first post (which gives a big nod to @ftripodi ).
https://unevenly-distributed.ghost.io/distribution-and-procedural-rhetoric/
Wie blickt eigentlich eine #KI auf den #OpenMediaStudiesBlog? Unsere studentische Hilfskraft Lars Hadeler hat sich dieser Frage angenommen: https://mediastudies.hypotheses.org/6710 #MediaStudies #DigitaleMethoden #OpenAccess
For anyone bringing #AI into their teaching this term, Tom Haigh just shared the syllabus for a new course titled "A Short History of Artificial Intelligence" (based on his forthcoming book). The supplemental readings offer a nice slice through the literature, from subject area experts to popular perspectives.
The paper also attempts to popularize(?) the term "slothwashing", coined in a Twitter discussion of #California oil lobbyist behavior!
Out now in Communication, Culture & Critique 
#MediaStudies #Petrocultures #EnvHum (?)
@commodon
That link 
is open access right now but I don't know if it's limited in how many clicks, etc. If it's not working & you want to see the paper, lmk!
One of the most incessant statements you hear from right-wingers is that they think the left pathologizes their ideas and motivations.
But as usual, this is just deflection.
Reactionaries absolutely love pathologizing progressives. But they're really terrible at it since they don't have sociological data, so usually it just devolves into fundamentalist gibberish, as in this profile of historian Niall Ferguson.
It's absolutely laughable: https://archive.ph/RoSNu
![Atheism is a religious faith, as opposed to the simpler I-know-nothing helplessness of agnosticism. In my view atheism requires much more magical thinking, a much more radical ordering, or disordering, of the facts of life and the universe, to sustain itself than does Christian belief. Often in an atheist life, there’s a crisis of unbelief, a sudden realisation of the terrifying void of nothingness, the existential nihilism, that atheism postulates. It goes without saying there are countless good people who are atheists. But human beings are believing and searching creatures; the sense of God lies deep in every human heart.
Back to [Niall] Ferguson: “The first phase was that as a historian I realised no society had been successfully organised on the basis of atheism. All attempts to do that have been catastrophic. That was an insight that came from studying 18th, 19th and 20th-century history. But then the next stage was realising that no individual can in fact be fully formed or ethically secure without religious faith. That insight has come more recently and has been born of our experience as a family.”](https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/785/731/619/023/029/original/a95876350afad828.png "Atheism is a religious faith, as opposed to the simpler I-know-nothing helplessness of agnosticism. In my view atheism requires much more magical thinking, a much more radical ordering, or disordering, of the facts of life and the universe, to sustain itself than does Christian belief. Often in an atheist life, there’s a crisis of unbelief, a sudden realisation of the terrifying void of nothingness, the existential nihilism, that atheism postulates. It goes without saying there are countless good people who are atheists. But human beings are believing and searching creatures; the sense of God lies deep in every human heart.
Back to [Niall] Ferguson: “The first phase was that as a historian I realised no society had been successfully organised on the basis of atheism. All attempts to do that have been catastrophic. That was an insight that came from studying 18th, 19th and 20th-century history. But then the next stage was realising that no individual can in fact be fully formed or ethically secure without religious faith. That insight has come more recently and has been born of our experience as a family.”")
