Recent Articles
On Target: Aura, Affect, and the Rhetoric of “Design Democracy”
If once we lived in a “system of objects,” today we live in a world of things. The era of mass consumption, awash in cheaply made gadgets and gizmos, has given way to a world in which every object is more than merely an object: each has become or has…From Consumer to Prosumer to Produser: Who Keeps Shifting My Paradigm? (We Do!)
Less than ten years after going mainstream, the Web returns to its roots as a read/write tool while entering a new, more social and participatory phase. Many interactive features of the Web have merged into a trend many now are calling Web 2.0 — “a new…The Park Pass: Peopling and Civilizing a New Old Beijing
The gates of Beijing’s famous parks open at daybreak. The largest crowds of park visitors stream through them between 5:00 and 8:00 a.m., a bit later in the coldest winter months. Though the gatehouses where admission tickets are collected are usually…Virtual Museums of Forbidden Memories: Hu Jie’s Documentary Films on the Cultural Revolution
The day after Bian Zhongyun, vice principal of a girls’ middle school in Beijing, was beaten to death by her students on August 5, 1966, her husband, Wang Jingyao, bought a camera and took pictures of her bruised, distended, and naked body.Secular Populism and the Semiotics of the Crowd in Turkey
Over the past several decades, commentators on Middle Eastern politics have been alternately surprised, scandalized, and seduced by the seemingly unexpected and contradictory relationship between secularism and popular politics.