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Blog archive (and About)

What this blog site is about

I draw on philosophy and cultural theory to help understand current affairs, architecture and developments in digital technology. These are not opinion pages, though my strongly held view that academic reflection really matters as we try to understand contemporary living may seep through. These posts are scheduled to appear each Saturday (mostly) and for an unspecified period.

Many thanks to those who’ve contributed comments. WordPress sends me an email every time a comment is posted, even for comments on older posts. So I’ll endeavour to respond. Themes developed here form the basis of companion books for a course on digital media and culture. Suggestions are welcome. All pictures in posts are my own where not otherwise acknowledged.

This is also an experiment in abbreviation, and an experiment in using current issues as inroads to themes normally requiring lengthy argument.

Blogs home page
Roll over links to see summaries in some cases (starts with most recent)

Posts

  1. Hunch, symptom, clue
  2. Shadow of a doubt
  3. Inside out logic
  4. Marx on nonsense
  5. Nonsensical signs
  6. Diagrammatics 101
  7. Peirce decoded
  8. The power of ten
  9. What does a theory look like?
  10. Triadomania
  11. Semiotic shock
  12. Index fever
  13. Calculating belief
  14. Climate change and doubt
  15. Cracks and flaws
  16. Pointlessness
  17. On being clear and distinct
  18. AI and advertising
  19. What’s wrong with the sharing economy
  20. Troll farming
  21. Encrypted city
  22. Romancing the blockchain
  23. Share city
  24. How smart are smart contracts?
  25. Sign here ……………………
  26. Decode this
  27. An anti-hacker puzzle
  28. Why hackers have to work hard
  29. Immutable data
  30. Dark web anonymity
  31. The sarcophagus at the end of the Anthropocene
  32. Postcard from Chernobyl
  33. Wasting time in the bit economy
  34. Is the Internet really evil?
  35. Digital money
  36. Is it ok to cite web pages in academic writing
  37. Fake followers
  38. Reverse analytics
  39. Outsiders
  40. What’s wrong with accelerationism
  41. In bad taste
  42. Politics as art
  43. Emotional targeting
  44. Automatic writing
  45. Reverse image search
  46. Armchair postmodernism
  47. You have reached your destination
  48. Brainwalks
  49. End of nature
  50. “Deconstructing” the curriculum
  51. Less of one and more of the other
  52. Inmate takes over the asylum
  53. Network Nature
  54. Garage labs and biohacks
  55. Extreme tweeting for professionals
  56. Unaugurate
  57. No retreat: 360 video and the visible camera operator
  58. The dark net wilderness
  59. Biocentrism
  60. The biolingual architect
  61. Slime and goo
  62. Lifeless architecture
  63. Archi-memes
  64. Are humans just machines for propagating tweets?
  65. What is nature for?
  66. Web of nature
  67. Self-reliance and the accessorised self
  68. The end of DIY
  69. Your post-human descendants are simulating you
  70. What does architecture represent?
  71. What’s the point of symbols?
  72. Whatever happened to architectural semiotics?
  73. On being unbalanced
  74. Is 360 degree video more real?
  75. Is post-truth politics a thing?
  76. The magic circle
  77. What happens when the machine stops?
  78. The well tempered intellectual
  79. Nature as the site of hermeneutical play
  80. Digital “detox”
  81. Video game semiotics
  82. Pokémon Go versus Ingress
  83. Biosemiotics
  84. Machine genomics
  85. Only design will save Europe’s future
  86. The great debate debate
  87. Shakespeare on nature
  88. Forests that think
  89. There’s an app for that
  90. Reading the book of nature
  91. One with nature
  92. Nature in retrospect
  93. Smarter surfaces
  94. Mixed feelings
  95. What’s wrong with postmodernism
  96. Sentient spaces
  97. Nature games
  98. Champions of the Anthropocene
  99. Goodbye Holocene
  100. How to be interesting
  101. Cute and cuddly
  102. The best there is
  103. Evaluating the flipped classroom
  104. Flipped classroom 103: Engagement
  105. Flipped classroom 102: What a performance!
  106. Flipped classroom 101
  107. Animating spirits
  108. Thinking naturally
  109. Shape-shifting architecture
  110. Trauma and fauna
  111. The wisdom of animals
  112. Is cyberspace real?
  113. Unnatural acts
  114. What’s wrong with the force
  115. Cover up
  116. Testing ethical acuity
  117. The hermeneutical intractability of Asimov’s three laws of robotics
  118. How to make a case out of a post
  119. How animals make us think
  120. Stupidities (Why cartoons have animals 3)
  121. Wonders exposed
  122. Like this
  123. AI and imagination
  124. Big corpus
  125. Post-digital humanities
  126. Refugees have smartphones too
  127. Big Data: a non-theory about everything
  128. Big data metaphysics
  129. What’s wrong with post-digital cultures
  130. Am I post-digital?
  131. When did we become post-digital?
  132. Indexcess
  133. The enormous fly wheel
  134. Best intentions
  135. How geometry aids recollection
  136. Blood lines
  137. The empathy bus
  138. Attending to the world
  139. How to grow a project
  140. Bear in the park
  141. A sudden prospect
  142. Aha moments
  143. Frustration
  144. The Internet as research tool
  145. Introducing hermeneutics to an architectural audience
  146. Natural enemies
  147. Interactive architecture
  148. Milking human kindness
  149. Copy edits
  150. Divided cities
  151. Design hermeneutics revisited
  152. What have the arts to do with ethics?
  153. Academic writing and publishing online
  154. Brand melancholy
  155. Poiēsis
  156. Nature and the city
  157. Remaking the city
  158. Making nature
  159. Windowphilia
  160. Profoundly bored
  161. Against empathy
  162. The animal within
  163. Rich media overload
  164. Vertigo on a stick
  165. The singularity paradox
  166. The big book of hermeneutics
  167. Unsuccessful failure
  168. The hook
  169. Even more radical pedagogy
  170. After dark
  171. Emotional labourers
  172. Good morning melancholia
  173. Losing it
  174. Writer’s block
  175. Do digital devices influence your mood?
  176. Nature versus smartphones
  177. Back of shop
  178. Social media help you to believe what you want to believe
  179. Looking backwards
  180. Eye contact
  181. Space dehomogenised
  182. Where does happiness happen?
  183. Emotional words
  184. What’s wrong with the digital humanities
  185. Emotional contagion
  186. Mood and movement (and dance)
  187. You are now free to move about the cabin
  188. What do maps do?
  189. Moods and movies
  190. A step up
  191. Zeitgeist busters
  192. Mood and movement (and trams)
  193. How bored is your dog?
  194. Time and tide wait for no one 
  195. Born of the Earth
  196. Deconstruct that! 
  197. Nature-deficiency disorder 
  198. Refuge 
  199. Go outside and play 
  200. Why cartoons have animals 2 
  201. Music makes it better 
  202. Life-changing technologies 
  203. Unlocking nature’s secrets 
  204. Moody atmospheres and electric auras 
  205. The online scholar: A guide for PhD students
  206. Wet and wild
  207. Betwixt and between
  208. Humanities in the wild
  209. Turning the corner
  210. Gathered round the hearth
  211. Genius headgear
  212. Showing off
  213. What’s wrong with parametricism
  214. Architectural pragmatics
  215. Frequent feelings
  216. Morphic fields
  217. Enchanted places
  218. How to slow down time
  219. In meditative mood
  220. Voices without bodies
  221. The cult of the book
  222. The benefits of walking
  223. Feeling free in flight
  224. Why experts are better than algorithms
  225. What’s wrong with posthumanism
  226. Bad metaphors
  227. What I really meant to say
  228. Absence of melancholy
  229. Internet as evidence
  230. The hegemony of good taste
  231. Buying time
  232. Let’s play
  233. Art challenges life
  234. Derrida for stand-ups
  235. Melancholy urbanism
  236. Some wild life
  237. Signature city
  238. Cappuccino epidemic
  239. Pride of place
  240. Mastering the universe
  241. Freeways in the sky
  242. Howling at the moon
  243. Accentuate the negative
  244. As the mood takes you
  245. Digital mood modifiers
  246. I’m in the mood for love
  247. The past is a construct of the mind
  248. Why music reaches the parts that architecture can’t
  249. Delayed gratification
  250. Pros and cons of Google Scholar
  251. What’s wrong with the future
  252. Are you aware of your brain?
  253. Mood machines
  254. Soft fascination
  255. The melancholy medium
  256. Your inner child
  257. Well-being and geometry
  258. The brain in the city
  259. Oblivion
  260. Swinging
  261. Shallow reading
  262. Richard on the Holodeck
  263. Loose ends
  264. Pleasure with malice
  265. Is the high street ruining the Internet?
  266. The happy medium
  267. Ambient wit
  268. Interpretation by design
  269. Web of belief
  270. Lego logics
  271. What does it all mean?
  272. Old enough to know better
  273. Universities as interpretive communities
  274. Shōjo Manga morals
  275. Vitruvius does steampunk
  276. What’s a modem?
  277. Brand me
  278. Cooperation or complicity
  279. Manifestos and madness
  280. The bliss of ignorance
  281. Interpretive communities
  282. Making friends
  283. Bodies in motion
  284. Audience disengagement
  285. Spem in Alium
  286. Situationist International and the mood of the times
  287. We are all entertainers
  288. How the Internet kills curiosity
  289. Melancholy and media
  290. Mad crowds disease
  291. Unearthing the trickster function in Icelandic myth
  292. Maximum graphic
  293. Synesthesia anesthesia
  294. Crowdfunding in the gift society
  295. What’s wrong with this picture?
  296. Ambience on demand
  297. Heidegger and vertigo
  298. Nomadology and colour
  299. Intoxicated by colour
  300. Haunted by media
  301. Posh boys and mirror neurons
  302. Why cartoons have animals
  303. Exaggeration
  304. Bauhaus geek
  305. Data waste
  306. The eye of the beholder
  307. Urban occupy
  308. Conservative hermeneutics
  309. Architectural unconscious
  310. Mystery philosopher fakes own death
  311. What buildings want
  312. Panoptic man
  313. Circles and how to get out of them
  314. Le Corbusier’s error
  315. Meditation on a blunt instrument
  316. The opposite of architecture
  317. The reception of architecture
  318. Arboreal architecture gets wrong end of the stick
  319. Pictures devour reality
  320. Inconspicuous architecture
  321. Kim Jong-Il orz
  322. Countercultural values
  323. Why ask?
  324. Almost to infinity
  325. What has science got to do with it?
  326. After affects
  327. Sequel-baiting
  328. The quantification of the intellect
  329. Network notion
  330. Amnesiac machines
  331. 3D passive unrealities
  332. Accidental people
  333. De-generation
  334. Neuroscience eclipses AI
  335. Game noir
  336. Play anywhere
  337. What are audiences for?
  338. Portable memories
  339. No way logo
  340. Thought transfer
  341. A nation addicted to smartphones
  342. The secret life of games
  343. Phone hacking enigmas
  344. What were the skies like when you were young?
  345. E-motion
  346. LOL Security reproduces the trickster function
  347. Obliquitous computing
  348. Reality re-structured
  349. Computer-supported collaborative distraction
  350. All watched over by Ayn Rand
  351. I am Spartacus
  352. Against understanding
  353. Being practical
  354. This is not a hideout
  355. Digital metaphors and the baroque
  356. No-thing as it seems
  357. Now is the winter of our disconnect
  358. The Creosote Code
  359. Derrida for Architects (index)
  360. Hygienic reality
  361. Wicked problems revisited
  362. The sublime indifference of waves
  363. We are all multiples
  364. Architecture as the last fortress
  365. The king’s speech impediment
  366. Profile yourself (Narcissus on line)
  367. Otaku architecture
  368. Electronic commerce, philosophy and the Greek city
  369. Zero Stars
  370. Superlatives
  371. Walking the line
  372. Travel guidelines
  373. Silent night
  374. Chasing the line
  375. Making a noise
  376. Computer images and realism
  377. Derrida and WikiLeaks
  378. Brain Scans and Creativity
  379. Architectural remainder
  380. Architecture and Music
  381. Being David Hockney
  382. The Future is Unremarkable
  383. Transilience
  384. Hermeneutics and ethics
  385. Design-led research
  386. Research is a grey area
  387. Written any good books lately?
  388. Mass media schedules and generation Y
  389. Where is that sound?
  390. The Internet as hypertext or archive
  391. Tuning as …
 Pages

  1. Structuralism in architecture: not a style but a tool for critique
  2. The one and the many
  3. AI article
  4. Architectural Theory
  5. Branded Meeting Places
  6. Branded Meeting Places Final Report
  7. Heidegger on technology
  8. Secrets of writing for the web
  9. Wired-Up Words
  10. Writing texts that flow
  11. Computers in Practice Report (PDF)
  12. Conference Proceedings: Universities as Interpretive Communities 1993 (PDF)
  13. Conference Proceedings: Gadamer, Action, Reason 1991 (PDF)
  14. MSc by Research in Digital Media and Culture

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