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