Technology
An institutional act of selective preservation or a hipster sound medium
Record
A "shocking" time in history
Modernity
A way of ordering discrete sequences into a whole, Williams says it keeps us in a passive and receptive state
Flow
He studied everyday life in the modern city. I guess you could say he was something of a flâneur himself
Walter Benjamin
The name for the window above your door. Watch your head!
Transom
A paradox where the more control you seem to have over your computer's interface, the more you are being controlled by it
User-Friendly Ideology
An "anxious" form of reading that puts its faith in the power of interpretation to expose the truth
Paranoid Reading
According to Foucault, it refers to both this occupation's legal ownership of and the sense of authority they have over interpretations of their works
Author function
The Swiss founder of semiotics
Saussure
This place is famous for its "electrifying" abundance of signs and advertisements
Times Square
The meeting of music and the desires/drives of the body
Sonorous Envelope
Kittler believes it lead to the instrumentalization of the human life
Industrialization/Standardization
Slippery and suggestive, it goes beyond the everyday use of language to influence us at a secondary level of connotation
Myth
She's famous for studying the printing press and the "myth" of Gutenberg (not that kind of myth!)
Elizabeth Eisenstein
An alternative to Windows and Mac for the paranoid computer enthusiast!
Linux
Interface
More a mode of presenting information than a form of information itself, it's characterized by over-interpretation with only a tenuous relationship to the truth
Paranoid Style
A hybrid of oral and literary cultures; maybe you've seen it on the news or heard it on the radio!
Secondary Orality
For him, the medium is the message and the massage. Anything goes with this crazy canuck!
McLuhan
The study of signs
Semiotics
The abstract, timeless ideals behind the mere "shadow" of reality that we perceive
The Forms
The process of imbuing something with magical powers, Marx believed it was responsible for masking the human labour that goes into the production of commodities
Fetishization
It's what happens when the ordinary flow of information is interrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
Information Catastrophe/Crisis
Colonial power is all about gunpowder, compasses, and the printing press for this breakfast-food philosopher
Bacon
This concept refers to shortening of modern attention spans to the length of a commercial
Televisual Time