Jul 18, 2010 | Digital Media/Internet, fan culture, Film, Print Media, Television, Uncategorized, Volume 17
‘If the Author is Dead, Who’s Updating Her Website?’, asks provocatively a Harry Potter fan in the title of her article published in an online fanzine (Angua 2006). And in this short sentence she seems to encapsulate the whole tradition of literary criticism, from...
Jul 18, 2010 | Games, Older Media, Print Media, Uncategorized, Urban Space, Volume 17
On January 21, 1942, pinball machines and their operation were made illegal in New York City. Raids on pinball venues—arcades, bars, and shops—commenced immediately, and thousands of the machines were seized within the following weeks. The banning of pinball in the...
Jul 18, 2010 | Film, Older Media, Television, Uncategorized, Volume 17
Media matters, Friedrich Kittler reminds us. Without media the world is senseless, or rather we are senseless before it. More importantly, media matter in different ways such that the world mediated via pen and paper is essentially different from a world mediated via...
Jul 18, 2010 | Uncategorized, Volume 17
“And now the rosy-finger’d morn appears, Shows every mournful face with tears o’erspread, And glares on the pale visage of the dead.”~ Iliad XIV 110 (Trans. Alexander Pope) "Darkness and light, strife and love are they the workings of one mind? The...
Nov 18, 2009 | Games, Uncategorized, Volume 16
‘[U]se’ is a hopelessly ambiguous or wide word, just as is the word ‘meaning’, which it has become customary to deride. (J.L. Austin, How to Do Things With Words) Language, it is commonly held, describes or reports on some state of affairs. Statements can thus be...
Nov 18, 2009 | Games, Uncategorized, Volume 16
In the face of social imperfections, videogames are habitually condemned for their violent themes and role in debauching the innocence of the young (Buckingham & Bragg 2004). This article presents findings taken from a two-year funded project [1] that gathered...
