Where our individual perception meets the external world: that point of focus is the juncture between inner and outer space. It’s where we and nature find union. It’s the home of the muse, of inspiration, even of what have been called ‘angels’ which the visionaries saw shining in that meeting place between the eye of the observer and the light of the observed.

Objectives of state redaction as set forth by Muriel Rukeyser’s redacted file:

1. Render information illegible to make the reader aware of her/his position as one who will never access a truth that does, by state accounts, exist
2. Isolate text in time and instance
3. …

The danger in utopian thinking is that it can easily turn you into a pointless vandal. The more useful thing is to think of betterment as a process rather than thinking that we just have to get rid of the bad people and then everything will be okay. If you could have enough utopianism to question the world as it is and imagine how it could be better, I think that’s a wonderful thing, but if you take it too far, you actually undermine yourself. So, I would say, a like “homeopathic utopianism” I will support.

A sweeping interview about Silicon Valley and the possible shapes of the future with the man who coined the term “virtual reality.”

a concise history of amulets and an overview of amulet culture in Thailand.

The general introduction to the Siam Society’s special issue all about the topic.

“We’re on the way to enlightenment”, he said. “And on this way, what should we do?”

This article presents the phenomenon of TikTok monks in Cambodia and the question of whether it’s appropriate to use social media to preach the dharma.

Relative to controls, participants restricting digital media reported a variety of benefits, including higher life satisfaction, mindfulness, autonomy, competence, and self-esteem, and reduced loneliness and stress.

Succumbing to algorithmic complacency means you’re surrendering your own agency in ways you may not realize.

We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems.

The more people used Facebook at one time point, the worse they felt the next time we text-messaged them; the more they used Facebook over two-weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time.

On the surface, Facebook provides an invaluable resource for fulfilling the basic human need for social connection. Rather than enhancing well-being, however, these findings suggest that Facebook may undermine it.

I interpret the fin de Siècle through concepts and experiences of time and space that were reinterpreted in high culture, reworked by new communication and transportation technologies, and palpably manifest in everyday life.

The history of Facebook from its beginning ‘til now is the story of numerous crucial moments in the development of the internet: rubicons that can’t be uncrossed. It’s the story of the transformation of our behavior and the story of how legal rules built for the era of TV and print are struggling to keep up…

Stories don’t just kick you over the head with a new idea but they embed these ideas in a richly imagined world. When you read a text, you’re not just influenced by a pet theory some character may be peddling but you’re much more influenced by the kind of world that is being created: what kind of rules does this world follow? A story always has an implicit theory of causality.

Analysis of work practices in imaging units and hospitals demonstrates how each image intertwines aspects of a patient’s body, socio-technical features, and economic priorities in locally specific ways to constitute the body in medical practice and social life.

Despite the tendency of popular narratives to position MRI examinations as objective knowledge, these images are not neutral nor are they equivalent to the physical body.

He never wrote to me about his insecurities. In my 20s and 30s, I would have loved to know that he had this feeling, to hear him talk about the weight of being a newish adult so disappointed with yourself after imagining greatness…

This use case that Apple is proposing is a near exact replication of a technology imagined in Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 dystopian sci-fi film Strange Days.

The modern appetite for bingeing on box sets and multi-episode podcasts makes it clear that we are not losing the ability to concentrate, merely directing it towards different media. We concentrate when we want to.

“It’ll Be Alright on the Night” was an outtakes show. It compiled mistakes, technical errors, and flubs from television and film…

An homage to a moment of British television history and to those who put in the effort to do things well.

Over the past decade, social media platforms have penetrated deeply into the mech­anics of everyday life, affecting people’s informal interactions, as well as institutional structures and professional routines. Far from being neutral platforms for everyone, social media have changed the conditions and rules of social interaction. In this article, we examine the intricate dynamic between social media platforms, mass media, users, and social institutions by calling attention to social media logic—the norms, strategies, mechanisms, and economies—underpin­ning its dynamics.

During the Syrian crisis, the media formed part of what officials describe as constant pressure from many actors to respond, which they say led to policy failures. Syria’s conflict is a cautionary tale.

It is often said that the increasing availability and applicability of remote sensing technologies has contributed to the rise of what can be called ‘satellite-based activism’ empowering non-state groups to challenge state practices of seeing and showing. In this article we argue that NGO activism is not challenging the sovereign gaze of the state but, on the contrary, actually reinforcing it.

We report evidence that posts about political opponents are substantially more likely to be shared on social media and that this out-group effect is much stronger than other established predictors of social media sharing, such as emotional language.

Why social media is particularly divisive as a medium.

You will also need a writing implement and a blank sheet of paper, and you should find the darkest spot possible…

Take a few minutes to copy a text by candlelight 🕯️ and reflect on the experience 🪞.

A model lab report for this exercise can be read here.

… analysis showed virtual reality meditation to be significantly more beneficial than video meditation.

Word got around. The family’s library of physical films and books became a kind of currency. Neighbors offered bottled water or jars of peanut butter for access. The 1989 Tom Hanks comedy The ’Burbs was an inexplicably valuable commodity…

On the continuing relevance of movie disks in the era of streaming.

This is Marconi’s original equipment that he brought to England with him. This is his transmitter with an induction coil like Hertz’s and these balls concentrated the energy of the spark.

We want friendly, helpful software. Why wouldn’t we? Yet as we cede to software more of the toil of thinking, we are diminishing our own brain power in subtle but meaningful ways.

Gazing at a massive dam as it holds forth against the huge forces of a river, can we doubt that we are witnessing a marvelous feat of engineering, a triumph of human ingenuity over nature? Yet what a receipt does is no less remarkable and no less powerful, even if it is less immediately apparent, for it is holding forth against the ravages of time.

A history of “the document” and writing in all its forms.

No one asks how the tape worm benefits the host. What if consciousness is like that? What if it’s the cognitive equivalent of ‘junk’ DNA?

A sci-fi author and biologist ponders the significance of brain interface technologies.

The hefty steel speaker we hooked
over the passenger seat window.

The medium is the message.

The foundational text of media studies.

McLuhan explained how the affordances of technologies themselves reshape the humans around them.

A lot more subtle stuff changed during that election too: stuff that’s been forgotten because now it’s everywhere.

How the first televised presidential election (of 1952) forever changed politics.

Tell me how does it feel

How changes in technology precipitated a change in music.

To the person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This reflects the way in which, when that hammer comes into that circuit of mind, body, and world, it transforms how the world appears to us or what it makes us see the world as.

We’ve structured modern life in such a way that it’s easy to say ‘this isn’t my fault,’ that the machine made me do it…

The first portable audio recorder was made in 1945 by a man named Tony Schwartz.

For many Chinese speakers in China and elsewhere, experiencing or connecting with matters of religion often includes mediation through or with material objects. Such mediation is readily accessible to larger and larger audiences and often occurs through the consumption of religious material goods, thanks also to media technologies and the Internet. In this article, the author seeks to complicate the notion that the production and consumption of novel Buddhist religious goods can be analyzed solely in terms of ‘market theory.’ While on the one hand the author shows that Buddhist technologies of salvation are historically associated with materiality, she also contends that the ‘aura’ of Buddhist-inspired modern religious goods is not so much effaced as it is reconfigured and transformed by technological mediations.

For the komusō, the shakuha-chi was not just a musical instrument but a veritable Dharma instrument (hōki).

On the long history of new media being used by Mahāyāna Buddhists to “spread the Dharma.”

It’s better to think of democracy less as a government type and more as an open communicative culture.

People think “Sesame Street” teaches children to love learning, but what it teaches them is to love television.

…when you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face, you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon, you see yourself.

Perhaps the most important consequence of high-tech modernism for the contemporary moral political economy is how it weaves hierarchy and data-gathering into the warp and woof of everyday life, replacing visible feedback loops with invisible ones, and suggesting that highly mediated outcomes are in fact the unmediated expression of people’s own true wishes.

The key is to think of what we offer as a gift.

Some “sage advice” on how to find—and be—a “hero.”

Their power—contrary to common sense—originated from their miniature size and intentional rejection of their sacred prototype. Through these miniatures, the banal ritual of pagoda circumambulation was transformed into an imaginary journey to the distant holy land, which was believed to be more efficacious and meritorious than an actual pilgrimage, and the prairie of northeast China was turned into the most sacred place in the Buddhist world.

The brain scan image—a silhouette of the skull, highlighted with bright splotches of primary color—has also become a staple of popular culture, a symbol of how scientific advances are changing the way we think about ourselves.

While the number of nominal Buddhists is still relatively low in Denmark, Danes’ appreciation of Buddhism is high.

… true crime can never be my guilty pleasure because it’s a part of my history.

Literacy disrupted the continuity of the oral tradition and reoriented access to knowledge from the oral- and aural-sense world to the visual world.

How the emerging Mahāyāna movement in India capitalized on new technology (writing) to legitimate and spread their teachings, and how the new medium shaped them in turn.

I think if we had more of that kind of sensibility operating in our world today we might not be in the pickle we’re in now

On cultivating a sensitivity to our relationships with objects and the material world.

… the present feels as if it is constituted by emptying out the future to sustain a looping version of a past that never existed

A collection of philosophical essays by a celebrated artist grappling with our current, global predicament.

Avalanches above, business continues below.

The three major aspects of computer technology that most visibly have taken over older technologies are word processing, electronic communication, and the development of large scale archives of both text and visual materials. These in turn have led to many other changes that raise interesting questions about our professional life, including aspects of pedagogy, intellectual community, economics, ownership of our work and our texts, and, perhaps most importantly, the quality of our work.

We need to turn towards the Earth rather than think so much about abstract, higher worlds. This is the world that has made us, and it’s a creative world. It’s truly an extraordinary place, and we haven’t given it enough credit I think, or appreciation.

Growing tolerance toward Asian peoples and cultures was fostered in a mass-mediated environment in which the role of the visual image took on increasing importance. While this environment allowed a popular engagement with Asian religious traditions, it also relied on and reinforced certain racialized notions of Asianness and Asian religiosity. These notions form patterns of representation that, because they are linked to such positive images, go unchallenged and unseen.

This fascinating and compelling history of the “Oriental Monk” figure in 20th century American media shows how Americans came to have certain feelings and expectations (that is to say, stereotypes) about Eastern spirituality in general and monks in particular which continue to shape Buddhism to this day.