Lockdown #2: Publications Update
I admit this second lockdown is proving much more productive than the first one: I am consuming much more cultural content online (I hated all my feeds just a few months ago) and as a consequence I’ve been inspired to write and publish more. Here’s a quick recap.
For starters, some seeds I planted a while ago also started surfacing, so I made a couple additions to my Academia profile. Short summaries below.
This is a submission draft for an upcoming book chapter about how the affordances of Instagram Stories and YouTube dissing compilations intersect with the networked identity of the celebrity “gangsta” in trap, drill, etc. It’s an adaptation from a chapter of my phd thesis, so it centers tagging (as in: @-ing users in Instagram Stories) as a form of “dramatization of evil” (Tannenbaum, 1938). Another fitting description of the text would be: “Scorsese meets Goffman”. Also relevant if you’re interested in explorations of masculine celebrity online, social stereotyping VS self-branding, and generally the “making of the criminal” in the age of social media.
Book review of “Tactics of Interfacting” by Ksenia Fedorova
During the summer I read and reviewed a book for Visual Studies. Tactics of Interfacing is a precious resource for both media art aficionados and those interested in a critical take on the cultural implications of new media, also in their more commercial applications. Fedorova’s focus is on the embodiment of technology and its tendency to expand our experience, which is clear since the table of contents: across the four chapters of the book, the author ‘zooms out’ from the face to the body, from individual consciousness to the environment around us. We are thus not talking about a strictly bound body, but a relationally expanded one. Just like the human selves Fedorova writes about, each chapter of the book is then an assemblage of theoretical concepts, personal accounts, commercial gadgets, and media artworks.
Apart from the links above, the writing I’ve done has not been very academic. If you subscribed to my newsletter project letdown comedy you know I have been quite active, and while I don’t have a ton of subscribers yet I am quite satisfied with the stuff I’ve been putting out there.
The first newsletter is about the new Borat movie, and why I am not too excited about it. Beyond the new Amazon release, I discuss the character in general, why it’s grown old (along with a whole genre of comedy that I used to be obsessed with), and other stuff that proves Sacha Baron Cohen has still more cards to play.
The second edition revolves around Donald Trump, satire, and how effective impressions and other forms of appropriation of his image have been and could be in the future. This one is a little more theory-heavy than the Borat one, but not too much. Give it a read regardless and tell me what you think.
The third episode discusses cringe comedy through the character of David Brent (from Ricky Gervais’ The Office) and its influence on more recent series. The shows I mention do not necessarily have a lot in common, but in my opinion they can all help us reflect on the changing relationship between creative individuals and late capitalism.
That’s it. Hope you are safe and well wherever you are, and that next time we meet will be in person.
