Starting from Scratch

By Justin Wyatt

James G. Webster. The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age.  MIT Press, 2014.  268 pp.

The task of understanding media consumption today is fraught by endlessly-morphing means of distribution, ways of engaging, and abilities to co-create media content.  To think that four decades ago, media consumption was led primarily by three television networks, local print newspapers, and a handful of national magazines! 
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Low Theory

By Matt Applegate

McKenzie Wark. Telesthesia: Communication, Culture, and Class. Polity Press, 2012. 241 pp.

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is the new and enduring object of political and intellectual inquiry for the Left in the United States. Indeed, like the 1999 Seattle WTO protests before it, OWS is perhaps more momentous, more impactful, or even more ‘revolutionary’ in its after-effects and in its memorialization than it was in the time and space of its production.
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