Blogging 101

Blogging 101
: Blogging journalist Chris Albritton is now a blogging teacher at NYU and you can watch his students’ blogs (link from the list on the right). There are restaurant reviews; there’s poetry; and there’s this bit of criticism from Roshan Abraham, which amused me:

Doug Rushkoff’s Blog – Rushkoff used to be a kind of countercultural figure and a leading “cyberculture” expert, back when that title made any sense. (The trendier term is now “technoculture”, I believe, even though it means essentially the same thing and makes it sound like a discipline doomed to evaluating bad KTU dance compilations. Who comes up with this stuff?) He hasn’t had much interesting to say since he published the dizzyingly weird, hyperbolic book of cyberculture ethnography Cyberia in 1994. Then he went on to become a media pundit, writing Media Virus!, where he not only defended Beavis and Butthead as an implicit, countercultural project that taught viewers how to criticize the television from their seats, but he used the term “meme” in the incredibly broad, vague and useless sense that has currently become chic with livejournal users and adbusters enthusiasts alike….

Media critic v. media critic.

I’ll be watching with interest.

3 responses to “Blogging 101”

  1. Yehudit Avatar

    What a coincidence! I was just reading the comments on my latest Rushkoff post. Follow these links back to more than you ever wanted to know about Rushkoff’s recent attempts to parlay his “cyberculture pundit” credentials into a position as cutting-edge theorist of post-modern Jewish identity. Unfortunately he refuses to face the fact that he doesn’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about, so he decided that Judaism isn’t ready for his brilliance and he’s “not going to be a Jew anymore.”

  2. red Avatar

    Okay..so can anyone out there define meme? I am obviously lost in the fog because I can’t figure out what it means.

  3. KMK Avatar

    A meme (pronounced to rhyme with “dream”) is a thought or idea.
    – NOUN: A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another.
    – A self-replicating unit of cultural meaning, as understood by biologist Richard Dawkins. Transmitted socially among individuals of different generations, memes evolve through processes of mutation and natural selection. Thus, for example, the jingles sung by children while skipping rope, the conventional standards for fashionable dress, and the notions comprising the “common-sense” view of the world are all passed on through time, gradually modifying without any deliberate guidance.