New MediaTheory

Defiance is the second Holocaust movie from Hollywood I’ve seen recently. I wrote about the deeply ironic Good here, which explores the idea that in the late thirties people in Germany – Germans and Jews alike – didn’t realize the implications of Hitler’s anti-Semitism. While Good asks us to set aside our historical knowledge about [...]

Jodie Whittaker and Viggo Mortensen in Good I saw the film Good a couple of nights ago which deals with denial in Germany in the thirties as a way of talking about how easy it is to fool ourselves ‘anywhere and everywhere’ – as Scottish Jew C.P Taylor,  the author of the play on which [...]

Librarian Emily Walshe’s Kindle e-reader: A Trojan horse for free thought in the Christian Science Monitor, argues that the Kindle’s access without ownership is dangerous. Why is this important? Because Kindle is the kind of technology that challenges media freedom and restricts media pluralism. It exacerbates what historian William Leach calls “the landscape of the [...]

Richard Fernandez in a recent post at the Belmont Club said that when complex systems break down we don’t know how they will reconstitute themselves – only that they will. Put another way, it is what Rumsfeld called a known unknown. While Fernandez had the entire political economic system that has prevailed since WWII in [...]

When Microsoft released their public Beta of Windows 7 a few weeks ago their servers couldn’t handle the demand. In fact when I went looking a day or so ahead of time to see what would be involved I got server errors. Paul Therrott said in his Windows Weekly podcast No 90 with Leo LaPorte [...]

  The roos were indifferent as usual, even to Gude’s Law. As I contemplate Obama’s inauguration what comes up for me in terms of Newmediatheory is the theme I have been discussing in recent posts. How new technological environments make us collectively and individually numb as we struggle to come to terms with a new [...]

Haviv Rettig Gur  in the  Jerusalem Post writes Coordination is Putting Israel Ahead in the Media War looks at how the the Israelis are fighting the media war in the present conflict. Unlike in previous military crises, “we have close coordination and unified messages between agencies,” says Yarden Vatikai, the director of the National Information [...]

(The defenestration of Prague  1618-Wikipedia) I can’t honestly tell if the Palin brouhaha is causing a serious problem for the Obama campaign, but I’m pretty sure its causing one in the established media aka the MSM. I have to say that I find The Anger Factor by Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz preposterous and [...]

I don’t intend this post to be partisan because I try my best with newmediatheory to avoid partisanship.  I want to put my main focus on some of the media ramifications of the Palin nomination. That said, the Palin nomination is a surprising political move and has made me realize two new things. First, John [...]

Earlier this year, I was walking a pair of Jack Russell terriers, along the Inter-coastal waterway in West Palm Beach with my son Julian after watching a Clinton Obama debate. My son remarked “I bet we wont see that in the papers tomorrow.” He was referring to Obama’s statement that if al Qaeda made a [...]