Imitating and Innovating a Critical Television Studies Model for Communication

This project imitates a television studies model of criticism by innovating a critical mixed-methods approach for communication scholars. Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz posit a television studies model that comprises examination and analysis across four key tenets in the TV encoding/deocoding process: programs, audiences, institutions, and contexts. In order to meet the criteria of these four tenets, I employ genre theory and autoethnography as a way to intertwine these intersecting communication factions. I limit my scope to the post-Sopranos or post-Network era of cable television dominance and triangulate focus between three dominate producers of dramatic television output in HBO, FX, and AMC. These three cable networks provide a healthy sample from which I close read or close watch and rhetorically recap select dramatic series—including Sons of Anarchy, Game of Thrones, and Hell on Wheels among others—in an effort to examine their social, cultural, political, and ideological meaning making. Ultimately I contend that not unlike the television studies model itself, contemporary television programming and cable drama series in particular utilize a unique brand of genre-mixing iconicity. In addition, cable series collectively indicate an emerging genre convention I identify in the rotten aesthetic. Through a diverse series of critical analyses, I argue cable televisual programs, audiences, institutions, and contexts constitute and communicate multiple conflicting values. Thus these texts and paratexts can be said to contain rhetorically rich polyvalence that individually and collectively warrant a critical television studies model to be imitated and innovated within communication studies

Critical Programming: Toward a Philosophy of Computing

Beliefs about the relationship between human beings and computing machines and their destinies have alternated from heroic counterparts to conspirators of automated genocide, from apocalyptic extinction events to evolutionary cyborg convergences. Many fear that people are losing key intellectual and social abilities as tasks are offloaded to the everywhere of the built environment, which is developing a mind of its own. If digital technologies have contributed to forming a dumbest generation and ushering in a robotic moment, we all have a stake in addressing this collective intelligence problem. While digital humanities continue to flourish and introduce new uses for computer technologies, the basic modes of philosophical inquiry remain in the grip of print media, and default philosophies of computing prevail, or experimental ones propagate false hopes. I cast this as-is situation as the post-postmodern network dividual cyborg, recognizing that the rational enlightenment of modernism and regressive subjectivity of postmodernism now operate in an empire of extended mind cybernetics combined with techno-capitalist networks forming societies of control. Recent critical theorists identify a justificatory scheme foregrounding participation in projects, valorizing social network linkages over heroic individualism, and commending flexibility and adaptability through life long learning over stable career paths. It seems to reify one possible, contingent configuration of global capitalism as if it was the reflection of a deterministic evolution of commingled technogenesis and synaptogenesis. To counter this trend I offer a theoretical framework to focus on the phenomenology of software and code, joining social critiques with textuality and media studies, the former proposing that theory be done through practice, and the latter seeking to understand their schematism of perceptibility by taking into account engineering techniques like time axis manipulation. The social construction of technology makes additional theoretical contributions dispelling closed world, deterministic historical narratives and requiring voices be given to the engineers and technologists that best know their subject area. This theoretical slate has been recently deployed to produce rich histories of computing, networking, and software, inform the nascent disciplines of software studies and code studies, as well as guide ethnographers of software development communities. I call my syncretism of these approaches the procedural rhetoric of diachrony in synchrony, recognizing that multiple explanatory layers operating in their individual temporal and physical orders of magnitude simultaneously undergird post-postmodern network phenomena. Its touchstone is that the human-machine situation is best contemplated by doing, which as a methodology for digital humanities research I call critical programming. Philosophers of computing explore working code places by designing, coding, and executing complex software projects as an integral part of their intellectual activity, reflecting on how developing theoretical understanding necessitates iterative development of code as it does other texts, and how resolving coding dilemmas may clarify or modify provisional theories as our minds struggle to intuit the alien temporalities of machine processes

The Falcon 2012-2013

https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/archives_newspapers/1083/thumbnail.jp

The Ticker, March 30, 2015

The Ticker is the student newspaper of Baruch College. It has been published continuously since 1932, when the Baruch College campus was the School of Business and Civic Administration of the City College of New York

University of Memphis Magazine, 2017 Fall

Cover Story, Renaissance Man by Gabrielle Maxey, Photography by Trey Clark A UofM professor’s big dream has breathed new life into a dying neighborhood. Also featured: The Columns Alumni Reviewhttps://digitalcommons.memphis.edu/speccoll-ua-alumni3/1081/thumbnail.jp

Appalachia Winter/Spring 2022: Complete Issue

Winter/Spring 2022 - Volume LXXIII, Number 1 - Issue #253. Cataclysms in the Catskills and Taconics: Floods, Temperature Swings, and Bluebird

Beyond Narrative: Exploring Narrative Liminality and Its Cultural Work

This book calls for an investigation of the 'borderlands of narrativity' - the complex and culturally productive area where the symbolic form of narrative meets other symbolic logics, such as data(base), play, spectacle, or ritual. It opens up a conversation about the 'beyond' of narrative, about the myriad constellations in which narrativity interlaces with, rubs against, or morphs into the principles of other forms. To conceptualize these borderlands, the book introduces the notion of "narrative liminality," which the 16 articles utilize to engage literature, popular culture, digital technology, historical artifacts, and other kinds of texts from a time span of close to 200 years

Kenyon Alumni Magazine - Fall 2023

https://digital.kenyon.edu/kcab/1305/thumbnail.jp