Book review of John Durham Peters. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media

Book review of John Durham Peters. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media The University of Chicago Press, 2015, 410 pp. ISBN 9780226421353

Moonwalking together:Tracing Redditors’ digital memory work on Michael Jackson

This article investigates the memory work concerning Michael Jackson on Reddit. By means of their posts, comments, and replies, people contributing to this site – Redditors – enter into a process we call mnemonic stabilization. This is a collaborative process in which networked individuals share their memories about, in this case, Michael Jackson. We argue that this process resembles Jackson’s dance technique called moonwalking: Redditors seem to go back in time, but they continually alter how Jackson is remembered and forgotten, depending on the (personal) context of the present and an imagined future. These theoretical observations are assessed empirically by a content analysis of comments and replies (N = 917) posted on the subreddit /r/MichaelJackson between June 25, 2009, and December 31, 2018. This revealed that most posts with a mnemonic dimension focus on personal memories of Michael Jackson’s music, performances, and (perceived) positive characteristics, rather than on how he should be remembered. These findings can be partially explained by Reddit’s socio-technical infrastructure

Book review of John Durham Peters. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media

Book review of John Durham Peters. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media The University of Chicago Press, 2015, 410 pp. ISBN 9780226421353

Back to School: Triangulating City Entrepreneurship

City entrepreneurship, the entrepreneurial attitude and behavior of city authorities, cansubstantially be promoted by triangulation, i.e. by opening the city-citizen relationship forcommunities of knowledge such as universities. This paper reports on an experiment in Amsterdam,where civil servants, with their inherent focus on \u27feasible\u27 solutions, were co-learning with Master\u27sstudents and researchers, with an equally inherent focus on the exploration of what is \u27thinkable\u27. Theresults were \u27achievable\u27 outcomes meeting the demands of citizens. Critical success factors appear tobe the organized disruption caused by the triangulation, the clear-cut occurrence of a comprehensionphase prior to policy making and the combination of bottom-up approach and top-level support