Adam Kotsko: Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television (2012)

“Argues that our fascination with cold and ruthless television characters reflects a broken social contract.

Sociopaths are pervasive in contemporary television, from high-brow drama all the way down to cartoons — and of course the news as well. From the scheming Eric Cartman of South Park to the seductive imposter Don Draper of Mad Men, cold and ruthless characters captivate us, making us wish that we could be so effective and successful. Yet why should we admire characters who get ahead by being amoral and uncaring? In his follow-up to Awkwardness, Adam Kotsko argues that the popularity of the ruthless sociopath reflects our dissatisfaction with a failed social contract, showing that we believe that the world rewards the evil and uncaring rather than the good. By analyzing characters like the serial killer star of Dexter and the cynical Dr. House, Kotsko shows that the fantasy of the sociopath distracts us from our real problems — but that we still might benefit from being a little more sociopathic.”

Publisher Zero Books, 2012
ISBN 178099091X, 9781780990910
107 pages

review (Siobhan McKeown, The Quietus)
review (Steven Poole, The Guardian)

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Lars Nyre: Sound Media: From Live Journalism to Music Recording (2008)

Sound Media considers how music recording, radio broadcasting and muzak influence people’s daily lives and introduces the many and varied creative techniques that have developed in music and journalism throughout the twentieth century. Lars Nyre starts with the contemporary cultures of sound media, and works back to the archaic soundscapes of the 1870s.

The first part of the book devotes five chapters to contemporary digital media, and presents the internet, the personal computer, digital radio (news and talk) and various types of loudspeaker media (muzak, DJ-ing, clubbing and PA systems). The second part examines the historical accumulation of techniques and sounds in sound media, and presents multitrack music in the 1960s, the golden age of radio in the 1950s and back to the 1930s, microphone recording of music in the 1930s, the experimental phase of wireless radio in the 1910s and 1900s, and the invention of the gramophone and phonograph in the late nineteenth century.

Sound Media includes a soundtrack CD with thirty-six examples from broadcasting and music recording in Europe and the USA, from Edith Piaf to Sarah Cox, and is richly illustrated with figures, timelines and technical drawings.

Publisher Routledge, an imprint of Taylor & Francis, 2008
ISBN 041539113X, 9780415391139
221 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-8-3)

Lee Siegel: Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob (2008)

From the author hailed by the New York Times Book Review for his “drive-by brilliance” and dubbed by the New York Times Magazine as “one of the country’s most eloquent and acid-tongued critics” comes a ruthless challenge to the conventional wisdom about the most consequential cultural development of our time: the Internet.

Of course the Internet is not one thing or another; if anything, its boosters claim, the Web is everything at once. It’s become not only our primary medium for communication and information but also the place we go to shop, to play, to debate, to find love. Lee Siegel argues that our ever-deepening immersion in life online doesn’t just reshape the ordinary rhythms of our days; it also reshapes our minds and culture, in ways with which we haven’t yet reckoned. The web and its cultural correlatives and by-products—such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of the “bourgeois bohemian”—have turned privacy into performance, play into commerce, and confused “self-expression” with art. And even as technology gurus ply their trade using the language of freedom and democracy, we cede more and more control of our freedom and individuality to the needs of the machine—that confluence of business and technology whose boundaries now stretch to encompass almost all human activity.

Siegel’s argument isn’t a Luddite intervention against the Internet itself but rather a bracing appeal for us to contend with how it is transforming us all. Dazzlingly erudite, full of startlingly original insights, and buoyed by sharp wit, Against the Machine will force you to see our culture—for better and worse—in an entirely new way.

Publisher Spiegel & Grau, a division of Random House, New York, 2008
ISBN 0385522657, 9780385522656
182 pages

review (Adam Thierer, Technology Liberation Front)
review (Louis Bayard, Salon)
review (John Lanchester, The New York Times)
review (Janet Maslin, The New York Times)

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