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Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan Profile picture
Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan
@bernardionysius
Writer. Teacher. Curator. History & theory of digital media, environments, screens, cybernetics. Lately, HCI and GPS. Tweets reflective of no one, incl me.
Jun 5, 2022 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
A hair-splitting remark on the term "data." @RobKitchin observes in "Data revolution" that "data" should really be called "capta," to emphasise data is taken, not given (see attached text). Great point, but it risks obscuring an ethical concern 1/8 #DataStudies #MediaTheory Kitchin's brilliant parsing is adapted to founding a particular critical and empirical field of data studies, around the oceans of data all around us. If you want a really robust entry to critical data studies, you can't do better. Yet data as "given" offers its own insights 2/
Jun 2, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
good idea that leads to bad practice: this is logic of euro funding, subject to re-eval every 1-3 years; practical result is widespread precarity for jr researchers, PIs doubling-down on time-consuming grant writing to keep staff paid, paperwork way up, time on research down 1/6 I follow the original tweeter, consistently v interesting and conceptually generative Ivy League prof; so this advice is probably pretty good in scope of his institution. Nonetheless... 2/6
May 22, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
the concept of "media theory" is wildly misleading and decades out of date. a zombie concept, based on a misleading generalisation from film, literary, and critical theories. here's why: 1/8 fields like "film theory" and even "literary theory" attended at great detail to what what was "filmic" and "textual." to be sure, they deconstructed the author, the novel, etc, but they also did a lot to nail down the specificity of the cinematic, the textual, and so on. 2/8
May 11, 2022 • 24 tweets • 4 min read
A few more words about why accounts of Adorno/Lazarsfeld as great rupture in critical/admin comm studies seem right. It turns story of politically engaged intellectual refugees, fleeing genocide & fighting fascism, into a US-centric story of institutions & petty gossip 1/24 There are lots of good ways to reconstruct intellectual history, so I don't really have a bone to pick with any single account. Lots of important reasons to tell some stories from within US institutions and policies, which do have their own inertia and power of capture; but....2/
May 3, 2022 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
article someone should write: WHY EVERYTHING YOU THINK YOU KNOW ABOUT COMM STUDIES AND THE FRANKFURT SHCOOL IS WRONG, i.e. accounts of split between administrative (Lazarsfeld) and critical (Adorno) comm research mostly retroactive projections by their disciples 1/9 I think a big spark for this misleading narrative was Martin Jay's presentation of testy Adorno/Lazarsfeld at Columbia Uni; thing is, Adorno has testy correspondence with everyone, including W Benjamin, so it's hardly evidence of an insurmountable break; that's just Teddy 2/9
Mar 13, 2022 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
I'd tweak this slightly: Cybernetics is humanist, born of the darker human sciences of difference like colonial anthropology, psychoanalysis, and imperial linguistics, which sought to situate aberration & difference as stable technical variables of cultural systems 1/14 Cybernetics' repute as anti- or post-humanist science based on a misunderstanding. True, folks like Mead, Bateson, even Wiener & Shannon dressed up cybernetic ideas as technological, but they relied on 1920s & 1930s (&earlier) technocratic social & human sciences 2/