American journalism has serious problems. But how did we get here? @bzelizer.bsky.social’s new book 📚 How the Cold War Broke the News📚 uncovers the surprising roots of journalism’s decline and offers a plan to make it better. Pre-order now: bit.ly/4mqcr68

Join us online or in person for two talks in association with the Stirling, Dep of Psychology, May 15 and June 5, 2025 - Professor Donna Rose Addis and Associate Professor Celia Harris leading researchers on memory and cognitive science.

"... AI hype has emerged in the context of such fatigue. Promising to automate a workforce for each of us, this hype, like crypto hype before it" — and big data hype before that, and... — "reinforces a future of individualized economic power with a sexier allure than attending a town hall."

We said something like this in 2009
@benoloughlin.bsky.social
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

7/First, it plays right into extremist hands. Those w/ a variety of issues who the media deem to be inspired by ISIS end up featured in its propaganda. (It's clear that the group’s “top secret source” is simply the news media.)
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

6/This is not to say that one’s online habits are inconsequential, but this narrative of inspiration does two things:

5/These become less relevant than one’s consumption of online content. (Depending, of course, on one's name, skin tone, religion, nationality, and so on; in this case the perpetrator is relegated to a “Texas-born US citizen,” rather than an American.)

4/as well as whatever condition the desire to kill one’s entire family might suggest.

3/one’s experience as part of the world’s biggest war machine that has killed scores in the war on terror, justified by security and laundered by the language of “collateral damage” ...
watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/f...

2/To claim someone is “inspired” by ____ is to suggest that that ideology, entity, etc. is the single catalyst that breathes life into violence. Important factors then take a backseat, such as

"In recent months, several publishers have announced that they are licensing their scholarly content for use as training data for LLMs... To understand the dynamics around this fast-developing market, [Ithaka is] launching a tracker of these licensing deals."

Out now - Standard issue featuring articles by M. Beatrice Fazi, Mark B. N. Hansen, Piotr M. Szpunar, and Raymond L. M. Lee.

journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt

9/and toward an analytic of imaginaries situated in the anesthetic fields of media ecologies— spaces of speculation, contestation, and the non-dyadic play of visibility-opacity-invisibility.

8/Dust as both elemental media and noise, then and in today’s 3D-printed interplanetary futures, encourages a move beyond notions of how media opens up and forecloses (alternative) futures…

7/He argued that, because of its indiscriminate nature, the camera was inferior to the trained telescopic eye in separating signal from noise. (A play couched in debates over mechanical objectivity at the time.)

6/Second, as leverage. When Percival Lowell’s attempt to let the canals write their own record on celluloid failed, he tried to turn the camera’s evidentiary feat—that it collected rather than observed light—on its head to keep his vision alive.

5/Ancient astronomers looking up in the night sky saw a malefic deity, not a record of advanced engineering etched into an inscription surface.

4/First, as source. The visual noise of the telescope—Mars’ dust—facilitated the appearance of canals. Revisiting Evans and Maunder’s 1903 experiments, this optical illusion at the limit of distinct vision is not strictly cognitive. It was impossible without the telescope.

3/Emerging out of a complex ecology of media, events, objects, and ideas, this mediated future was the product of noise as much as signal, in two senses.

2/At the turn of the 20th-century the telescope was thought to reveal Earth’s future when trained on its nearby twin, Mars. Its “canals” were evidence of an advanced lifeform struggling to survive on a dying planet.

New Pub! The gist: The shape imaginaries take pivot not only on what media make clearly visible but on what they offer up for speculation at their eco-technological edges. Open Access @meejatheory.bsky.social
journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt...