taCity

Category: Words

  • Against Future-Proofing

    I was sent this paper by a colleague this morning and not only does it make for some extremely depressing reading if you work in (and value the merits of) public higher education, but it also made me extremely agitated by the use of the term ‘future proofing’. In the…

  • Ode to the 21st Century

    In the 21st century… What is making the news is now news, You can make money just by moving money, Politics is now about anything but politics, You now have to be taught how to teach, Having an education does not make you educated, The police need policing, Being creative…

  • I hate EveryOne

    When you read stuff like this, it really does make you realise the folly of structuralist thinking, or more accurately, the curse of the ‘ism’. I remember reading something by Marcus Doel once when the opening line was “I hate everyone” (I forget in which one of the myriad of his marvellous essays it…

  • “Just a band?” – A conversation about language

    A: “The Beatles, just a band”. Too true, the Beatles were ‘just a band’, as were Led Zepplin, the Beach Boys….” B: “How can you say that? The Beatles defined a generation of cultural trends! They had massive influences beyond the realm of just music! They created peace movements, wrote…

  • Video lectures worth taking the time to watch….

    Trawling the internet for videos worth watching is definitely a time-consuming exercise, yet I’ve found that over the course a year or so, I’ve manged to accumulate a host of bookmarked pages of videos that I felt I would want to watch again (for differing reasons I hasten to add).…

  • What now for Actor-Network Theory with the advent of Web 2.0?

    Actor-Network Theory (or simply, ANT) has been my staple diet of social theory, methodology and research direction for the last 6 years now, with my PhD thesis revolving around the tenant of ANT and Bruno Latour‘s writings. Adding a temporal dimension, one could say that it was in the late…

  • Interlude 1: The futility of words

    Words are peculiar things. They are the building blocks of verbal language, yet are woefully inadequate at their role of communicating what we are thinking. The classic book by Albert Mehrabian in 1971, ‘Silent Messages’ says that only 7-10 percent of our communication is through verbal language so the spoken…