All Tomorrow's Cultures

I've been following Kim's work for some time now, and, at some point, will post up my impressions of his novel, "Neighborhood War" (동네 전쟁).  But, until then, some short notes on his short story, "Superman Now" (초인은 지금) in the collection "The Superhero Next Door" (2015).  What draws me to Kim's work is his use of Seoul as the staging for his stories, and it is not difficult to see why.  Besides being a huge, Dickensian metropolis full of dramatic encounters and chance meetings, it is city of sometimes profoundly alienating spaces: row upon row of apartments, faceless office buildings.  Accordingly, Kim's Seoul is a place for disturbingly non-human encounters.  Seoul citizens are harried by a black-hole like sphere in 절망의 구 (2009), and by monstrous, multi-species aliens in 동네전쟁 (2011).  Confronted with the completely enigmatic, Kim's characters circulate rumors and wild theories, but their attempts to understand the city always fall sh...

One of the community groups we work with has a book out.  Another has just won a major victory for environmental justice.  A third is looking for new staff.  Another has posted an incredible collection of photos from the Baltimore Uprising.  My responses?  Depending on the social media platform, “Like”; “Retweet”; “Share”; “Follow”.  Perhaps those aren’t even “responses”.  I haven’t done anything—I haven’t even moved from my chair!  Even J.G Frazer had to get up to pick up another tome of hermetic folklore.  But I would be remiss not to engage in this slacktivism .  Not only remiss, I would be endangering our relationship to our Baltimore interlocutors.  Public anthropology takes many forms—including advocate, gadfly and cultural critic.  What about zombie? The digital, networked world in which we live has enabled unparalleled access to the tools of content creation.  All of us can make a movie, write a novel, publ...

An essay I wrote a few years ago that has emerged from behind its paywall . . .Let's hear it for Science Fiction Studies ! http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/collins109.htm

Twitter's new, non-chronological timeline ranks tweets by their (algorithmically) perceived importance to your network.  As they say in their documentation, "Tweets you are likely to care about most will show up first in your timeline. We choose them based on accounts you interact with most, Tweets you engage with, and much more." There's a lot not to like with these changes, and, of course, the whole thing has more than just a whiff of desperation about it.  But my unease is more than just with the Facebook-ization of Twitter.  In subordinating chronology to 'importance' (however defined), Twitter undermines its temporality--and in doing so inhibits the ways we might manipulate that temporality as part of our practice of Twitter. That is to say, if time is replaced by a proprietary algorithm, than chronology is no longer a significant dimension in our understanding of Twitter events, and the interesting (and rather quantum) perambulations of Twitter-tim...

As Twitter continues to flounder as a business, many have tendered their advice for the struggling company.  On the other hand, people at Twitter have responded by introducing what appear (to some) to be "innovations" that are already shared by multiple, social media .  All this has prompted me to think about my own fascination with the platform.  Even though I've blogged here many times about Twitter's relationship to physical and social space, I find myself most often thinking about Twitter's time effects.  Like other social media, part of the allure of Twitter is the way it allows users to manipulate space--i.e., using social media to "be there" even when you're very far away.  But time is also a resource that people manipulate through their social media.  While some social media emphasize the present (or the "expanded present" ),  other platforms allow for other, sometimes subtle, temporalities.  This powerful combination of space an...

Note: the narrative for my Design Anthropology class for Spring 2016. People in Baltimore demand a “right to the city,” i.e., to live in a city that allows them to develop human and community potentials without pernicious race- and class-based inequalities.  But, a year after the Baltimore Uprising, we are still confronting the city’s systematic, structural inequalities. And while there are numerous (pressing) injustices to be addressed, one of the most challenging questions we could ask people in power is simply that: where is the “right to the city” for the majority of Baltimore’s residents? This doesn’t mean the right to buy and consume in Baltimore’s tourism spaces.  Instead, it’s about heretofore marginalized peoples “fighting for the kind of development that meets their needs and desires” (Harvey 2013: xvi).  And not just in the short term.  As Henri Lefebvre wrote in the shadow of the Paris Commune, “To the extent that the contours of the future city can ...

Abstract for a new paper . . . The city consists of a collision of relativistic spaces and temporalities that overlap in tension with each other, nowhere more evident than in Seoul’s subway system, where, above ground, urban development space is warped around new stations and new lines, while below, space becomes the 2-3 minutes duration between stops.  For many theorists, this sprawling subway (the largest in the world) is an “empty” time in what Auge calls a “non-place”--a period of empty waiting.  In addition, capital has been quick to exploit these temporal and spatial interstices, with Seoul’s subway stations host to a cacophony of advertising and media.  On the other hand, the subway also contributes to new forms of connection and place-making, possibilities that have been enabled by technological developments of mobile connectivity that extrapolate on digital presence and absence in order to forge new quantum potentialities for human life and sociality.  I...