This blog is my space for sharing my thoughts on the way that our social world is affected by developments in communications media. There is so much happening as the internet becomes increasingly part of the lived experience of our social reality, and I look forward to being able to use this space to think through these changes.

The title, for those curious, is my attempt to devise a single term concise enough for a title of a web site that expresses the way that the dominant media technologies of the early twenty-first century seem to take hold of us and demand that we pay attention to them, rather than serving the needs of the ones who own them. More of my reasons for thinking this will come in an inaugural post.

Every now and then I find myself imagining what would happen if Earth were visited by some kind of exo-anthropologist from another world. Lately I imagine that such an explorer might be struck by the way that so many of the humans on this planet seem to be constantly entranced by one screen or another. We walk down the streets of our cities staring at little screens that we carry in our pockets, or at least listening to something coming out of the same devices. During the day at work, many of us sit in front of another screen to interact with it. When we get home, we have a bigger screen to look at that is most likely shining some messages at us. If we go out to socialize with others of our species, we often do so in places where there are many screens hanging on the walls. While we drive in our metal boxes down the flat strips of melted dirt to get from one place to another, we are often making sure to go past more roadside screens beaming their messages at us, and if we ride in an elevator to get to an upper part of one of our tall structures, or when we are filling up our metal boxes with refined hydrocarbons, we are usually able to monitor one of these screens as well.  Surely this would strike those from off-planet as one of the key facts about our contemporary way of life.

Such an alien observer might even conclude that we are under the control of these screens, since we spend so much time ensuring that those devices have access to us. But of course, that is not how we would explain the relationship if we were asked about it. The screens are supposed to serve us – we have them, watch them, carry them with us, and install them everywhere, because we want to do so. But sometimes it seems like the reverse is true

This blog is about this contradiction. I won’t be writing about aliens (although I might be writing about people who do). I will be writing about just who is served by the ubiquitous devices that are becoming impossible to leave behind in our daily lives.

I will be writing about the way that the things that are broadcast, watched, heard, read and passively absorbed online are organized and designed to serve some purposes more than others, and to serve some kinds of people more than others. In other words, it is about the politics of media culture.

Since I live in Canada, this blog is likely to discuss the politics of media in Canada more than it would if it wasn’t, but things that happen elsewhere are always good for comparison. What happens in that big powerful country south of here won’t be ignored.

I hope readers will respond and let me know what they think.

I am a political thinker who teaches in the Communication Studies department at York University, in Toronto. I live nearby, in Hamilton, and spend more time than I would prefer commuting. During which time, I find myself held captive by all kinds of screens.