The purpose of this blog is to allow me to do what I enjoy doing more than anything else in the world. Let me describe it briefly for you.

I take popular culture — both past and present forms — and use it as a lens through which to contextualize electronic communication technologies (ECTs) within a framework of race, class and gender analysis.

So why the hell do I enjoy this so much?

I spent a great deal of time alone as a child without rules. I had no bedtime, I had no one governing what I watched. I could wear pioneer hats and eat hot dogs all day! So, in lieu of human attachments I connected to television and movies. Ripley laying waste to the Alien was my 8-year-old lesson in self-reliance. My obsession with Remington Steele made me appreciate that sometimes when you pretend something for long enough it will become real and entirely sexy. Obviously, some of the lessons were more valuable than others. I made up countless revisions and rewrites to all the shows and movies I watched and even wrote some of them down. If only I had those to share with you and goof on now! Sadly and somewhat prophetically, I threw them all out shortly after I wrote them.

These so-called low forms of popular culture were my primary agents of socialization. I also enjoyed school and books but they were of low quality and in limited supply. I spent a great deal of time in undergrad feeling ashamed of my television parent. No Europe, no museums, no athletics and no art galleries. Just idiot box. Thankfully, I soon found cultural theorists like Stuart Hall and John Fiske who appreciate the productivity in consumption. Their theorizations describe the myth of passive reception as a function of classism and social regulation.

That’s when I unleashed my obsession. I never enjoy myself more than when I am reading theory, everyday life and impossible equations through the lens of the popular. For me, popular culture is my problem solving grounds. Time and again, when I am having trouble figuring something out, my solution will come from what is now my very deep and abiding knowledge of the popular. My thesis, in part, used Candyman II to analyze classism in academia. It soothes me in a time of stress to imagine myself inside a room painted by Rufus Porter. Horror movies are my church. And finally, the easiest way for me to instantly fall asleep is to put on a crime drama featuring worried men packing heat.

It can, at times it can be quite irritating watching television or a movie with me. I often interrupt and ask questions about what would happen if that were you or me, or what would have happened in this situation 100 years ago and it were yours or my ancestors. You have to tell me to shut up or, ideally for me, play with me.

So now you know what to expect from this blog. The socialnets are the lowest of the low on the ladder of cultural production: personal, unprofessional, excessive. But their consumption/production processes will not be mapped hierarchically here. I don’t question whether Twitter or Youtube are dangerous signs of the decline of society. Instead I explore how they are used to make meaning and identity. Read on and you will become unavoidably aware that rejection and fear of ECTs describes more about your own social location than it fosters any greater understandings or insights into the technologies themselves.