Filter posts by:

Discourse network 2000 Does technology influence what we write?

How do the tools that you use for writing influence what you write? Alan Liu researches this relation between technology and writing. He argues that our reading and writing is part of “discourse network 2000”. We structure our knowledge...
Plato’s Republic: The decline of the state and the history of the World Wide Web

Plato’s Republic: The decline of the state and the history of the World Wide Web

While reading through Plato’s conversation with Socrates in his classic writings of the Republic, I noticed an almost utopian allegory in Book VIII in which they discuss the decline of the state. The decline discussed by the ancient Greek...
Dualism, Objectification and Gazing: A Philosophical View on Why Pro-Ana Blogs are so Succesful

Dualism, Objectification and Gazing: A Philosophical View on Why Pro-Ana Blogs are so Succesful

Why are there so many pro-ana blogs? What makes them so attractive to people who suffer from anorexia nervosa? I would like to make clear that this post is not going to answer these big questions, but I will...
Walter Benjamin and journalism in the age of electronic reproduction

Walter Benjamin and journalism in the age of electronic reproduction

Structurally, the printed press is a medium that operates as a monologue, isolating producer and the reader. Feedback and interaction are extremely limited, demand elaborate procedures, and only in the rarest cases lead to corrections. Once an edition has...
‘Imagined Community’ applied to weblogs

‘Imagined Community’ applied to weblogs

One of my favourite philosophical themes is the the notion of nation, and how nations are created. Some argue they have been around forever, but currently the academic consensus rests on the idea that the concept of nation, or...

Surveillance – From Jeremy Bentham to Michel Foucault to Gilles Deleuze to blogs

On the left you can see the prison that philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed in the 19th century. In this design the prison cells are being build in a circle around a centre in which the guard resides. The guard...