media | Platypus

Digital Anthropology of the Senses: Connecting Technology and Culture Through the Sensory World

 Adriana Moreno  July 23, 2024

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With the ubiquity of the Internet and the overwhelming number of screens that mediate our daily practices, the predominance of the image in daily life is indisputable. The image’s omnipresence has guided countless academic works focused on the visual. For example, visual studies and specialties such as visual anthropology highlight the ethnographic value of images, which, analog or digital alike, have become powerful vehicles for the construction of knowledge (Zirión, 2015; Gómez Cruz, 2012). However, given the predominance of the visual, we have neglected research regarding other senses; this gap widens even more if we consider its intersection with digital studies. (read more...)

Antti Lindfors Interviews Nicole Starosielski on Media Hot and Cold

 Antti Lindfors  December 26, 2023

This is a conversational interview between Professor Nicole Starosielski (UC Berkeley) and me, Dr. Antti Lindfors (University of Helsinki), discussing Nicole’s book Media Hot and Cold (2022, Duke University Press). In my postdoctoral research on the emerging cultures of cold exposure as a therapeutic technique, I developed an interest in the evolving multidisciplinary field of environmental and elemental media. Nicole’s work in this area takes exciting and novel directions, introducing perspectives on how thermal communications and infrastructures reinforce power relations, shore up racialized and gendered hierarchies, and subtly persuade, control, and even subjugate us. In our discussion, we explore these subjects, from thermal metaphors to thermal violence and attractions, such as ‘coldsploitation cinema.’ The interview was conducted over email and lightly edited for editorial consistency and clarity. (read more...)

Junk Anthropology: A Manifesto for Trashing and Untrashing

 Rebecca Carlson  July 4, 2023

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It is currently held, not without certain uneasiness, that 90% of human DNA is ‘junk.’ The renowned Cambridge molecular biologist, Sydney Brenner, makes a helpful distinction between ‘junk’ and ‘garbage.’ Garbage is something used up and worthless which you throw away; junk is something you store for some unspecified future use. (Rabinow, 1992, 7-8) In the bioscience lab near Tokyo where I did my ethnographic study, the researchers taught me how to do PCR experiments. This was before Covid when almost everyone came to know what PCR was, or at least, what kind of instrumental information it could be good for. The lab was working with mouse models, although I never got to see them in their cages. But the researcher I was shadowing showed me how to put the mouse tail clippings she collected into small tubes. She hated cutting tails, by the way, and preferred to take ear punches when she could. She told me that she didn’t like the way the mice wiggled under her hand, as if they just knew. But at this point anyway, the mice are alive in the animal room and she is only putting small, but vital, pieces of them into a tube to dissolve them down (mice becoming means), to get to the foundation of what she really wants. (read more...)

Coming Soon: The MultiRepository

 Owen Kohl, Falina Enriquez  October 14, 2021

Este contenido también está disponible en español.

This post introduces a new collaborative project coming soon to CASTAC: an archive of online platforms that highlights how researchers have utilized different communicative modes and media in qualitative research and creative work, including in journalism and the arts. Think about how you usually encounter a researcher’s findings, a journalist’s account of an important event, or news of an artist’s latest work. In the early 20th century, you would often do so by reading an article in a newspaper, magazine, book, or academic journal. And although these publications might include pictures, graphs, and cartoons, they often emphasized textual ways of conveying information and ideas. Nowadays, an increasing number of researchers, journalists, and artists use multiple media technologies—often digital—to conduct and publicize their work, including text, graphics, and video, among others. Using and combining broader arrays of communication technologies reflects current media practices, but it also gives researchers and other professionals (read more...)

Ways of Looking: Alternative Encounters with Art and Artifacts

 Susan Shih Chang  September 16, 2021

“When we encounter something beautiful, we usually experience two kinds of reactions. One may be moved by learning the background of the work or the artist, while the other one is an emotional excitement we feel for no apparent reason.”— Suntory Museum of Art. One would guess that this quote is based on theories of lateralization, stating that the right hemisphere of the brain controls emotion, while the left hemisphere is dominant in language expression. While there is evidence that discounts the left/right brain concept, many people still believe in this distinction and that their preference for reason or emotion may be genetic. Held at the Suntory Museum of Art in Tokyo, Japan, from April 27 to June 2, 2019, “Information or Inspiration? Japanese aesthetics to enjoy with the left side and right side of the brain” plays with this debate in brain science and invites visitors to experience art via two routes: the information route and the inspiration route. (read more...)

Like, Share, Comment, and Follow: Labor and Capital on Instagram

 Lakshita Malik  July 14, 2021

Social media content creator Ishita Mangal (@ishitamangal) uploaded a post with multiple slides on her Instagram page. The first slide is entitled “an apology letter to my audience.” In the rest of the slides, she highlights a “barter collaboration” gone sour. The collaboration entailed the digital creator featuring four Indian kaftans (a type of clothing) brands on her Instagram page in exchange for keeping the outfits that she would feature. One of the brands was singled out, with their Instagram handle mentioned in the caption for viewers of the post to easily access. The brand was accused of harassing the digital creator; walking back on the terms of the agreement; asking for the garment in question back after “absorbing maximum benefits of all the posts on various platforms.” The digital creator proceeds to tell the tale of harassment and “extortion” she experienced at the hands of the luxury brand owner. (read more...)

Days of Their Lives: The Limits, Possibilities, and Parallels of Media-Ted Research during a Pandemic

 Sreenidhi Krishnan  June 17, 2021

On a regular day, a Hindi soap opera production set in Mumbai is home to upwards of 100 artists and technicians – production associates, actors, make-up artists, costume artists, lighting technicians, assistant directors, creatives, and spot boys. Their collective efforts ensure that audiences have new episodes to look forward to daily. Come rain, hail, or shine, through collaborations and conflicts, together they build melodramatic worlds that entertain millions of households in India. But what happens when the meaning of “regular” is redefined? What happens when even two become a crowd? When the first wave of COVID-19 hit Mumbai in March 2020, it brought, among other things, the Hindi soap opera industry to a halt. Daily production activities of soap operas across channels were abruptly paused. Sets had to be abandoned in haste when a citywide lockdown was announced. The absence of film work meant that workers would go without payments (read more...)

Covid-19, Fatness, and Risk: Medico-Media Discourses and Stigma

 Tina Sikka  January 26, 2021

Contemporary English speaking media and popular medical discourses on Covid-19 have been notable in their stigmatization of fatness by implicitly and explicitly arguing that susceptibility to Covid-19 is causally increased by fatness qua fatness. This is accomplished by the assertion that a causality exists between BMI, a problematic gage on its own, and comorbidities like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and asthma. Headlines like “HEAVY BURDEN: The truth about obesity and coronavirus – from ‘crushed lungs’ to organ failure as bodies put under ‘severe strain'” (Pocklington 2020), and “Coronavirus: Obese people at greater risk of death and may stay infectious for longer” (Urwin 2020), are indicative of a media landscape that relies on ambiguous and ill-communicated science to produce clickbaity headlines that are both harmful and misleading. (read more...)