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I've [Fatherflot] been working in my spare time on two projects near to my heart: a freeform webcast station for my university and a "Media Ecology" course with a large online database of readings.
As I've moved towards the stage of justifying each project I've begun to see a lot of connections. A true freeform radio station is a kind of educational institution, after all, serving as an evolving commentary upon/critique of commercial radio (in the case of WFMU, with its world-class "faculty" and "facilities," that critical engagement extends pretty much to the entirety of mass culture). The freeform ethos, in other words, is collective cultural criticism in practice. And while my main response to this practice is to encourage it, support it, tell others about it, and finally, to emulate it, there's nothing like a little theory to illuminate the practice.
Thus, I thought it might not be totally out of place to share some of the links I've found to the more important short works of cultural theory which are available on the web. If you like, we can use the comment section to discuss these texts and to suggest others if you know where they can be found. Here, in no particular order, are some of the biggies I've found:
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer - "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception"
Georg Simmel - "The Metropolis and Mental Life"
Guy Debord - "The Society of Spectacle"
Jean Baudrilliard - "Simulacra and Simulations"
Clement Greenberg - "Avant Garde and Kitsch"
Walter Benjamin - "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Susan Sontag - "Notes on Camp"
Roland Barthes - "Myth Today"
C.P. Snow - "The Two Cultures"
Neil Postman - "The Humanism of Media Ecology"
Neil Postman - "Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change"
Marshall McLuhan - "The Playboy Interview"
Marshall McLuhan - "Understanding Media - Chapter One"
Steve Talbott - "Computers, The Internet, and the Abdication of Consciousness"
Steve Talbott - "Owen Barfield: the Evolution of Consciousness"
Umberto Eco - "The Future of the Book"
Walter Ong - "Orality, Literacy, and Personality"
Walter Ong - "Media Transformation: Electronics and Printed Books"
Susanne Langer - "A Note on The Film"
Alfred Korzybski - "The Role of Language in the Perceptual Process"
Jacques Ellul - "The Humiliation of the Word"
Jacques Ellul - "The Technological Bluff"
Jose Ortega y Gasset - "The Revolt of the Masses"
Slavoj Žižek - online links page at Lacan.com