It happens every year. One or more students ask me if I think the Apollo moon landings were a hoax. I teach critical media studies at Temple University in downtown Philadelphia, where the diverse collection of urban students are street smart, open-minded, and hard-working. This is not an indictment of…

AUTHORS Julia M. Hildebrand (Drexel University) and Barry Vacker (Temple University) Since publication here, this concept essay won a prestigous international award—The 2019 John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in the Field of Media Ecology, awarded annually by the Media Ecology Association. The essay inspired the Media(S)cene art exhibit at the…

Stars, Dirt, and the Cosmic Sublime In an early scene in Interstellar, Cooper laments: “We used to look up in the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.” This lament follows a long tradition of humans gazing up at the vast…

Fifty years after its debut, 2001 is more relevant than ever. Released at the height of the space age in 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was one of the cinematic and cultural blockbusters of the 1960s and early 1970s. Fifty years later, 2001 stands as the greatest and…

We live in a world where the highest function of the sign is to make reality disappear — This essay originally appeared in Socrates Cafe. For more of my critiques of conspiracy culture in Medium, click on THEORY/ON/CONSPIRACY. ________________ In the book The Perfect Crime, philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote that media and technology had murdered “reality” and gotten away with it in “the perfect crime.” Baudrillard wrote, “So…

It Starts in the “Chill” Gaze — Looking Out and Away What if the “Dark Skies” movement might be the most important long-term idea for our civilization and life on Planet Earth? What if a new philosophy can generate new dreams, desperately needed amid the waking nightmares haunting our lives and civilization: climate disruption, environmental destruction, anti-science worldviews, conspiracy theories, and…

Bond, Nietzsche, and Sartre: Double 0s of “the Future” — Sean Connery’s 007 stood astride the abyss of the 1960s, the fears of nuclear annihilation of the Cold War and the rising technological fetishism of the Space Age—between man and Superman, between rockets and sleek cars, between now and the future. …

For now, all secular culture has to offer for a shared destiny is the 24/7 consumer-entertainment-narcissism society — Crashing into the Future After six decades of cool cars, sexy assassins, evil super-villains, and immortal cinematic imagery, the above scene from Spectre (2015) might be the most existentially profound in all the James Bond films. That’s because 007 is flat wrong. “It” didn’t stop “right here.” “It” keeps on coming, building momentum, a…

Trapped in our skyglow metropolises, who looks at the night sky with awe and wonder? — This essay originally appeared in Socrates Cafe. In the remote regions of far west Texas and northern Mexico, plans are underway to create the largest “International Dark Sky Reserve” on Planet Earth. The Dark Sky Reserve will span approximately 18,000 square miles of Texas and Mexico. …