Note: This article was cited in the New York Times (July 22, 2018) as an intellectual counter to the emerging religion of “Ancient Aliens.”
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In the book The Grand Design (2012), Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow claimed that “philosophy is dead” (p. 5). They wrote: “We exist but for…
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…
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…
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…
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 the prophecy has been fulfilled: we live in a world where the highest function of the sign is to make reality…
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…
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…
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. That’s almost the collective size of Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.
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In conspiracy theory, the true believers are millions of copies of Neo, downing red pills as they break free from the Matrix. Copies of copies of copies. The new Neos were born in the desert near Roswell, shocked on the streets of Dallas, made heroic in Hollywood, validated on the…
