Critical Media Studies

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss Susan Sontag’s essay In Plato’s Cave from her book: On Photography. In this essay Sontag argues that photographs are much like the images that the prisoners in ...

14 Apr 20231h 7min

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss Jonathan Crary’s book, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Though there are a few detours, the discussion focuses on two of Crary’s central arguments: ...

31 Mar 20231h

In This episode of the Critical Media Studies podcast we discuss Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. As the book is aphoristic, rather than trying to address the work as a whole, Barry and Mik...

17 Mar 202359min

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss the French Christian mystic Simone Weil and her focus on attention and its role in the “right way” of doing things. This discussion picks up on the previous epi...

3 Mar 202351min

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss Byung Chul Han’s “The Burnout Society” with an eye to his discussion of multitasking and the loss of what Han calls “profound boredom.” The discussion invokes B...

17 Feb 202341min

Barry and Mike pick up their discussion on Raymond Williams’ monograph, Television: Technology and Cultural From. In their previous episode they covered the idea that media technologies are answers t...

3 Feb 20231h 3min

Barry and Mike begin their discussion of Raymond Williams’ 1974 book, Television. Their discussion revolves around the question of the place and purpose of media as a social process. The crux of the ...

20 Jan 202352min

Barry and Mike wrap up their discussion on The Dialectic of Enlightenment by taking on the final section on antisemitism and then offering their takeaways from the book. It’s a long discussion that c...

6 Jan 202356min