I’m teaching first-year Communication Studies again this semester. This course is definitely one of my favourites, as it gives me a lot of room to make material my own (something we as sessional instructors rarely get to do…)

I’ve taught this course more than any other course – probably more than all the other courses I’ve taught combined. This course keeps me out of debt and gives me much needed structure in an otherwise unstructured life, all while providing me with plenty of time to complete a dissertation. I really like my job these days, and I am extremely lucky to have teaching work that is (relatively) stable, as well as highly rewarding.

This semester, I’m teaching four sections of the same course. That means I run a 4-hour seminar (mostly lecturing), and then I repeat the exact same material three more times within 48 hours.

When I tell people this, they often grimace and ask how I stay sane. “Don’t you get BORED repeating yourself like that?” Then I tell them that I taught the same course last semester, too. And the semester before that. I’m on track to deliver the same lectures at least 10 times this year (fingers crossed… )

I should be bored to death with this material by now. Sure, I get to add and drop bits and pieces each time I give these lectures, and I tweak the overall narrative of the course at least once a year, but still… I’m giving the same four-hour lecture on the Frankfurt School, four times in a week.

Why don’t I feel bored? Read More

It occurs to me that I still have a blog, and that I haven’t posted anything in weeks…

I thought about a ‘Lance Armstrong is Innocent’ post, but decided at the last minute NOT to share the inane ramblings I typed up in the wee hours of the morning…

Perhaps a “Republicans are all BLAH, but Democrats are all BLEH” post… but anyone who follows me on Twitter (god help you) knows how little I care about party conventions. (Can we at least agree that you don’t NEED to frame comments about Clint Eastwood with terms like ‘great’ or ‘legend’? He’s old. That, in and of itself, doesn’t translate to ‘greatness’. He squinted his way through one-dimensional character performances for 40 years. That’s it. He’s also an ignorant asshole with no relevance to contemporary politics whatsoever…)

So I thought I’d put up a quick post to share some of the latest work I’ve been doing. (That kinda was the ‘point’ of this website in the first place… as my colleague has reminded me after some recent ‘tangential’  posts…) Read More

Not dead, I swear. Just swamped with end-of-term business, such as 100+ essays and exams.

Will take time next week to write a proper post. But for now, I just want to mention the fantastic dissertation defense I attended on Monday morning.

Ladies and Gentlemen, DOCTOR Benjamin goddam Woo.

Good friend, colleague/collaborator, partner in crime-fighting. Not to mention a rather intimidating scholar.

Look for info on his book (coming soon) on this site.

Read the man’s website. He’s a doctor, so he knows what he’s talking about.

Two posts in one day? Has he gone mad?

Here is a second paper that I presented in Kitchener-Waterloo last week. This one summarizes three empirical case studies and the methodological strands connecting them. I co-authored this paper with two colleagues, and I would encourage you to check out their work when you can.

Hopefully, there will be more work from this ongoing collaboration to post soon.

(Note: these are edited/modified versions of the papers presented at Congress 2012 in Kitchener-Waterloo. For full versions with reference lists, please feel free to contact me. Some content has been reserved for future publications.) Read More

** Warning: this post is about sports and math. I strongly suggest some of you skip this one…

It begins… For the second year in a row, I find myself caring entirely too much about hockey.
Last year, I learned to loathe the local team, making me deeply unpopular with certain friends. I bet on the team’s failure, then watched angry rioters burn cars and smash windows. Some would call that karma, I think it’s just drunk assholes doing what they do best…
This year, my esteemed colleagues and I are running a full playoff pool, in order to keep track of the minor heartbreaks that will eventually add up to crush the Canucks and their fans. Some would call this schadenfreude… I think it’s just cynical assholes doing what we do best… Read More

I’ll be the first to admit – when the iPad was first released, I made my fair share of jokes. Why on earth would I want an over-sized iPhone? Why would I want a laptop with no keyboard, no USB ports, and a hefty price tag?

And here I am… composing a blog post on a goddam iPad.

How did it come to this?

Well, I guess it started when my MacBook decided it no longer had a wireless card, a Bluetooth card, or even a power supply. A laptop is pretty useless when it won’t connect to … anything… and it flat-out dies after a few hours of use, never to work again.  Read More

AMC’s Breaking Bad is the best show currently on TV. Period.
Now that we have that out of the way, some ideas to consider…

*** If you aren’t caught up with at least three full seasons, ‘Spoiler Alert’. Read More

I promised myself when I started this site that I’d do my best to avoid excessive YouTube videos, random collections of links, and scatter-brained meditations on ‘stuff I like right now’.
If you want to know how great the Wu-Tang / Fugazi mashup album is, find me on another media platform.
That said, if I have a particular media text on my mind long enough, it starts to form connections in the dark and useless corners of my brain. Eventually I’ll seek an outlet to babble on about the things that excite me. So if you live in Vancouver and meet up with me from time to time, consider this post a bullet dodged. I won’t have to drone on about podcasts for a half an hour the next time I see you. Read More

So, like, it’s Facebook but it isn’t owned by Facebook?
It’s sort of like Twitter, except it’s linked to your search history?

I’ve spent a few days playing around with Google+, the so-called Facebook-Killer, and thought I’d share a few observations and critiques.

1. I’m fascinated by the ways in which programmers attempt to codify ‘basic’ social interactions – which are, of course, extraordinarily complex. Read More

In the ongoing fallout from last week’s ‘event’ in Vancouver, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the highly contested term ‘Fan’ as it relates to this mess. As was expected, the good tax-paying Vancouverites have rallied their wagons, insisting that ‘professional rioters’ are to blame. (What in the hell does this even mean?)

REAL fans wouldn’t do that. REAL fans showed up the next morning to clean up the mess.

Watching the live footage unfold on Wednesday, I certainly started to fall into that trap myself, insofar as I believed that those directly responsible for burning and looting probably didn’t care very much about the actual hockey game. But really, who gets to decide what constitutes a ‘real’ fan, and why? Read More