my first publication in the emerging field of critical mouse jiggler studies is now live: journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt... Recommended if you like hypnotic geometric patterns, demon-capture devices, and the phenomenology of aerial perception

Matt LeMay wrote about the "art v. content" tension, fundamental to creativity under capitalism, during the late era of the mp3 medium.com/@mattlemay/a...

We have EXTENDED the deadline to June 15, 2026!!!

This a hell of a move to make when professors are rapidly moving back to paper everything …

[email protected] is currently soliciting nominations for the annual Claudia Gorbman Graduate Student Writing Award, which "recognizes outstanding scholarship in the field of sound and music media" by graduate students. Essays due August 3rd. More info here docs.google.com/document/d/1...

University of California IT employees form biggest tech worker union in the US! www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/they-just-...

Indeed. And please read @katejewell.bsky.social :)

Faculty in CA in the 1990s successfully protested mandatory online components of their classes largely on the grounds of IP and labor intensification. We don’t have to accept this. We can start with abandoning the LMS.

Resonance (UC Press) is looking for humanities research across the following topics: Sound in Political Crisis, Sound and Social Justice, Experiments in Sound, Sound Archives and Preservation, and we're convening a permanent series that'll examine "Film and Cinema Sound" this Fall. Please circulate!

please, nerds, I am looking for where this image is from

An old "theory of everything" seems to be everywhere. Media scholars left it for dead decades ago. Reporters keep giving it new life. What is "the Great Divide" and how does it hold us back from understanding our digital dilemma? www.mackhagood.com/oral-residue...

Do any indie radio/college radio people keep a master list of promo company emails/contacts? I'm trying to re-energize a flagging college radio station that's been floundering since covid and this would be a good start

postdoc for a sound studies scholar out there full deets / alt text in link palestinestudies.artsci.utoronto.ca/call-for-pos...

STS folks, I'm organizing an open panel on CONTRAPTIONS for 4S this year, following up on a lovely panel at last year's AAA meetings. You should submit something if you got it! www.4sonline.org/accepted_ope...

👀 The intro of Inventing Nadar is now up online for free!

Your grad rep here with some self promotion-- I've co-organized this conference at UC Berkeley 3/7-3/8- free and open to public-- possibly of interest to some in this community! www.algorithmicmusicmethods.com

Save 30% on #NewBook "Wild Tides" by Patrick Brodie, which traces Ireland’s shift from reckless pre-2008 real estate development to a post-crisis investment in media infrastructure, revealing how financialization alters the daily life of a nation. buff.ly/NVSBjbJ

very cool and exciting news: my debut book, PLATFORM HYGIENE, is now under contract with @dukepress.bsky.social!

Listening to a fascinating conversation about R&B history with Amani Roberts, @brandontensley.bsky.social & Emily Lordi & just realized that Whitney Houston grew up in East Orange, NJ, also home to Queen Latifah & WFMU. Part of Popular Music Books in Process Series: www.youtube.com/watch?v=htEX...

Cool to see students doing cool things www.insidehighered.com/news/student...

new essay on platform authoritarianism, disability, and class in creator economies out now in comm & critical/cultural studies! www.tandfonline.com/eprint/P8HRY...

Everyone should be following the digitization and posting of the Adam Jacobs Collection. A 10,000 live concert chronicle of rocknroll-live-in-Chicago between the mid-1980s and today. archive.org/details/aada...

some exciting news: announcing CREATOR & INFLUENCER STUDIES, the first open-access peer reviewed journal dedicated to creator and influencer culture research. I'm honoured to be named as one of the journal's inaugural associate editors. submissions open Feb 12.

The annual Day of Noise—24 hours of live experimental music—at @kzsustanford.bsky.social is happening now! I'll be playing an ambient-drone set with a friend 9–9:30 p.m. PT. Tune in at kzsu.stanford.edu.

This week on Phantom Power: Yellow Swans' Gabriel Mindel on #sound, power, and Minneapolis. His research and criticism on noise, protest, and settler-colonialism couldn't be more relevant. www.mackhagood.com/podcast/nois...

Big congrats to @akstuhl.bsky.social for winning the 2026 SCMS dissertation award. For “Unmaking a Medium: Automation and Art in American Radio, 1950–2010,” supervised by Jonathan Sterne (McGill).

“It’s only natural that our brains struggle to find logic in what we are seeing. There is a logic, and this logic has a name. It’s called state terror.“ www.nytimes.com/2026/01/24/o...

Stunning photos from Minneapolis, including this one by John Locher for the Associated Press. www.theatlantic.com/photography/...

Good morning! I wrote about Marty Supreme’s anachronistic use of 80s art rock, which means that I also wrote about Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette soundtrack, Theo Cateforis’s new wave book, post-war neurosis and diplomacy, and synth mallets. alyxvesey.substack.com/p/games-with...

Happening today! Show up to shut down ICE, the unaccountable murderous gestapo. socialists.nyc/press-releas...

hey! hey!!! if you are an academic of any rank in the critical tech studies space who cares about how money, finance, and business structures work in science and technology, i want to see your abstracts for a collected volume! they're due tomorrow!!! https//oddletters.com/tech-money/

as part of it, i'm going to maintain a regular blogging practice and email newsletter, please sign up if that's your thing robarcand.info/blog/why-bot... robarcand.info/newsletter

anyone know of any good papers on how the vocal tone/inflection of the ChatGPT voice interface was/is trained?

one of my _favorite_ critical technology books of the past decade is Morgan Ames's THE CHARISMA MACHINE on the OLPC project mitpress.mit.edu/978026253744...

NEW PUB ANNOUCEMENT! out today in @ejcs-journal.bsky.social, I wrote about lolcows, livestreaming, and how platform affordances and anti-fan practices catalyze digital freakery. journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Just Published: For the latest @jcmsjournal.bsky.social issue, Mal Ahern and I co-edited an In Focus dossier on 'Images and (Infra)structures,' which originally emerged from a lively @scmstudies.bsky.social roundtable in 2022. What, we ask, do images and infrastructure have to say to each other?

people are actually very susceptible to just-so stories about human origins because listening to bullshit helped us survive on the savanna

NYU-MCC is hiring! Asst. Prof in the area of “Media and Global Cities.” Please help us get the word out. apply.interfolio.com/174886

Journal of Sonic Studies CFP on sound and radical organizing. www.researchcatalogue.net/view/558606/...

Feels like this week signaled the permanent reorientation of legacy media industries. There's no sustainable business model to "fire successful talent to obtain ephemeral political points with no tangible dividend."

Tomorrow I start as an Asst Prof in Communication, Media and Arts at Seton Hall. Last spring, news that this opportunity would pan out coincided very closely with the passing of my advisor, Jonathan Sterne. Some overdue reflections on that, mostly on Jonathan, here: akstuhl.net/blog/2025-08...

I'm excited to share that I'm on episode 1005 of the long-running and amazing podcast Kreative Kontrol, speaking with @vishkhanna.bsky.social about my recent book MUSIC IN ORBIT. We chatted at a skatepark and discussed streaming music, Bob Dylan, playing in punk bands in York Region + more.

Media academics! I'm putting together a 6-7 week media studies unit for our intro class (called Intro to Film and Media but historically taught as Intro to Film) and would appreciate any sample syllabi you're willing to share, or suggestions of readings/topics that *absolutely must* be covered.

A lot of this feels like "manager brain" to me - LLMs are an idea of intelligence for and by people who have been adulated all their lives as visionary or creative for _telling other people to do things for them_, and now can't tell the difference between giving an order and actually doing the thing

Many thanks to @burrata.bsky.social and Sounding Out for this nail-on-the-head Jonathan remembrance. Even the most serious work he did had playfulness at its core, animating those spry jumps across methodologies – and of course his very lively teaching, too soundstudiesblog.com/2025/07/14/i...

Out Now - Media Theory 9.1 Full issue: journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt