Cybercultural

In this third and final part of my audio vs text series, I examine where podcasts fit into the cultural content landscape. The thesis of this series is that audio formats, such as podcasting and audiobooks, have in some ways replaced textual formats like blogs and print books. Text content is certainly not dead, of course, but … Read more

In last week’s feature article, I analyzed the rise of audio formats in comparison to the decline in print formats. Specifically: podcasts and audiobooks are on a bull run in the content market, whereas blogs, print books and ebooks continue their bearish tendencies. In the following two articles in this audio vs text series, I’ll take a deeper dive … Read more

On The Bill Simmons Podcast this month, author Malcolm Gladwell said something that startled me: the audiobook version of his latest book, Talking to Strangers, was outselling the hard cover after the first week on sale. He mentioned this was also happening with the books of Jordan Peterson, a middle-aged self help author who’s become enormously popular with younger generations due to … Read more

Last week I argued that blogs, Tumblr and email newsletters can offer an alternative to the Black Mirror world of social media we currently live in. In particular, that we can build this new world – the blogosphere 2.0 – around cultural content. Once again I have to caution: I don’t see this as competing with social media, because … Read more

The following post is my argument for a new type of social networking built around cultural content. While blogs, Tumblr and email newsletters cannot compete with social media for popular attention, we can build an alternative, more thoughtful, world with these tools.

Online gaming, virtual reality experiences and mixed reality apps are among the fastest growing parts of the digital economy. But are they what we’d traditionally label as “culture”? A new report argues that not only should these “interactive media” be talked about in the same breath as movies, music and books, they’re also essential to … Read more

In this week’s free weekly Cybercultural newsletter, I look at the problem of archiving cultural content from magazines, blogs, musicians and video gamers – and why it matters. Have you ever had any of these issues lately while trying to access content? You wrote a blog in the early to late 2000s, but it’s long … Read more