What is the “feel” of a game? Every gamer knows it and can easily recall the sensation, the kinesthetic feeling, of controlling some virtual avatar or agent. It’s what causes you to lean left and right as you play, swinging your controller wildly as you try to get Mario to move just a little faster. It’s the feeling of masterfully controlling some object outside your body, making it an extension of your will and instinct. This “virtual sensation” is in many ways the essence of videogames, one of the most compelling, captivating, and interesting emergent properties of human-computer interaction.
Steve Swink – Principles of Virtual Sensation.
The influence of Reality TV has been insidious, pervasive. It has ruined television, and by ruining television it has ruined America. Maybe America was already ruined, but if so, it’s now even more ruined. Let us itemize the crop damage.
James Wolcott – I’m a Culture Critic … Get Me Out of Here!
[R]ather than being a definition retrieval system or associative datastore, their interactive function is to create a gameworld for the reader. This is part of the wonder of these books – they took a pre-existing set of interface conventions designed for utilitarian search tasks and mapped a new activity onto it. They were effectively a new kind of software application for the oldest information-display platform we have.
Christian Swinehart – One Book, Many Readings
Zombieism is not so much a state of being as a set of practices and cultural scripts. It is not that one is a zombie but that one does being a zombie such that zombieism is created and enacted through interaction. Even if one is “objectively” a mindless animated corpse, one cannot really be said to be fulfilling one’s cultural role as a zombie unless one shuffles across the landscape in search of brains.
Gabriel Rossman – Towards a sociology of living death
The past’s power comes from experience, the lessons it dares us to dismiss on the grounds that maybe things will be different this time. The future’s power is born of experiment, and the endless grudge match between fear and hope.
Time Magazine – What College Students Don’t Know
[W]ie immer bei Politik ist die Bürokratie das Instrument, mit dem das Desiderat zur Ausführung – und zum Entgleisen gebracht werden kann.
Niklas Luhmann – Das Deutsch der Geschlechter
Mit dem Fußball ist deshalb die Frage verbunden, ob nicht er es sei, der die in Lebensstile und Szenen auseinanderstrebende spätmoderne Gesellschaft zusammenhalte?
Jochen Bonz – Fußball – soziales Band der spätmodernen Gesellschaft? Beobachtungen an zwei Habitus der Fußballbegeisterung.