- Brian Phillips at Grantland thinks spy movies present a fantasy of tourism:
The spy is the ideal tourist because he represents an inner self perfectly contained within an outer self that is adapted to any possible location or circumstance. Travel can broaden him by the width of a new sexual conquest, but for the most part, he’s seen everything already. Going to the Louvre won’t make him vulnerable, and he won’t stammer when he buys his ticket. The pathos of the whole Bourne series lies in the way it gives us a character who’s been left with the spy’s invulnerable outer shell but lost the inner self it was originally meant to protect.
- This video at Kotaku explores what PS4 games would look like on the Oculus Rift. Previously the site compared playing Portal 2 on Oculus Rift to a religious experience.
- Maclean’s recently published a recently-discovered McLuhan interview that includes questions about the surveillance state. McLuhan’s response seems prescient in light of the recent Snowden/NSA media coverage:
Newman: It has become a frightening world. We seem to be constantly under surveillance. How can we deal with this menace?
McLuhan: The new human occupation of the electronic age has become surveillance. CIA-style espionage is now the total human activity. Whether you call it audience rating, consumer surveys and so on—all men are now engaged as hunters of espionage. So women are completely free to take over the dominant role in our society. Women’s liberation represents demands for absolute mobility, not just physical and political freedom to change roles, jobs and attitudes—but total mobility.
- Writing for The Hollywood Reported Douglas Rushkoff discusses Deen, Snowden, Zimmerman and the Culture of Contagion:
Today, our social media amplify and accelerate word of mouth to a new level. These aren’t hushed water-cooler conversation about whatever salacious gossip we’ve seen on the news; they are publicly broadcasted pronouncements about who is a hero, who is a traitor, who is a liar, or who is a fraud. In a media culture that values retweets and “likes” even more than money, stories spread and replicate less because they titillate than because they are suitable subjects for loud, definitive, 140-character declarations.