BOOK COLLECTOR

For those not yet caught up in this week’s media outrage-pocalypse, let’s brush up on one that’s currently ablaze all over social media and news sites--weighing in among them The New York Times ,  Salon , HuffPo , The Washington Post , CNN, Fox, Slate, The Daily Beast ,  Aljazeera , Washington Times, Politico, Politifact , The New Republic , and many more. Strangely, last Friday’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher spawned a 10 minute-clip of an exasperated Ben Affleck and a staid Sam Harris arguing on misaligned frames of reference about what constitutes fair criticism of islamic dogma and what crosses that line into liberal outcries of “Islamophobia”. The issue, in general that seems to divide people on this topic is a conversational misalignment. Simply put, liberals on both sides aren’t arguing about the same thing and it’s about time we all get on the same page.  Harris puts it succinctly: “The crucial point of confusion is that we have been sold this meme of I...

Nine months ago--June 2012--, feminist vlogger and pop-culture critic, Anita Sarkeesian, riled the video-gaming community when she proposed a Kick-Starter project to investigate the sexist tropes of women in video games. The modest $6,000 proposal outraged some among the online community, calling it "exorbitant", "excessive", & "undeserved" (since most YouTube game-reviews are made by fans for free) but by the end of the KS project, nearly 6,000 supporters donated close to $160,000 to Sarkeesian's project. What exactly set Sarkeesian's proposal apart? What launched her project into lucrative overdrive?  While noting the malignant "sexism" that is rife and altogether obvious in classic video games isn't anything new--feminist researchers have been writing intelligently about the topic for over twenty years (see here , here & here ), Sarkeesian applies a distinct blend of ideological savvy & reference material with...

If I aim to promote digital auxiliary spaces for academic writing as a viable medium for college composition coursework, I better have a firm experiential grasp on the concept. Basically, auxiliary or supplemental spaces are mediums for academic writing that aren't written in audience-vacuums. Audience-vacuums consist of writing assignments (by student-writers) consciously designed with the teacher in mind as sole reader/evaluator. That is, a student might be asked to "imagine" that they are writing for their peers or their parents or their congress-spokesperson, or some other demographic related to the content of their assignment but in the end the only person reading it--usually for assessment purposes--is their instructor.  While in some cases composition teachers promote peer-review to vaguely simulate a reading audience, their tactless design of the process deludes the experience and encourages students to tailor their peerreview-assessments according to a naively ...