In this incisive and illuminating study, the author shows how she appreciates the power of art, the power of the internet,...
Bridging scholarly research and street activism, this analysis shows how memes are so much more than an internet phenomenon.
As an artist, journalist, and technologist (whose “home is wherever the Wi-Fi is”), Mina draws on a wide range of experience, from China to America, in her attempts to show the possibilities and challenges of galvanizing political activism through social media. What is a meme? In its simplest definition, it is “a unit of culture,” a term coined by scientist/author Richard Dawkins in 1976, well before the development of the internet. Originally popularized within the academic world, the notion of memes went viral as internet memes did, whether visual sloganeering, cat videos, or GIFs. They spread quickly and internationally, often defying the understanding of censors, as the author shows in her reportage of Chinese social movements, and adapting to messages well beyond their original intent. “Culture shifts, culture changes, culture is informed by much deeper processes than the internet, but the internet also informs culture,” writes Mina. “Memes come from deep wellsprings in society, and as more of society comes online, more memes of contention and disagreement appear.” Memes shape and shift the popular narrative, as hashtags amplify the power of “Black Lives Matter,” or “Deplorables,” or the crusade for gay marriage, and so often launch countermovements in their wakes. Though the author recognizes that such online activism is often derided as “slacktivism,” she suggests that online activism and physical activism have a synergistic relationship, that “object memes” such as the “pussy hats” in the 2017 Women’s March show a collective power and purpose. Mina is also insightful on those funny cat videos, which showed cat lovers (isolated in a world of dog parks and dog love) that there is a whole community of them on the internet.
In this incisive and illuminating study, the author shows how she appreciates the power of art, the power of the internet, and the intersection of the two.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8070-5658-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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