Call for Comments: Social Media and Free Speech

From Hannah: At the end of March (so basically, an entire decade ago) we released our episode “News By Meme,” which dealt with how social media spreads news and the consequences with this — especially content that is inaccurate. Briefly in that episode, we discussed the policies social media companies like Facebook are adopting to…

Call For Comments: Avatars and the Virtual You

From Mav: In the last few days an interesting meme of sorts has popped up on Facebook: people posting their “Facebook Avatars,” stylized cartoonish self-made images generated with Facebook’s mobile app. They’re cute enough, but rather innocuous and I didn’t think much of it. I did play around with it for 5 min and made…

Call for Comments: Senior Skip Day Semester

From Mav: A funny thing about being trapped in your house, along with the rest of the world, for a nigh global quarantine… people’s reliance on social media has gone way way up. And in doing so I’m seeing way more memes passing around than normal. One of the most recent that I’ve seen populating…

e102. News by Meme

Newspapers are a dying breed in the twenty-first century. This isn’t a new thing; it’s been happening for a while. But at this point, more than just newspapers are dying. Even news programming is dying. Sure, cable news networks are huge. And sure… they’re on the internet as well. But, the problem is that on…

Call For Comments: News by Meme

From Mav: I had the idea of doing a show based on the benefits and failings of meme culture quite some time ago and given the events of the last few weeks (and this last week of worldwide covid-19/coronavirus pandemic especially) it seems like it’s maybe more important to do this one than ever. I’ve…

e90. 30 Good Things You Missed!!! 2019 Year in Review

Happy New Year! It’s the end of 2019, and that means it’s time for all good podcasts to do a year in review episode. The thing about a show focused on pop culture like ours is that we have already devoted episodes to all of the biggest pop culture events of the year. We know…

Call for Comments: Pop Culture Etiquette

From Hannah: We spend a lot of time on the show talking about how we experience pop culture with other people. I only watched Game of Thrones, really, because I enjoyed sharing it with my friends. We have online communities of strangers, where we can all commiserate over The Bachelor franchise. Back in the olden…

Call for Comments: Kickstarter and Popular Culture

Hannah: Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site whose “mission is to help bring creative projects to life,” turned ten in April. You may know Kickstarter for enabling the Veronica Mars movie to happen. Or you may know it if you’ve played games one of the many Jane Austen games it helped launch (Marrying Mr. Darcy, Polite Society,…

e66. Fandom Petitions

Did you hear about the thing a couple weeks ago where a Christian watchdog group started a petition to get Netflix to cancel the hit TV show Good Omens because Satan, and the internet got a big huge laugh out of it, because that show isn’t even on Netflix? That was great. But it makes…

Call for Comments: Online Media Petitions

I mean… to be fair.. they maybe have a point. That is cool! From Mav: Have I mentioned before that I hate petitions? I mean, not all petitions. In the abstract, they’re a good idea. If you need to get a stop light put up in your town, or you’re hoping to get Congress to…