genealogy

At our recent seminar on Anne Allison's brilliant book Millenial Monsters, an ethnography of the global interest in Japanese toys (and much much more), one of the panelists, Larry Grossberg, one of the founders of Cultural Studies, was reflecting on the rapidity with which people are willing to pronounce on "the new" and "the old." He was referring to "new media" and the many comments one reads about the catastrophic social effects wrought by new technologies, the disruptions in social life as we know it, and so forth.