Dr. bird’s eye view explains how everything is connected, we only know what we know, and anything becomes normal in repetition. Full episodes coming very soon.
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/bbirdbPhD)
Subscribe and keep an eye out for forthcoming episodes.
Dr. bird’s eye view explains how everything is connected, we only know what we know, and anything becomes normal in repetition. Full episodes coming very soon.
Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/bbirdbPhD)
Subscribe and keep an eye out for forthcoming episodes.
Hello and welcome to a [Dr.] bird's eye view, a podcast where I talk about the world from a critical media ecological perspective. For those of you who aren't familiar, media ecology in a traditional sense focuses on the medium rather than the content of a message. For example, Marshall McLuhan is famous for saying the medium is the message. So he argued that there are different technologies in our society that actually have more of an influence on our way of thinking and being than just the content that it sends. My work extends Marshall McLuhan's ideas into critical cultural studies theorists that have argued that different biases are built into structures as features. I don't know about you, but I live in a place that has just disinformed its citizens since its national origin. To this day, most people here are still covertly and overtly lied to through erasure, omission, and/or sugarcoating about who and what characteristics founded United States citizenship, as well as who and how they defined pervasive ideas of humanness.
Said otherwise, welcome to a [Dr.] bird's eye view, a podcast where I break down my liberatory embodied perspective, first debuted in my dissertation project, that has been informed by activism, art, as well as a critical combination of sociological, Media and Communication scholarship, and the field of media ecology. My name is Dr. Bernadette "bird" Bowen, and I'm a critical media ecologist and poet. My Bachelor's is in sociology, and I have a PhD in media and communication. In my research, I explore and critique ideas and ways of understanding identity, sex, and other norms in our increasingly algorithmic age. My work blurs academic activist and artistic insights to birth fresh perspectives. But you don't have to have any degrees to do what I do. Everyone has a perspective to tell that adds to our understanding of the world. This podcast is what the world looks like from my interdisciplinary neurodivergent perspective.
We're living through a time where more people have been educated than ever before (albeit many poorly and/or at an elementary level) with access to internet that they don't understand has bias limitations, and many who do not know what makes us source credible or not. On one hand, more people have started righteously challenging the many inequities, that mostly old dead white men, deliberately built into the foundations as features. To this day, their founding logics and practices still inform and limit transnational and global structures.
In my own work, I've subversively referred to the founding fathers, and all later human extensions of religious, scientific, political and personal institutions as humans who act as media in society building processes. In doing this, I've learned how ideas of who and what has been deemed normal, have been far too limited and also harmful.
On the other collectively since March 2020, we appear as a society to have lost significant faith in measurable, specialized, and institutional expert knowledge and recommendations, instead favoring the most charismatic sounding...well, anybody, found online. And I think I understand why...
This period was inevitable in a structure built as deliberately inequitably as the United States, and anywhere else, if and when enough people became educated and empowered enough to be able to speak out against the numerous inhumanities and murders the country was founded upon. Thankfully, if my bird's eye view holds any weight, hope is not lost. As long as we recognize we have the full power and capabilities of moving forward to build new structures at every level. Arguably, we've never been more well equipped to do that. But first we need to survive the very real. Now, not one, but two pandemic viruses.
Equally urgent and deadly is the ownership of media and other transnational and global industries. That as a result of seemingly harmless, incremental neoliberal policies since the 70s, have been monopolized to a point now that only a few transnational capitalists own nearly all of it.
The Bright Side is that we have full power to reregulate deprivatize and decorporatize the oligarchy that is the transnational capitalist class in all its corrupting limbs. No matter who you are, you can see the results of this full monster in your own specialized pod and/or your personal life. The way this monster views the world is through a colonial perspective, treating the planet like a host it red-lines, it gerrymanders, it gentrifies, and it shits out environmental racisms and other injustices. It destroys ecosystems and paves them over with Noodles and Company neighborhoods.
This is why both corporate parties that coerce and force themselves upon us all, can never solve this. The same people who own the media have their hands in the pockets of both Republican and Democratic parties. Our transmutation is an ongoing choice between life or death. This podcast is a short series and my last ditch effort before U.S. Christo-fascism, to communicate what I've learned about how everything is connected. So as many of us as possible can be informed and stay alive in communities that we have always deserved, but have not been yet allowed to build.