Who am I?
Jamal Russell, currently an English Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
What do I do?
Digital Poetics (of which the study of Electronic Literature is a major part), Avant-Garde Poetics, Media Theory, Software Studies, Platform Studies, and the Digital Humanities. I’m currently a member of the WhatEvery1Says project, and am currently serving as the Arnhold Collaborative Research Adviser for the Making the Humanities Public Collaborative Research Group that spins out of that project.
My own research, as of late, has focused on how digital poetics and electronic literature constitutes a critical investigation how the interface and platform design, as well as the interoperations of platform and interface, habituate the user of a given media device to the operations and logic of the platform. This occurs via the incorporation of extant habits of media use into the design of the platform and interface, the use of which (the “interfacial act,” as I call it) allows the user to become more easily attuned to the new or more platform/interface-specific habits the designers mean for the user to adopt.
Why is the blog called “Mindvirus”?
This is why. Which itself reaches back to some of the work of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which has been a huge touchstone for me over the years in terms of how I (hope) to approach the act of theorization. It also describes pretty well how good ideas and concepts should work in general: like a virus invading the reader’s/listener’s mind.
Contact me at jamal.s.russell@gmail.com
Mindvirus 