Modern fan culture is first thought to have emerged in the 1960s, with the help of Star Trek fans. Of course, people still called themselves ‘fans’ of particular aspects of pop culture before and during this time — but “Trekkers” (often also known as “Trekkies”) warranted special focus because of…

The premise of ‘cancelling’, when first heard, is a terrifying one. The idea of those less-proud moments of your past being dug up, stripped of contextual meaning, and displayed to the masses — leading to your shaming and eventual expulsion from your social world — is certainly not something that…

The term “meme” was originally coined by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1979. In his definition, a meme represented a unit of non-genetic behavior — one that could be transmitted through a culture through learning or observation. The other main distinctions that Dawkins intended to point out between the…

The public sphere was first conceptualized by Jurgen Habermas, who used the term to describe an arena of discourse that took shape in the 17th and 18th centuries. With the rise of mercantilist classes at this time, a new social sphere began to emerge that existed between official and private…

The 1960s and 70s were a period characterized by multiple pushes for and instances of social reforms centered around people, policies, and the world at large. These movements cropped up in response to known and long-endured inequalities and social ills, but also sparked intrigue, as they all seemed to come…

Media scholar Marshall McLuhan is known for the idea that dominant forms of communication have a profound and direct impact on the civilizations in which they are developed, and that different forms of media themselves contain inherent messaging and are meant to be understood in different ways. His work The…

In academia, the modern era refers to a time period in civilization marked by the Age of Enlightenment and the rise of industrialization. It was an era where, thanks to the innovation of the printing press, knowledge and inquiry flourished. At this time the beginnings of contemporary science were first…

Living in today’s vast yet deeply interconnected world, it is not often we stop to absorb the idea that much of what we do today would be unheard of in the past. It’s even hard to imagine that the inception of mobile technology is a relatively new phenomenon, given the…