 The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha — which is to demean oneself. Each year in the run-up to Wimbledon, the annual sporting event works meticulously to frame itself as less of a cultural construction and more of a natural, pastoral ritual. But in recent years, joint advertisements for the British tennis tournament and its technological partner IBM have stepped up their game.
Repeating and retooling the descriptive phrase “tennis in an English garden,” these ads celebrate what makes Wimbledon, well, Wimbledon — the world-class tennis, the perfectly manicured grass, the quintessentially British charm— while also revealing and showing off a powerhouse of cutting-edge technology and astute business strategy beneath the surface. It's a fascinating paradox at play that makes for a potent case study of the augmentation of our everyday reality by ubiquitous computing — a garden that’s wired for sound, data, and global domination — in service of age-old Enlightenment ideologies.
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A decade ago, I attended my first academic conference as a presenter, a gathering called VisComm. It's still going, and it still has the most alluring description of itself online: The Visual Communication Conference is an un-organized conference. There is no association, no board, no dues, no official membership. It is an annual get-together of people passionate about Visual Communication and it is that passion that makes it the most satisfying, most creative four days you will ever experience. They're not kidding.
 I had been excited to share a new article this week — but I kinda got DOGE'd!
On the heels of several weeks of ethnographic research at Greenwood Rising — a museum conveying experiences before, during, and after the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921 — I wrote "Greenwood Rising: Immersion and Interpellation" for Oklahoma Humanities magazine. The piece sums up some initial thinking about a unique mixed-reality exhibit in the museum, a barbershop in which visitors can sit and get a haircut from three holographic barbers, and the resulting research will comprise the final chapter in my forthcoming book, Looking Through You: Digital Holograms and the New Technical Image. However, Oklahoma Humanities was just notified that its NEH funding (a majority of its budget) had been eliminated as part of the utterly irresponsible cuts made through the new federal government's ham-fisted DOGE office. As a result, the tech-themed spring-summer edition of the magazine, which was due to hit the streets this week, cannot be printed. But they had at least designed it — so the full issue is available online as a PDF here, and my article can be downloaded here. Please consider supporting Oklahoma Humanities and its crucial programs funding art and culture in this state, via donations or contacting legislators. I'm honored and excited to have been named a Faculty Champion for 2025 by the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont. These awards recognize efforts in building partnerships between student media and the communities beyond their campus. This spring, I've launched new coursework at The University of Tulsa designed to do just that, and my challenge goals for the yearlong fellowship include plans to expand the local engagement of our young newsmakers with the city of Tulsa.
I'm eager to contribute to this new cohort, and the fellowship's funding will support news coverage at TU's Collegian newspaper and TUTV broadcast studio. Check back for updates! It’s been 15 years since she was murdered, the girl with the dragon tattoo. Her name was Bernadett Szabó, she went by Betty. At 18, she left her native Hungary for Amsterdam and started earning money in the city’s well-known prostitution trade. Sex work was legalized there in 2000, when the government opted for a “you can’t regulate what’s forbidden” policy in the hope of reducing crime and improving labor conditions. The latter has indeed improved, but sex trafficking hasn’t waned — and crime still occurs, of all sorts. Like Betty, who was murdered. Within a year of arriving in Amsterdam, she became pregnant; she had the baby and gave her son to a foster family. But one night early in 2009, some fellow sex workers realized they hadn’t seen her in a while. They checked on her room in the Oudezijds Achterburgwal and found her dead, stabbed multiple times. Betty, though, has haunted investigators for 15 years. The murder occurred in one of the city’s busiest spots, which indicates a likelihood of witnesses. Even all this time later, someone may remember something that would assist the case. So a kind of shrine sprang up on a corner of the Red Light District, full of stickers and visuals related to the case. TV screens loop images from the crime scene and a documentary about Betty’s short life. There’s info about a €30,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. Now, Betty herself haunts the space — as a digital hologram. Welp, I really don’t feel as fine as REM assured me I would in this particular circumstance.
I have pursued two separate but related careers in my half-century thus far: journalism and education. Neither pays well literally but they afford great riches figuratively — and both have been driven by an inherent urge to (as my late father drummed into me) leave this world better than I found it, and to inspire others to do the same. The impending ruination of this nation’s universally applauded human rights, everyday protective regulations, and overall basic dignity will not divert me from this work, and in fact will energize it.  Longtime colleague Jason Archer at Michigan Technological University and I have been thinking about haptic holograms for a while — and our first critique of such interactions is now published in a special section of the International Journal of Communication. Our paper, “Haptic Holograms: The Liminal Communication of Emerging Visio-haptic Apparatuses,” considers how two technologies — digital holograms, which attempt to manifest 3D object imagery, and haptic technologies, which attempt to create sensations of touch — have converged recently within several prototype systems designed to create and project touchable holograms. In many of my media-studies courses, we usually begin by underlining the idea that all communication is mediated. Some students initially resist this. They see conversation and face-to-face interactions as direct, unmanaged, unmediated — communing rather than communicating. Once we get going, though, they learn to see the mediation in play even here: gestures and visuals, language itself, social forces, and the very spaces of interaction. There is no mind meld. There’s always a mediator.
Many emerging media, however, would like their users to think like those hesitant students — to experience the pre-programmed interactions of their technologies as unmediated, to ignore the inherent and carefully managed structure of the encounter, to assume that the communication is direct and free of outside influence. Thus the rapid development of digital channels that seem more “natural.” ChatGPT and other AI systems free users from having to learn a particular communication code; instead of mastering the art of the Boolean query in order to maximize Google results, ChatGPT speaks our language, as it were. Ask it a complete, “normal” question, and receive an almost human response rather than formatted results. Siri, Alexa, and other voice assistants create seemingly interpersonal encounters via natural language, as if we’re conversing easily with another subject rather than interrogating a bot. Only when the systems make mistakes do they become more visible in the exchange and remind us that, oh right, I’m talking to a machine. To further understand this kind of situation — and especially in the context of my investigations related to digital holograms, which only succeed as communication if their mediating apparatus is similarly hidden from the user’s experience — it may be useful to adopt a theory that was coined in the context of literature and art and adapt it within media studies: demediation. Last day of Media History class, and I threw ’em a one-two punch. First, we read some of Vilém Flusser’s intentionally provocative media philosophy — where he claims that the age of writing is ending. Then, per the 21C prof handbook, we pivoted to a YouTube video (above) about hip-hop writing practices. The class basically started with writing — what was it? what is it? what does it do? — so I wanted to bookend the semester by circling back. After spending the second half of the term immersed in mostly electronic media, indeed, what’s the status of this allegedly foundational linear-narrative form?  Ever since I read this book in 2022, I’d been looking for the right syllabus — OK, any syllabus — that could support its wonderful weirdness. Written by a musician, it’s one of the finest theoretical texts about cultural materialism I’ve ever savored. And it’s all about a spent piece of chewing gum. In the early 1990s, folk-rocker John Wesley Harding released one of the best B-sides around: “When the Beatles Hit America.” A lengthy narrative about a dreamed-up Fab Four reunion, it envisions both cultural and technological contexts for a new Beatles event — and this is back when only one of them was dead. In Harding’s epic ballad, the Beatles are going to reunite on stage, all “due to a miracle marketing strategy / beyond the realms of reasonable possibility.” The lyrics realistically dramatize the build-up (securing the film rights, sponsorships, talk show scheduling, etc.) and then inject a bit of scifi to make it happen (the manager of the new Beatles is “made up of cloned parts of Col. Tom Parker and Col. Sanders”). Ringo won’t actually play, though, because he’s been replaced by a more accurate drum machine; he’s “disappointed to find that no one / needs him anymore except for the vibe.” Lennon, meanwhile, is substituted with a life-size cardboard cutout, and then — per today’s news, in a way — he speaks to the press, sounding suspiciously like some old recordings: John, who was never the quiet one makes all his press contributions from his old songs -- in tune, in time, and with the backing track behind him And when they ask him how it’s been in the studio, he says, “It’s been a hard day’s night” And no one understands him, but he always was the cryptic one … Funny stuff, but now prescient. Today marks the release of the Beatles’ latest — and allegedly last — technologically resurrected cast-off, a “new” old song called “Now and Then” that features the two living members and the two dead ones reunited in eerily perfect harmony and time. As a scholar who studies the uncanny properties of media and its inherent constructions of liminal spaces between life and death, well, I have some initial thoughts. If you’ve arrived here after clicking the link on Twitter: Greetings! You’ve reached the Twitter handle of Dr. Thomas H. Conner. I currently am unavailable to service the social-media labor needs of a neofascist CEO and his tech bros. Please join me in not leaving a message there.
The following post points to other places you can find me & my work, as the Feelies sang, for a while anyway …  When I was the pop music critic at the Tulsa World in the late ’90s and early aughts, I had the distinct pleasure of meeting and writing about one of my musical heroes, Dwight Twilley ("I'm on Fire," "Looking for the Magic," "Girls"). The ol' cuss passed away recently, and I returned to the World's pages this weekend to try and say something about what I learned from him — like, how to be proud of where you come from without coming off like a chamber-of-commerce goon. Twilley's pop-rock sound was Tulsan, pure and simple. He knew it, he understood it, and he hired the guys to maintain it. (Different than Leon Russell or J.J. Cale and all that "Tulsa Sound" stuff. Dwight was just nine years younger than Leon, but somehow I think of Leon as an uber-boomer and Dwight as a bit more forward-thinking.) Here's to you, DT.
 The Collegian, the student newspaper at The University of Tulsa, features a regular column called See Me After Class — profiles and interviews of professors on campus. As I'm a newbie at TU (well, sorta), this week was my turn. I visited Mark Brewin's Introduction to Media Studies class, which Michael Tran wrote about for the feature. It's part bio, part research statement, part advice to aspiring journalists. Always a good day when I get to leave "Hatsune Miku" on the white board.
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I'm THOMAS CONNER, Ph.D. in Communication & STS, and a longtime culture journalist. Categories
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