Diary of a Digital Plague Year with Dennis Broe

Diary of a Digital Plague Year: Corona Culture, Serial TV and The Rise of The Streaming Services with author Dennis Broe

DENNIS BROE, author of Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and The End of Leisure, will be talking about his new book Diary of a Digital Plague Year: Corona Culture, Serial TV and The Rise of The Streaming Services. The book offers a blow-by-blow account of the ongoing confinement, charting the changes in our lives exacerbated by the coronavirus. Corona culture is a digital culture extraordinaire for some, while for others it has increased panic and terror about being at work.

The privileged site for this exploration is serial TV and its new mode of delivery, the increased power of the streaming services as they attempt to dominate and even throttle global media production in a neoliberal, privatized attack on publicly financed film and television. The book charts this rise in short bursts that in toto illuminate these rapidly evolving changes in all our lives, as Adorno’s Minima Moralia meets TV Guide.

 The talk will touch on the year’s highs and lows including “John Brown’s Maid,” on the travesty that was The Good Lord Bird; “Coming Undone: The Limits of MeToo” and Nicole Kidman’s power walks in The Undoing; and “Battling ’50s Apartheid One Monster at aTime” in the majestic Lovecraft Country. The year is also recounted in essays on film, art, books and Euro- and American Cultural Politics, all the while asking how to turn this new phase of Digital Disaster Capitalism into a more liberatory (Virtual) Road Ahead.

Here’s what the critics are saying:

“With his latest masterwork, Dennis Broe confirms what some of us already knew: when it comes to parsing and interrogating popular culture, he has no peer.” —Gerald Horne, author, Paul Robeson:  The Artist as Revolutionary

“Broe’s mastery of history, economics, and media let him provide details and insights that few other writers can match. These short, readable essays offer convincing explanations of the moment in which we live.” —Julia Lesage, Co-founder and editor of Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media

“Dennis Broe is one of the most acute critics working today. He has an astounding capacity to reach beyond a specific medium to give us wide-ranging yet deep social, cultural, and economic contexts. A triumph” —Toby Miller, author of A Covid Charter, a Better World

 “Broe’s blisteringly inciteful commentary isn’t just important, it’s brave.” —From the Foreward by Redacted Tonight’s Lee Camp

DENNIS BROE is the author of Birth of the Binge: Serial TV and The End of Leisure and Maverick or How The West Was Lost. His television criticism can be found at Bro on The Global Television Beat. His radio commentary can be heard on his show Breaking Glass onArt District Radio in Paris and on Arts Express on the Pacifica Network in the U.S. He is the author of two novels: Left of Eden, about the Hollywood blacklist and A Hello to Arms, about the postwar buildup of the weapons industry. He is currently teaching in the Masters’ Program at the Ecole Superieure de Journalisme in Paris, has taught at The Sorbonne, and was a full professor and director of the Media Arts Graduate Program at Long Island University in New York