Massaging the Medium: Seven Pechakuchas

In the alternate universe where Roland Barthes was a TikTok star and Marshall McLuhan an Instagram Inluencer cloned with a generation of super-whiz critical-wise-cracking kids to produce super-hip trend-smart media brand collage-critique they might have approached the extra-orbital velocity of Adeena Karasick’s high-powered cultural insights. The sheer scale of her inventory of references is enough to overwhelm the synapses and explode the constellationary possibilities of trying to process the world we live in. We, not the medium, are what is being massaged, manipulated, and mangled—and Karasick artfully exposes these many machinations while keeping her cool voice and ludic edge. Mordantly clever these compressed works are full of edge and insight. Up-to-dateand totally timely, the dense fields of text-image resonate with current associations and indexical trails of the familiar frames according to which we mediate the culturally produced encounters with our daily lives. Accurate and