Person

Mark Dery

Mark Dery is a cultural critic. He writes about media, the visual landscape, fringe trends, and unpopular culture.

He is the author of The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink (1999) and Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (1996). He edited Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (1994), the anthology that inaugurated cyberstudies as an academic field. His 1993 essay "Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing, and Sniping in the Empire of the Signs" popularized the term "culture jamming" and helped launch the movement. Dery has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly (online), The Washington Post, Lingua Franca, Rolling Stone, Spin, Salon, Wired, ID, Dwell, Print, and The Village Voice, among others. He has written columns for several national magazines, most recently "Invisible Lit," which ran for several years in Bookforum. His radio commentaries have been featured on the nationally syndicated program "Radio Nation." He is a frequent lecturer in the United States and overseas, where his talks have taken him to the UK, Germany, Italy, Finland, Macedonia, Chile, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and Australia. In January 2000, he was appointed Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine. He is the director of digital journalism at New York University, where he teaches in the Department of Journalism.