‘Sending Shit to UKIP’ documents the UK populace’s juvenile, yet hilarious, ‘dirty’ protest at the politics of the far-right UK Independence Party. ‘Getting Google's Approval’ is sharp in its assumption that Google is silently disapproving of your search topics, especially those it considers depraved. A number of essays in particular stand out. Perhaps this is increasingly the only way to grab the attention of an internet-obsessed generation who can't get through a EDA post without simultaneously opening a tab for to look at pictures of cats sleeping on top of dogs. Rarely do the essays exceed 1,000 words some barely scrap past 500. This array of subjects offers an easy way in for the prospective reader, who can dip into the text at random and bounce from subject to subject at will, a literary equivalent to skipping television channels or, perhaps more fitting, surfing the internet. Helpfully, the Collective have broken their analyses down into fields of interest: art, film, sports, work, digital cultures, sex and love, books and comics. Žižek, Derrida, and Lacan, sit side-by-side with Cowell, Gosling and Geldof, a mash-up of high and low culture which could, in other philosophical hands, have proved unwieldy. The term 'something for everybody' certainly applies, yet hardy goes far enough. With such a diverse range of subjects covered it is difficult to offer a constructive and concise review of everything covered in this volume. The writings here are more confident, vibrant, funny and lucid than that previous effort. They have only been operative since 2013, yet here we are already on Volume Two of the group's collected writings, just a year or so after Volume One, Why Are Animals Funny? (2014) made a small but significant splash. The Collective are a group of students, scholars, writers, artists and activists pulled from all corners of the Earth, and are attempting to lower the highbrow of critical theory with short and snappy essays that deconstruct social and political life in an accessible, bit-sized format. The above quote, taken from the introduction to the magnificently titled Twerking to Turking: Everyday Analysis Volume Two, encapsulates what is superb about the Everyday Analysis Collective and their enquiry into the banal minutiae of contemporary culture. What we want to avoid at all costs is something that is common inside both academic and journalistic discourse that is, criticising the popular from an imaginary privileged position of knowledge, and even setting up this imaginary position in the process, making it seem as though we can speak from somewhere outside of these discourses.
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