Mark Dery

American journalist

Mark Dery (born December 24, 1959) is an American writer, lecturer and cultural critic. An early observer and critic of online culture, he helped to popularize the term "culture jamming" and is generally credited with having coined the term "Afrofuturism" in his essay "Black to the Future" in the anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. He writes about media and visual culture, especially fringe elements of culture for a wide variety of publications, from Rolling Stone to BoingBoing.

Dery was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He grew up in Chula Vista, California. He earned a B. A. from Occidental College in 1982. He is of Anglo Irish Scottish descent with some distant French ancestry.

From 2001 to 2009, Dery taught media criticism, literary journalism, and the essay in the Department of Journalism at New York University. In January 2000, he was appointed Chancellor's Distinguished Fellow at the University of California, Irvine. In the summer of 2009, he was a scholar in residence at the American Academy in Rome, Italy. In 2017, he taught "Dark Aesthetics" (the Gothic, the Grotesque, the Uncanny, the Abject, and other transgressive aesthetics) at Yale University.

An early contributor to the study of cyberculture and the cultural effects of the digital age, Dery has written for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The Washington Post, Lingua Franca, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Spin, Wired, Salon. com, BoingBoing, and Cabinet, among other publications. Dery’s books include monographs such as Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (1996) as well as the edited anthology Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (1994) and a collection of essays, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams (2012). Both Escape Velocity and I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts have been translated into other languages. In 1990, Dery's New York Times article "The Merry Pranksters and the Art of the Hoax" offered an early discussion in the mainstream media of the practice of "cultural jamming" by an emergent generation of activists. In Flame Wars, Dery wonders, in an essay titled "Black to the Future," why "so few African Americans write science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the Other – the stranger in a strange land – would seem uniquely suited to the concerns of African American novelists?" the book is the first biography of the eccentric figure, putting Gorey's idiosyncratic creations into a more personal context.