creativity/machine

Call for Papers: Sonic Interventions: Pushing the Boundaries of Cultural Analysis (ASCA Conference, Amsterdam, March 2005).

Jon Hoem, Videoblogs as Collective Documentary (conference paper - pdf).

A rant in two parts
Part 1: Internet Studies, Cultural Studies

The delightful Kris has just come back from AoIR, and reflects on the lack of connection he felt with the approaches of many people there; people with whom he shares a common subject of study (weblogs), but whose objects of study, and methodological frameworks, are worlds apart. This is something I, as a fence-sitting sociologically-tainted cultural studies person, have also begun to notice in the field of Internet Studies: a field which is not so much emerging as it is in the process of lockdown; validating itself as Serious and Important work via the tried-and-true technique of erecting a scaffolded structure of positivist social science research around the otherwise maddenly elusive Internet, furnishing the rooms with Big Topics (Regulation, Governance, and Law) that map nicely onto Big Instutions and decorating them with numbers - lots and lots of numbers. It’s hard to find space in this structure for academic practices that seek to understand the ephemeral, the apparently trivial, the emergent, and which are in themselves insistently relational, reflective, recombinatory. The frustrating thing is that the smaller, richer pictures, and the relations between them, could be very productively brought into dialogue with the Big one. But there are language barriers, and academic class divides, in the way.

Of course, I’m being clumsy and overly aggressive. Of course, the Big Topics are Big for several reasons (many of which need to be persistently worried at and not merely assumed). Of course Internet Studies is bigger than “new media” and “online community” (but should it be smaller?). And of course there’s room for social and cultural research of every persuasion - trust me, I do empirical work myself, and sometimes I too like to know “how much”? “where”, and “in what circumstances”? In fact, one of the frustrating things is that in the context of humanities research, I’m relatively (sometimes grumpily) prosaic, pragmatic, even positivist (a lot of alliteration here, isn’t there?) But I have in recent times felt deeply frustrated at the end of a promising paper that turned out to be full of stats and graphs and mystical diagrams that gloss over the hard questions, and delivered or invited none of the rigorous and critical debate that I had wrongly assumed the quantitative analysis was designed to provoke.

I also get the distinct impression that “new media” studies, and even worse, “cyberculture” studies, are thought to be first-wave Internet nonsense, and the worst possible symptoms of the aestheticisation of the academy, the cultural turn in the social sciences, and postmodernism to boot. And since many people assume (quite wrongly) that cultural studies is about the celebration of media cool, whatever “wow” factor cultural studies once had in the academy has evidently faded away in some circles. In the eyes of the social sciences, we are the emperor’s new clothes; recently reclaimed from a charity shop and being worn most inappropriately to a Serious and Important dinner party.

My comments are busted on certain entries (i.e. the last 5 or so) and I have absolutely no idea why, because I haven’t touched anything, I swear. I’m investigating; in the meantime, comment here instead, or just hold your breath

Call for Papers: The Second International Conference on Communities & Technologies (C&T 2005) Milan, Italy, 13-16 June, 2005. Deadline for full papers: 12 Nov 2004.

Sour grapes: Everyone is at AoIR in Brighton except me. And Kylie. And, due to cyclone activity, Jeremy (I think). We have repeatedly told our OII summer doctoral program colleagues not to bond without us, but with all that Internet talk, beer and fish and chips (with mushy peas!) by the seaside, it’s not looking good
Junket: Instead, I’m off to the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association congress in Sydney tomorrow. Which should be interesting. My research question for my time at the congress: to what extent, and it what ways, is the mobile industry really starting to focus on the social contexts of mobile phone use - and how are users imagined in general (or even better - not in general but in their complex specificity)?

Just a few days after reading all about the Italian Effect conference (and shrieking with glee over Mel’s unique performance of geeky theory grrrl rebellion), I discovered this passage at the end of Steven Shaviro’s summary of Hardt and Negri’s Multitude:

There’s a wonderful passage in Multitude (190ff) where Hardt and Negri write of the way that political philosophy has traditionally seen the nation or the society as a body: Hobbes’ Leviathan is only the most famous use of this more-than-metaphor. The multitude, they say, can in this context only be seen as something monstrous, a disorganized agglomeration of flesh, since it rejects the sovereignty of the head over the other organs that is the central concern of Hobbes’ model (and that of all too many later political thinkers as well). Capital works, in the terms Hardt and Negri implicitly borrow from Deleuze, by separating the body politic from what it can do. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, the multitude is a body without organs; it expresses its potentialities to the fullest by rejecting the restrictions imposed by the hierarchical organization of the organs.

While I find this image compelling, I can’t help being haunted by its inversion. In my picture, capital itself is the monstrous flesh, the body without organs, that we the multitude are forced to inhabit. This flesh is “really” ours, ultimately ours. But in our pragmatic, day-to-day experience, we don’t own it, or hold it in common. Rather we scurry about, in its folds and convolutions, like lice or fleas; or at best, we reprogram its code here and there, just a little bit, like viruses. It oppresses us, but we are stuck; we hate it, but we can’t live without it. Can we transform this parasitic, shadowy state of being into a form of resistance?

I like that - it’s nicely thought out, and elegantly rendered.

What really gets the mental gears turning for me though, is that it seems a higher power (and/or my own literally unsatisfiable desire for the Final Enlightenment of the Left) is directing me to engage with all this Italian business. Then again (I acknowledge but transfer no blame to Mel’s excellent paper), it might just be the global flows of fashion intersecting with the Theory Industry, urging me to throw out last year’s wardrobe and invest heavily in the latest conceptual gadgets.

Sigh…the black skivvy just doesn’t cut it anymore, and De Certeau is sooooo yesterday - and yet, I don’t even have a decent espresso machine, or a decent grasp on Deleuze.

books1

Originally uploaded by jeangenie.

This is indeed a flawless lifehack: John Udell’s Library Lookup bookmarklet.

It’s so elegant: find a book on amazon, click the bookmarklet, and instantly display search results from *your* library for the ISBN of the book you are currently viewing.

I have been playing with it for hours, charging through my wishlist like there’s no tomorrow.

I wonder if I can set it up for a meta-catalogue like Kinetica as well, without going through the authentication rigmarole? That would be good, because I could go from “oooh, that looks cool” to “stupid ****ng library doesn’t have anything i need” to “aha! I can get it in a week from UQ instead” in about 4 seconds. Keeping the moodswings to a minimum.

Nothing, however, will get me out of the trudge up the very, very long hill to our library.

Thanks to David Brake, plunderer of book repositories, for the link.

Jen and Nancy at The Write Doctors are putting together an anthology of teen writings which includes old diary entries, passed notes, stories, essays, even yearbook entries. I’m interested in this in vernacular creativity terms, of course.

And they are calling for submissions:

If you?re anything like we were, as a teenager you kept a diary filled with hopes, dreams, bad poetry and, well, self-obsessed ramblings about your life?s profound urgencies. Do these old journals fill you with shame and embarrassment when you read them now? Do you chuckle at your coming-of-age obsessions, your angst, your propensity to melodrama? Have you even dared to look back at those padlocked outpourings of your teen heart? Or, are you impressed with your insight, your newly-found wisdom?

We invite you to capitalize on that glorious shame, humor, and pride by submitting old diary or journal entries for publication in the anthology If You Read This I?ll Kill You: Breaking into Our Teen Diaries.

To read examples or to find out how to finally publish that rant about the unfairness of being the oldest/middle/youngest child or (in my case) not being allowed to watch Countdown, visit the website. And I’m still mad about the Countdown thing.

Ha! I knew it…

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

If David Brake can blatantly post evidence of procrastination on his research blog, then so can I. As if having a research blog in the first place isn’t evidence enough of both procrastination and geekiness, right Mel?

And how happy am I at being quasi-Drew?