creativity/machine

Just when I was feeling anxious about the apparently endless complexity of my scattered, bowerbirdesque, messy methods of conceptual work (yes, beware, it’s the PhD monster…), here’s Philip Pullman in the Guardian, via blackbeltjones.

It begins with nursery rhymes and nonsense poems, with clapping games and finger play and simple songs and picture books. It goes on to consist of fooling about with the stuff the world is made of: with sounds, and with shapes and colours, and with clay and paper and wood and metal, and with language. Fooling about, playing with it, pushing it this way and that, turning it sideways, painting it different colours, looking at it from the back, putting one thing on top of another, asking silly questions, mixing things up, making absurd comparisons, discovering unexpected similarities, making pretty patterns, and all the time saying “Supposing … I wonder … What if … ”

[…]

It’s when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic, childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful, and most firmly grounded in reality, because the world itself is the most unlikely of places, and it works in the oddest of ways, and we won’t make any sense of it by doing what everybody else has done before us. It’s when we fool about with the stuff the world is made of that we make the most valuable discoveries, we create the most lasting beauty, we discover the most profound truths. The youngest children can do it, and the greatest artists, the greatest scientists do it all the time. Everything else is proofreading.

Love that pithy last line. Even better:

True education flowers at the point when delight falls in love with responsibility.

So I’m off to play cupid. Wish me luck.

Everyone, welcome Danny Butt to the ’sphere.

Remember, abstracts for BlogTalk Downunder are due on Monday 31 Jan. This is mine, fingers crossed…

Blogging Technologies and the Social Construction of Genre

The web is rife with over-generalised and underexamined discursive constructions of particular blogging platforms, blogging genres, and their users: we are led to believe that LiveJournal users are all teenage girls who pour out their angst onto the screen; Movable Type is for academics and geeks; and so on. But how do these links between particular technologies, the social positioning of users, and textual genres actually work in specific contexts, and what are their broader implications?

This paper seeks to contribute to a critical taxonomy of blogging by exploring the emergent socio-technical construction of blogging genres. The process through which genres emerge is understood as a complex articulation of three sets of phenomena: firstly, the technological affordances and constraints of specific blogging platforms; secondly, the ways in which the discourses around these platforms call specific user communities into being and invite specific forms of literacy, textuality and sociality; and thirdly, the agency of bloggers in shaping these communities. The paper reworks Du Gay et al?s ?circuit of culture? model of cultural studies analysis to compare two of the most distinctive blogging platforms: Movable Type and Live Journal. The analysis demonstrates that there is a complex and recursive relationship between technology, constructions of genre, and the social positioning of users, in each case producing a specific set of social meanings imbricated with clearly identifiable class, age, and gender characteristics. The paper concludes by speculating on the ways in which this approach to the emergence of blogging genres might provide the basis for further interventions in debates around the perceived value of particular kinds of blogs and the unequal distribution of power that is connected to such value judgements.

SixApart (developers of Movable Type) have bought LiveJournal. What’s next, Google buys SixApart and Flickr?

But as I’m just about finished knocking out an abstract for BlogTalk Downunder on blogging technologies and the co-construction of genre, what interests me is the possible impact that SixApart’s need to clearly differentiate their products might have on blogging practice at the grassroots, eg:

We have a service intended for individuals to interact with family and friends through LiveJournal; a hosted service for avid webloggers who want more flexibility and power with TypePad; and the leading server-based solution for power users, corporations and institutions through Movable Type

A nice, neat example of the ways a highly gendered continuum of technological mastery gets mapped on to the construction of economic value (’mere’ communication with friends and family is always low-end, witness advertisements for a whole range of digital products, from cameras to PCs). Nifty.

Some very good reflection on the cultural and technological differences between the two platforms from Danah Boyd.

Call for papers: AoIR 2005 (Chicago): “Internet Generations”

The first day of the OCL conference (see previous entry) went not too badly, so here’s some extremely random highlights.

In our conference packs we got copies of the Creative Commons copy me/remix me CD (but I really wanted the Wired one), CC buttons and stickers, and a v. nice QUT pen…Larry Lessig gave his trademark performance, with a masterfully synchronised use of one-word powerpoint slides in his retro typewriter font, and his over-the-top declamatory style - you always feel like you’re at some kind of copyleft tent revival meeting. As a cultural studies person, it is interesting to note that his focus in these speeches has now moved away from the liberal economic arguments he was making in The Future of Ideas and has become much more culturally focused - the keyword is “remix”, people. There was even a hint in there of a cultural democracy argument; i.e. that the rights and freedoms enjoyed by those who work expertly with words (fair use, the ability to comment, pull apart and reassemble the words of others) must be extended to those who work with images and sounds, because the second group is the larger, and will continue to grow, and because the first group is an elite. [Mind you, there’s no getting away from the fundamental concepts of copyright: the author and the work, which are still hugely problematic for many, many creative and cultural practices not based on the dominant Anglo-European tradition - Best Question of the Day award goes to Danny Butt for bringing this point up]

I also belatedly found out about some of CC’s ongoing tech projects - mixter is especially interesting, in that (like flickr), it is an example of the emerging articulation between online social networks (friendster, orkut) and creative content. But not only can you track the relationships and connections between people on the network (friends of friends), you can can track the evolution of those people’s original content (for the moment, they’re starting with music) as it is sampled, remixed, and redistributed. For one thing, this is designed to start building communities of practice around creative commons licensing and content sharing, and for another, it might work as a proof of concept for CC’s focus on remix culture.

And who ever thought I’d be sitting down to a roast-dinner-and-salad buffet on the Kookaburra Queen, like some callow tourist? Let alone sitting on the top deck drunkenly masterplanning the future of various university disciplines with Terry Cutler, Stuart Cunningham, and John Quiggin, for all the world as if I were some pipe-smoking, tweed-wearing academic mafioso in a creaky leather chair in some old boys club, instead of the feisty upstart I’d mucn prefer to think I am. But that’s what happens when you attend a conference dominated by lawyers, and the conference dinner sees you stuck on a boat with them - solidarity is to be found in the unlikeliest of places. Oh, and I finally met Seb Chan in the flesh and had a lovely chat.

Back today for some stuff on computer games…

…that’s the title of a short paper I’m giving tomorrow at Open Content Licensing (OCL): Cultivating the Creative Commons (pdf) at QUT, with guest star Larry Lessig. I’ll be appearing as a proxy for the Youth Internet Radio Network (YIRN), which I’ve been involved with as a researcher, but which isn’t really “my” project.

YIRN uses ethnographic action research to develop and investigate a network of young content creators and youth-oriented organisations from across Queensland, which includes developing an online space for creative content, collaboration and interaction that will be called www.sticky.net.au when it launches. I’ll be speaking about the principle of intercreativity (as opposed to older ideas about how engagement - such as with government - can be facilitated through top-down content delivery with added-on “interactivity”), and the ways in which creative commons licensing and the participatory, “open architecture” approach YIRN is taking to website design and development aim to support intercreativity, innovation, and enterprise outcomes.

I will then entertain the assembled lawyers and government types with some of the actual creative content, whereupon everyone gets to breathe a sigh of relief and head off to the dinner cruise. If the DVD fails, i may have to do something else to induce the same level of excitement. Damnit, I never should have dropped jazz ballet in grade 2.

Call For Papers: BlogTalk Downunder, Sydney, May 2005.

A new book across my desk:

OBLIVION
Marc Aug?
Translated by Marjolijn de Jager
Foreword by James E. Young
University of Minnesota Press | 136 pages | 2004
ISBN 0-8166-3566-8 | hardcover | $56.95
ISBN 0-8166-3567-6 | paperback | $18.95

?Remembering or forgetting is doing gardener?s work, selecting, pruning. Memories are like plants: there are those that need to be quickly eliminated in order to help the others burgeon, transform, flower.?

For the health of the individual and the society, oblivion is as necessary as memory. One must know how to forget, Marc Aug? suggests, not just to live fully in the present but also to comprehend the past. Oblivion moves with authority among a variety of sources to illustrate the interplay of memory and forgetting in the stories told across cultures and times.

For more information, visit the book’s webpage

Which reminded my of Anne’s post late last year about memory and the idea of a forgetting machine. In contemporary culture (particularly cultures of computing) there is a significant amount of anxiety around technologies and memory - the anxiety mainly concerns the reliability of archiving systems - will all our data be kept safe forever? As if memory equalled the active keeping of everything, and forgetting merely a lapse in that process. But we know that information and cognition are not the same thing, and archiving information is not the same thing as remembering experiences, feelings, or even “facts”. Further, it goes both ways - remembering is a rich and complex process, requiring not only binary editing (where keeping=active=1 / forgetting=not-keeping=0) but complex, affective sorting and analysis, and, if you think about it, active and artful forgetting as well as (or as part of?) remembering.

And in case we need more convincing, let me steal from Anne and whip out the Nietsche:

Forgetting is not simply a kind of inertia, as superficial minds tend to believe, but rather the active faculty to … provide some silence, a ‘clean slate’ for the unconscious, to make place for the new… those are the uses for what I have called an active forgetting…

[note: ironically, my proxy server dropped out to reconfigure QUT access just as I was finishing my first draft of this post - because I’d forgotten half of what I wrote half asleep this morning, this draft is different, but is it better?]

So let me leave you with a question or two:

1. What would active, creative forgetting look like, or feel like?
2. Is it a cognitive impossibility?
3. What with all the obsessive keeping-of-everything, what should the network of networks actively forget, and what would be the effects of an Internet that more closely relates to human and cultural memory, as opposed to machine memory?
4. And finally, a much more fun question: what would you as individuals, if acting out of your own long-term best interests (i.e. not just the avoidance of pain) choose to actively forget?

It’s invisible most of the time (or it just feels like sociality), and you only remember it’s there when you suddenly need it.

This is not me, but some totally random Stranger Jean, who carelessly left this lying around (or, Dan and/or Maryann left it lying around) to be found by an equally random stranger. But I’m glad she had friends who were there for her, cos I’m v grateful for mine.