Archive for April, 2006
unAustralia (Call for Papers)
Apr 26th
unAustralia: Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Annual Conference, Canberra, 6-8 December, 2006.
If things are ‘un-Australian’ it must be because they come from UNAUSTRALIA.
Where is it?
Who lives there?
How does it come to be?
What is its past and what is its future?
While raising some very local questions of critique and desire, the theme is open to international perspectives and interpretations.
Do other places have their own unplaces? What goes on there?The conference will feature both refereed and non-refereed papers, and a curated exhibition of creative visual works. The University of Canberra invites abstracts of up to 150 words for 20 minute papers. We welcome panel submissions, and we also welcome abstracts from scholars whose work who would not normally be considered within the ambit of Cultural Studies.
Closing date for submissions: 30th June, 2006
the death and life of a great urban crusader
Apr 26th
Sad news via Molly Steenson. Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and several other books to which Floridean “creative cities” arguments owe a lot more than you’d think, has died at 89. The NY Times has a long and thoughtful piece about her life and work.
more video-sharing thingies
Apr 20th
Online editing, rich ‘folksonomy’ and community-building features would seem to be essential components of whatever is going to be the ‘flickr of video’, i.e. the default destination for video ’sharing’. (That is, if there will be such a thing – remembering the very specific circumstances of flickr’s emergence, which have a lot to do with the viral marketing and ingroup psychology of the A-list techbloggers).
In addition to YouTube, which is the most well known at the moment, and jumpcut, which I blogged about the other day, a couple others have floated into my field of vision lately: Eyespot has the ‘mix and share’ ethos right up front; also, I don’t know what is currently going on at motionbox, but wanted to check it out too. Any others I should know about?
A is for Apple
Apr 19th
In the beginning, there was an apple from the teacher…
You could use it in the kitchen…
Eventually even Mom could join in…
Then it grew so small you could take it out into the world, where you were now more liberated, individual and same-yet-different than ever before.
If you like this stuff, the Mac Mothership is a treasure trove.
See also the Lisa TV commercial (featuring Kevin Costner), which told us: “soon there’ll be just two kinds of people. Those who use computers, and those who use Apples.” (link not working right now)
And Lori Reed’s article Domesticating the Personal Computer is the perfect accompaniment to all those apples.
I wonder how I could get a certificate of mastery though?
For a contrast, have a look at the history of Windows magazine ads at the GUIdebook gallery, where you will see that Microsoft was teaching us what computers were for too. I found the marked shift in tack that came with the introduction of the MediaCenter edition especially interesting.
Seminar: The Gendered Ties that Bind
Apr 19th
The Gendered Ties That Bind the ‘New Global Governance’ to the ‘New Information Economy’
Associate Professor Lisa McLaughlin
CENTRE FOR CRITICAL AND CULTURAL STUDIES
PUBLIC SEMINAR SERIESThursday 20th April, 2.00-3.30pm
CCCS Seminar Room, Level 4, Forgan Smith Building, University of Queensland St Lucia Campus
As the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) illustrates, the ‘new multi-stakeholderism’ and public-private partnerships work in concert to advance the ‘corporatization’ of international development initiatives. In this presentation, Assoc Professor McLaughlin maintains that the gender mainstreaming advocated by the UN and various gender-oriented organizations necessitates that summits such as the WSIS actively include gender advocates who adhere to formal, governmental modalities while passively excluding those who actively oppose market-led approaches to development, and she will link this to an agenda in which women of the Global South are offered the potential for emancipation and mobility through access to technology but instead are apt to become place-based informational labor.
About the Presenter:
Lisa McLaughlin is an Associate Professor at Miami University-Ohio, USA, where she holds a joint appointment in Mass Communication and Women’s Studies. She is also Director of Graduate Studies for the Master of Arts in Mass Communication Program. McLaughlin is editor of Feminist Media Studies, an international peer-reviewed journal published by Routledge. She teaches courses in international communications, global media governance, and feminist media theory and practice. Her recent work focuses on ICTs and the corporatization of development as it has emerged under the auspices of the United Nations. At present, McLaughlin’s research concentrates on Cisco Systems’ Networking Academy Programs and the corporation’s Gender Initiatives that have originated as public-private partnerships brokered through the UN.
Members of the university community and the general public are invited to attend this free seminar with refreshments to follow. For further information please visit the website at http://www.cccs.uq.edu.au/index.html?page=42734&pid=16094
The C word(s)
Apr 18th
A great post from Anne on the relations between and the material contexts of design practice, criticism and critique (and critical thinking – not the same thing as critique, as I keep saying until I’m blue in the face). It ends with this elegant provocation:
And while we’re at it, how do ‘by-and-for the people’ technologies and media help to construct who ‘the people’ actually are and what they can do? Who benefits from this and in which ways?
That really couldn’t be closer to what I’m on about. Spooky, almost.
slower, softer
Apr 13th
Let me just frame this by saying that I am at the business end of trying to construct a doctoral thesis on the implications for cultural citizenship of vernacular creativity in “new media” contexts. I use radically mixed methods and my concept maps always start with ‘worms-eye’ views. I try to live up to the ethical ideals of cultural studies, participatory action research and the power of specificity and radical contextualisation.
I’m doing this in an institutional context where I feel fluctuating degrees of pressure to attempt to be not only clever but also useful (good); but where there are competing views of just what I should try be useful for; and in a research context where the speed of innovation is utterly incompatible with any kind of scholarly pace.
Also, I recently got external feedback on a collaborative project that is explicitly designed to mount a grounded, pragmatic critique of some of the ethical implications of “creativity” and “innovation” in particular contexts – something that almost nobody who might actually make use of such an understanding seems to have time to do, because we’re always too busy trying to find the cutting edge. The feedback wasn’t overly negative, but I was gobsmacked to find that it said there was not enough emphasis on the future.
So let’s pretend for a moment that I’m in the business of making naive and idealistic manifestoey statements. This is what I’d want to say about how “new media” talks about itself, and about how new media scholars talk about it:
Old things are as interesting as new ones.
The speed and spectacular novelty of a particular innovation should never be a measure of its value or the basis of its justification. (But I get why they are).
We* need time to explore slow and ethical innovation.
We need more space for quiet voices, more room for thoughtfulness and more recognition of the value of boredom.
We have a lot to learn from the practices of late adopters, as well as those of the thoughtful, the sceptical, and the reluctant. We should watch them. We should listen.
But that’s just between you, me and the choir.
*designers, users, researchers, critics, teachers, students, policy-makers, journalists. you. me.
A Study of Interestingness and Note Spamming
Apr 12th
Interesting indeed. You have to suspect that it was a case of any excuse for a geeky nude-up, though.
JumpCut
Apr 10th
JumpCut is another new player in the “creative online community” business – the idea is to not only upload, share, and discuss, but also edit, collaborate and remix images and video online.
You can automatically import sets of images from flickr, too.
After having a quick play around with the editing interface, it seems pretty powerful and elegant. It’s set up to make quite sophisticated slideshows, with control over individual image duration (by manually entering values, though) and transitions, so it would also be relatively straightforward to use JumpCut to make and publish a very simple digital story using stills and an uploaded voiceover track.
tilt-shift
Apr 10th
Josh told me about the photoshop fake tilt-shift technique, so I had to try to it over the weekend. I got kind of addicted for a day or so, and this is one of the results.
