creativity/machine

Some erudite cultural analysis of the relationship between mobile phone brand and social identity, thanks to Nielsen Media Research via the Lazy Research Desk at The Age:

Sony Ericsson handsets are favoured by ambitious young men trying to make their mark; LGs are tops with mums; while Samsungs are wielded by young women focused on their career, a study of mobile phone usage shows.

This is no reworked PR fluff-piece, though - it contains Real Journalism.

Sydneysider Dane Maddams, 21, of Concord, agrees that you can tell a lot about a person by their mobile phone.

[…]

Mr Maddams has a Sony Ericsson K800i and says he could be described as an ambitious young man trying to make his mark.

“I’m definitely not a middle-aged woman,” he said.

I’m not one for the psychoanalysis, but…hello Dane, could you be projecting?

P.S. Guess what, Dane. I’m afraid I have the same phone as you.

And in other news not fit to print, watch out for me fulminating on YouTube in this Saturday’s Courier Mail.

Some of the shiny things found in my RSS reader this morning.

Jane McGonigal is something of a wunderkind in the games world. I don’t pretend to understand everything she does, but two things I like are the underwriting ethic of ‘meaningful play’, and the idea of ubiquitous games that are embedded in ‘real world’ spaces. She recently finished her PhD (in her spare time) and this is her next project:

Can a game developer be nominated for a Nobel Prize in one of the sciences by the year 2032? That’s my plan, which I presented this past weekend at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
[…]
My goal over the next decade is to support the development of a massively multi-citizen science through massively collaborative games (think: alternate reality games with real-world data embedded inside.)

I think that this kind of unashamedly immodest ambition for intellectual work is just what we need. It makes me want to play already.

Anne Galloway on Nigel Thrift on affect, forms of communication and the mobilisation of publics. Includes gorgeous religious paintings that even a Protestant like me can appreciate.

And via Danny’s comment at Mel’s blog, here’s a video of Sir Ken Robinson in action, apparently delivering the final address at a conference.

You can also download the video here. Sir Ken is the special guest star at this week’s Digital Literacies symposium at one of Brisbane’s newest Shiny Buildings, the State Library of Queensland. I’m speaking at it (about Flickr and ludic literacies) along with most of the other researchers here at the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.

Wonderful to see the tentative program for MIT5: creativity, ownership and collaboration in the digital age has now been posted - it looks jam-packed with very good stuff, actually. Our panel, Produsing Culture (not ‘producing’ as Axel was very, very quick to point out to the organisers!) has been scheduled for 9.00 Saturday morning…not usually my most scholarly time of the week but I’ll see what I can do. Early to bed, early to rise and all that. Which is not my usual conference behaviour, either…

Our original panel proposal had an abstract which won’t appear on the website, so I thought it might be useful to post it here:

Produsing Culture: Implications of User-Led Content Creation
The proposed panel draws on the work of the User-Led Research Group based at Queensland University of Technology, Australia. The panel explores the practices and politics of cultural production in a range of contemporary new media contexts that are structured by collaborative user-led content creation, dissemination and evaluation. The shared approach of the papers is one that rejects both dystopian or utopian discourses in favour of a critical, grounded exploration of the complex and emergent ways in which cultural and media power relations are being reshaped or reconfigured in specific contexts, and the broader social implications of these shifts for democracy, cultural work and cultural participation.

My abstract:

Vernacular Photography 2.0: Flickr, Aesthetics and the Relations of Cultural Production
The photo-sharing network Flickr is one of the better-known examples of the participatory turn in web business models commonly referred to as ‘Web 2.0.’ This paper demonstrates that Flickr can be viewed as the site of a vernacular ‘relational aesthetics,’ focused not on discrete art objects, but on the modes of social connection that are both made possible by and flow through images within the network. At the same time, those social connections are used to collaboratively construct, negotiate and learn visual aesthetics and techniques. Rather than representing a revolutionary takeover of photography by untrained amateurs, Flickr is a highly heterogeneous ‘architecture of participation’ where the social worlds, technologies and aesthetics of ‘professional’ photography, art and everyday life collide, compete and coexist to produce new forms of intensely social and playful cultural production.

The abstract definitely shows signs of being written 3 weeks before PhD submission (and what was I on, buzzword pills??), but luckily allows me to move forward into some of the stuff I’m actually doing now. Should be fun.

Keyword search someone used to arrive at the previous entry:

“what is the purpose of an axel in a machine?”

Well, Axel, what do you have to say for yourself?

An interview with Jürgen Habermas on YouTube:

So, Habermas comes to the interweb. Or does he? There are those who say he still doesn’t quite get it, but I think there is much in his more recent work that–perhaps against his will–allows for a non-broadcast, networked model of the public sphere and a re-evaluation of the importance of ephemeral communication within it, if not the decentring of Reason as its connective tissue.

Case in point: I found this video via David Berry, via Twitter.

I’m about 6 weeks into my postdoc, so what I’ve been up to lately is a lot of background research and planning. The immediate goal has been to develop a coherent 2-3 year program of research that builds on my previous work, advances the field and helps to fulfil the ambitions of the Federation Fellowship program within which my postdoctoral fellowship sits. By the way, the FF program involves a team of four researchers, including the Federation Fellow and two other postdocs, so there’s some collaborative stuff we’re doing as well. I’m very happy to report that things are taking shape nicely now.

I’ll explain more as it gets down to brass tacks, but basically my individual research is designed to build on the kind of work I did in my PhD, while extending its reach quite significantly. I’m planning a central case study around YouTube, situating it within the broader historical context of the emergence, popularisation and social uses of new media technologies of all kinds, going right back to the emergence of an ‘elaborated system’ of print literacy. More as things move forward.

Other stuff that’s happening now and in the immediate future:

1. Co-teaching a coursework masters unit on Applied Research in the Creative Industries this semester. The unit has been redeveloped around the contexts & uses of Digital Storytelling and incorporates a reflective practice element with the inclusion of a Train-theTrainers workshop as a core activity
2. Very excitedly planning a 2 week trip to Boston with fellow postdoc John Banks in mid-late April, including our panel (with Axel Bruns) on “user-led content creation” at MIT5, and a number of other invited seminars and speaking engagements. We’re hoping to develop and strengthen some research collaborations while we’re there as well.
3. A multi-authored book proposal - fingers crossed, and more info soon
4. An article on Flickr (sort of drawn from my PhD, but sort of moving on from there) for a Big Journal (again, fingers crossed)
5. A few other fun journal articles that I banned myself from thinking about while concentrating very hard on Writing Up, but which I promised myself I’d write this year

One of several European Graduate School videos featuring famous Capital-T Theory dudes available at YouTube. (Thanks Glen). This presentation by DJ Spooky aka Paul Miller on the theory and practice of Rhythm Science is my favourite.

Thought I’d share a couple of quite silly stop motion animations made using Boinx iStopMotion and the iSight on my MacBook Pro. I plan to do something a bit more purposeful with the software one of these days, but I was quite pleased with what I managed to achieve in an idle hour or so on a Saturday morning. And it was lots of fun!

Three one-year postdoctoral research jobs at the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, Sweden.

The Centre for Gender Research is a research intense unit, consisting of about 20 researchers from different disciplines. We are now recruiting additional post-docs for full-time, one-year positions. Successful applicants have some kind of “double” competence - gender research and science - in one of the following research areas:

1) Gender and physics. The interface between gender research and physics has mostly been restricted to understand “women in science”; conditions, power-relations, mechanisms of exclusion and the like. We encourage applicants to focus on questions about gendered knowledge and materiality.

2)Gender and animal research. Animal research has traditionally, with some very important exceptions, been viewed as “outside” of gender and feminist concerns. Applicants in this area are welcomed to focus on issues concerning the gendering of animals, and the animaling of gender, in biological and other research.

3) Trans-disciplinary feminist didactics. Gender didactics is an undeveloped field, mainly in Sweden but also internationally. At the same time it is pivotal in all gender research to understand how gender is communicated. Hence teaching is the key to transdisciplinary encounters, which is why a national knowledge base in gender didactics is expected to contribute to deepen the planned trans-disciplinary research and theory development. To meet this requirement, we invite a visiting scientist position in feminist didactics who will start the building of such a knowledge base.

The persons we are looking for have different disciplinary backgrounds, and may therefore be researchers in for example pedagogy, history of science, sociology, biology or physics.