Jill posted slides of her presentation just now - which is such a good idea that I thought I’d steal it 
I worked from a script, but the full paper still has to be written into existence. When it’s done I’ll upload it to the MIT5 website. In the meantime, please enjoy the Flickr-ness of the slides that went with the talk.
I’m enjoying the MIT5 conference immensely, although it is very distributed - both temporally, with something like 11 parallel sessions - and spatially, with rooms dotted around a few different buildings with no common meeting area (but that’s just the layout of MIT). So catching up with people really relies on micro-coordination using sms, email, IM and twitter, rather than relying on bumping into them at some big shared ‘event’.
John, Axel and I presented our panel this morning and we got some good dynamic discussion out of it. I really meant to blog much more comprehensively about the conference before now, but find I have medium-form writing fatigue after churning out so much stuff this week. But I’m interested in how much I’m communicating about the conference with people far and wide using other modes of communication.
For example, Twitter is being used by a few people at the conference, like Jill and Luca, for micro-annotation of each panel and paper. Although since my Twitter is ‘friends-only’ I tend to use it more for micro-annotating other, possibly less fascinating topics like what i’m eating, who i’m having lunch with, what software I’m mucking around with etc. So it’s interesting to encounter and contribute to all the conference-twittering while persisting with my usual use of the technology.
Given that busking paid my rent over several summers back in the day, I have a special place in my heart for buskers, and street drummers are super cool. I captured this video (on my phone, sorry!) while out strolling around sunny Boston with all the other tourists this afternoon. Enjoy. Here’s a direct link in case the embed doesn’t work in your feed reader.
If you want to try this at home, all you really need is a couple of sticks, some old paint cans, good coordination, a killer sense of rhythm, and years and years and years of practice.
Here’s a video of a different Boston street drummer with a much more esoteric style. Hope he’s still around!
There are heaps of other great busking videos on YouTube, too.
After arriving in Boston very late on Thursday night, the first speaking engagement fellow cci postdoc John Banks and I had was the Convergence Culture Consortium one-day symposium at MIT. C3 is a research collaboration between Comparative Media Studies at MIT and a range of mostly media industry partners.
The event was organised around the theme ‘Collaboration 2.0′, and it was certainly interesting to experience some of the many possible ways that academic-industry alliances could be negotiated, especially in such a different institutional (and national) context from our own. I came away more convinced than ever that the disjunctures and disagreements between and within both industry and academia were often just as productive of insights as were the shared assumptions - perhaps even more so - as long as they were mobilised in a spirit of mutual respect, and if genuinely shared objectives can be shaped in that context, then all the better. From my own perspective, given my work on Flickr I was especially pleased to make connections with the representatives from Yahoo!, and I’m looking forward to seeing where that might lead.
The sessions were a mix of invited academic presentations and snapshots from the industry partners. I spoke about the social value of vernacular creativity, and discussed Flickr as an example of best practice, while John explored the ways that user agency is being navigated in co-creative industry contexts, using his work with Brisbane game developer Auran as a case study.
Other highlights: Kevin Sandler’s presentation on Scooby Doo as a brand was one of the most entertaining academic presentations I’ve ever seen. As possibly the pre-eminent collector of Scooby Doo memorabilia, I think perhaps Kevin’s ulterior motive is to help Scooby re-take the world I also really enjoyed Rob Kozinet’s presentation about the cultural and economic distinctiveness of the Star Trek fan community. And it was good to get a look at the research being done by frighteningly hard-working CMS grad students Sam Ford (who writes most of the content on the C3 blog) and Ivan Askwith. And props to Josh for inviting us and organising everything…more to come.
Seriously, I challenge you to imagine you are a caricature of a businessman, and then to think of any really important knowledge not contained in one of these three books.
Above my (nice big) desk in my hotel room in Boston, which will be mission central for the next 10 days or so.
And by the way, the weather is increasingly lovely - I woke to clear blue skies today.
Autumn in Brisbane:
Spring in Boston:
That’s just so wrong. Apparently there may be sleet, which I’ve never really experienced. I know that posties go through it to deliver mail, but that’s about it. So that’s exciting, anyway.
The title of this post is a bit too ponderous for its content, which is going to be nothing more than some quick-and-dirty thinking out loud. It was prompted by a few things: Anne’s brief post mentioning mess and method, my participation next month in a CRN Masterclass with John Urry on ‘complexities and mobilities, and the YouTube project I’m designing for my postdoc that tries to link complex systems theory up with the history of ‘literacy’ (as a complex system itself). Most of all, I’ve been trying to work through the idea of a critical pragmatism as ‘engaged’ cultural studies practice, in thinking about my paper for Cultural Studies Now in July (part of a panel called ‘Labours of love: The work of creative intellectual practice’, with Mel Gregg, Kiley Gaffney and Nadia Mizner). And also reading Richard E. Lee’s The Life and Times of Cultural Studies with great interest.
I think part of what I want to argue is that pragmatic engagement actually opens up complexity, both because of the researcher-as-change-agent dynamic and because of getting a view from inside the machine. The way I’m thinking about it is kind of an inversion of the way cultural studies traditionally thinks about the role of critical theory (enlightening/transformative) as opposed to dirty ‘instrumentalist’ engagement with social or commercial enterprises (which must necessarily involve simplification or disavowal of the issues a critical researcher is supposed to be dealing with). I just don’t reckon that’s actually true, especially when I add another layer by thinking about the institutional formations (i.e. the different kinds of universities) which support each of those dominant modes of research practice. Don’t ask me too many questions just yet about what I mean by any of that - as I said, I’m thinking out loud.
So anyway, this is my abstract for Cultural Studies Now. It was written before I’d finished my PhD thesis so it uses that project as the departure point if not the destination:
Terms of Engagement: Doing Cultural Studies in the Enterprise University
Simon During (2005) recently argued that the structure of research funding in Australia and the rise of the ‘enterprise university’ have deprived ‘more abstract and theorised cultural studies’ of their ‘critical force’; conversely, Ien Ang has argued for the transition from ‘cultural studies’ to ‘cultural work’, carried out through strategic and pragmatic industry alliances (in Gibson & Rodan, 2005). This paper contributes to these debates by reflecting on a recently completed doctoral study entitled Vernacular Creativity and New Media. The project was grounded in the history and politics of cultural studies’ engagement with ‘ordinary’ culture and ‘everyday’ creativity, and in addition to theory-building and historical work included participation as a facilitator in community-based creative practice, as part of other university research projects funded by government and industry sources. The paper examines the multiple opportunities for and constraints on ‘critical engagement’ that emerged throughout the course of this research.I suggest that a critically engaged cultural studies that is practically articulated with ‘real world’ contexts affords productive alternatives to the extreme positions – both of them positions of ‘critique’ - that Jim McGuigan (2005) calls ‘uncritical populism’ and ‘radical subversion’ respectively. Instead, an engagement grounded in critical pragmatism actually works to reveal and open up, rather than close down or disavow complexity.
Anyway, I’ll keep thinking. In the meantime I’m off to MIT on Thursday for a bunch of presentations and stuff, which I’ll blog about as I go.
As I do when I find a series I like, over the last couple of weeks I binge-watched all 3 seasons of Battlestar Galactica. I did the same with Heroes. In both cases, eventually the tragic day arrives when I’ve caught up with the States. At best, this habit means waiting a week in between episodes, something which really doesn’t suit my lifestyle and OCD personality. At worst - well, in the States, BSG is all over until a mini-series in September, while the next season doesn’t start until 2008.
In the short time since my stockpiled episodes of Season 3 ran out, I’ve been feeling strangely sad, lost, angry and…look, let’s be honest - really quite alone.
This very well put-together ‘gag reel’ has made it all a little bit better (warning - contains spoilers!):
By the way, if anyone knows the proper details about the gag video and how it got to the interwebs, please let me know in the comments. i.e. was it on TV or a DVD extra, or was it released into the “virusphere”?
Anyway, it’s on YouTube now, and therefore=work.
Well, at least fan videos (where vernacular creativity and proprietary content get all entangled and bear fruit) are work, definitely. Like this very sweet Starbuck/Laura number for example:
Via cityofsound’s del.icio.us I just discovered PingMag. Where have I been?
The most recent entry is about the amazing Social Suicide line of suits.
They have a line that’s available in stores and online, but it seems they still do bespoke suits as well. Here’s a taste:
If you are a man with a tattoo, we might arrange a photo session with you where we take a shot of your tattoo in its exact position and measure you for your suit. We then have your tattoo embroidered on your jacket. Now when you take that jacket off you have your tattoo on your shirt, and when you take that shirt off it shows on your body - in the exact same position.
These suits start from £3 600/ $6 600 dollars.
More at pingmag. For someone who fantasizes about the perfect generic white shirt, endlessly repeated in neat rows in my wardrobe, it’s all a bit creepy, this endlessly customizable future. Creepy, but cool.
Also very interesting:
An interview about the book 3030: New Photography in China:
This fully illustrated survey of 30 of China’s brightest photographers under 30 shows a new generation of artists, unburdened by ideology and immersed in the economic and social changes that have transformed China over the past 20 years.
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