creativity/machine

There’s a job going in the Creative Industries Faculty for someone to help with the co-ordination and further development of our applied research strengths in the area of digital storytelling and other co-creative media.

If you know of anyone who might be good for this position, please forward this on to them, and please note it’s closing on the 25th Jan, which is very soon!

Brief info pasted below, for full details of the position, how to apply and how to make any further enquiries (not to me!), go to the QUT website.

A Project Officer is required by the Research Office of the Creative Industries Faculty to assist a Steering Committee in the coordination, development and maintenance of Digital Storytelling and co-creative initiatives at the nexus of research, teaching and engagement.

Closes: 25 January 2008

Salary: $45 907 to $51 777 pa (AUD)

Benefits available at QUT include 17% employer superannuation contributions, a generous study assistance scheme, salary packaging, extensive development and training programs and access to a range of state-of-the-art facilities.

INFORMATION FOR APPLICANTS

Whilst the University welcomes applications from candidates outside the greater Brisbane area, candidates will be responsible for any travel and relocation expenses involved in interview/commencing appointment.

DUTY STATEMENT

Purpose of Position

A newly formed Steering and Advisory group of senior and active researchers has been established to steer and manage the coordination, development and maintenance of Digital Storytelling and co-creative initiatives at the nexus of research, teaching and engagement. The Project Officer will assist the Creative Industries Faculty Research Office, under close supervision and direction from the Steering/Advisory Group, to develop applied commercial research opportunities by assisting in the building, coordination and facilitation of the Faculty’s capacity to lead innovation in Digital Storytelling and co-creative media. The Project Officer will assist in the development and maintenance of collaborative relationships within the Faculty, across the University, and with external clients such as the State Library Queensland; maintain and organise recordkeeping; arrange meetings; ensure communications are maintained amongst all parties; and assist in the organisation and delivery of training.

The other day I had the pleasure of participating in this week’s episode of Spark, a CBC Radio One show on tech culture news and ideas. It was a lot of fun being part of such a smart show - yay, public service broadcasting, long may it reign.
The full show and related info, links etc is now available at the Spark website.

I was there to provide some comments from a cultural research point of view on Dan Ackerman Greenberg’s now-notorious ’secret strategies’ for manufacturing ‘virality’. My main point really was that I didn’t think you could use the virus metaphor to simply describe a piece of content becoming very popular through word-of-mouth or peer-to-peer distribution. However I do think it is tremendously interesting to think about the ways in which ideas, recipes, and practices become available for re-use via mass replication and variation; to try to understand what these little units of knowledge actually are, and how it all works.

It’s the difference between talking about the Crank That music video ‘going viral’, and the Crank That dance steps.

Actually, moving away from video and to mix the metaphors, it is so-called ‘internet memes’ like the lolcats that are the best examples.

With those, you have a form, a set of essential elements, and a set of constantly evolving ‘rules’ for practice, producing apparently infinite lol-possibilities. These ‘rules’ are like cultural building blocks that can be re-used, remixed, and re-combined to produce new ideas, always hybrid, always - in a particular sense of the word - creative. This is far more interesting to me than the banal quest to get more eyeballs onto your piece of ‘content’.

The catch is, it seems to be almost entirely unpredictable which of these ideas will be repeated and built on to the extent that they go truly ‘viral’.

Do you doubt me?

Oh, and by the way, Joshua Green and I are very busily writing a book about YouTube that draws on our collaborative research project. It will be out on Polity Press later this year, and, to misappropriate physics instead of biology, it will hopefully provide some useful angles to think through the politics of participatory culture, using YouTube as a lens through which to refract the competing dynamics of user-created content, expertise and agency. That’s keeping me quiet and away from the blog a bit, but I’ll be posting updates (and attempting to generate enough hype to make the book go ‘viral’) later on.