creativity/machine

Back in 2004, along with my good friend and colleague Marcus Foth, I was a participant in the second annual Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Program. It was one of the most intellectually stimulating experiences of my PhD candidature, and the friendships established there have remained both socially and academically rewarding ever since. It was also really fun, so I felt quite nostalgic when I went back for a visit back in October.

Given I know how valuable the SDP Programme is to those who are fortunate enough to participate in it, I’m very pleased to be able to announce that the next one will be held in Brisbane at QUT next year.

From the official website:

We are delighted to announce that the seventh OII Summer Doctoral Programme (SDP) will be conducted and organised by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) in partnership with the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia from 6-17 July, 2009.

The thematic focus this year will be on ‘Creativity, Innovation and the Internet’.

The aim of the programme is to bring together advanced doctoral students engaged in dissertation research on diverse aspects of creativity and innovation relating to the Internet and other ICTs. By sharing their work and learning from leading academics in the field, students can enhance the quality and significance of their thesis research and create a peer network of excellent early-stage researchers.

We welcome applications from advanced doctoral students in any discipline whose work in the field of Internet research engages with the overall themes of creativity and innovation.

Specific topics will include, but are not limited to:

• Methodological innovation and multidisciplinarity
• Innovative uses of ICTs in developing contexts
• Practice-led and performance-based Internet research
• The economics of creativity and innovation
• Community and industry partnerships
• User-led innovation and user-generated content
• Citizen journalism and community media
• Mobile, locative and urban media
• Digital literacy and pedagogical innovation
• Regulatory barriers to creativity and innovation
• Copyright and its alternatives
• Innovation policy

As well as drawing on the OII’s faculty and research interests, the 2009 SDP will reflect the research interests of the nationally-funded ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries & Innovation (which is where I work) and the QUT Institute for Creative Industries & Innovation (iCi).

This collaboration has been in the works for some time, and I’m really looking forward to it.

And yes, technically it will be winter here, but let’s not give anyone the impression that the weather will be anything other than gloriously sunny. I should also mention that the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association conference, themed ‘Communication, Creativity and Global Citizenship’ will also be taking place in Brisbane at almost the same time, so it’s going to be a good place to be.

More information and the application form at the OII website.

I have copious session notes to blog from the conference, but I can’t cope with rewriting them right now (Axel, you are the master of conference blogging - I will have to just sit at your feet and learn). Plus, this is not really a laptops-out-during-sessions type crowd, and having an iBook makes you look even more like a pretentious geek.

But anyway, on my second night here I caught up with my friend Colin who I met at the OII last year. We started at this pub in Harvard, then we wandered through Boston’s mansion district, stopping for a fancy martini at the Oak Bar (Michelle, you are the best waitress ever), before mac’n'cheese and a beer at cafe delux (which was, indeed, delux) and finally catching the last two sets of a great trio of (I think) Berklee College of Music students at Wally’s cafe - a jazz bar that has been in the same family since the 1940s. Outside of Wally’s I was accosted by another Berklee student flogging a really quite awesome hip hop CD on which he goes by the name of Black Swan (no URL for this dude).

FYI, everything in Boston shuts at 1.00 am, and there is not really a street culture to speak of…but I feel I’ve been privileged to see the best of it.

Needless to say there is no hope for the sleep patterns to stabilise by the time I fly out tomorrow…

Thanks, Colin!

Just got back from the CSAA conference in Perth, and am now both knackered and leading a week-long Digital Storytelling workshop - I have about 20,000 words of blogging to do about both of those. But for now, one of my lame “announcement” posts.

I had the _best_ time at the Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Programme this year, and next year they’re going to hold it in Beijing. So if you’re a social science (very broadly defined) PhD student working on the Internet, then this is for you:

The Oxford Internet Institute is pleased to announce that the application process for our next Summer Doctoral Programme is now open. The 2005 programme will take place in the city of Beijing, China between the 7th and 21st July 2005. The programme will focus on the increasingly multilingual, multicultural character of the Internet and Web, particularly with the rapidly growing prominence of Asia, and China, in this global network of information, communication, services and technologies.

Further information regarding the programme and details on how to apply, are now available on our website. Please see:

http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/teaching/?rq=sdp.

If you have any further queries please email sdp[at]oii[dot]ox[dot]ac[dot]uk.

Sour grapes: Everyone is at AoIR in Brighton except me. And Kylie. And, due to cyclone activity, Jeremy (I think). We have repeatedly told our OII summer doctoral program colleagues not to bond without us, but with all that Internet talk, beer and fish and chips (with mushy peas!) by the seaside, it’s not looking good
Junket: Instead, I’m off to the Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association congress in Sydney tomorrow. Which should be interesting. My research question for my time at the congress: to what extent, and it what ways, is the mobile industry really starting to focus on the social contexts of mobile phone use - and how are users imagined in general (or even better - not in general but in their complex specificity)?

As if anyone needed further proof that the pathway to a complete PhD is far from smooth…

Here’s a mindmap of the current conceptual state of my thesis, made in a fit of OII-stimulated inspiration on the train to Brighton while sleep-deprived a couple of weeks ago.

It’s been sitting crumpled at the bottom of my bag ever since, hence the added patina (signifying mental effort and creative authenticity, I’m sure).

I’ve had a nice day doing a bit more exploring around Oxford, including the Natural History and Pitt Rivers museums, followed by a quest for good icecream and some shopping. But being (very) far from home the notion of place comes up again and again, both in conversation and in my head.

As I sit here now in my room at Wadham college, the soundscape includes music from my laptop (meme - thanks to fellow OII participant David Berry), Beethoven symphonies from downstairs, the outdoor theatre troupe on the lawn below my window performing a French play (Cyano de Bergerac) in English, and the chants and shouts of the animal rights protest marching past on the street. This morning I looked at cultural artefacts from all reaches of the globe, many of which are of course the spoils of Empire, before eating Turkish delight icecream and buying an african thumb piano (mbira) and a set of peruvian pan pipes…

This evening: croquet, apparently!

Finally got online for the first time in three days today - a strangely unnerving and oddly liberating feeling being disconnected for that long. So after answering all the most urgent work-related emails, I steeled myself to overcome my fuzzy-headed jet lag long enough to write something about the first day of the OII summer doctoral programme…I was going to wax rhapsodical about the dreaming spires, the bridge of sighs, the centuries of tradition (and privelege) that you breathe as you walk down the street here. Not to mention the labyrinthine procedures involved in getting a Bodleian library card, the bright people (self excluding statement of course) who’ve been gathered together for the program, and the vigorous discussions that have already begun. But super-organised Kylie Veale has already done all that for me. Then I was going to post bad camphone pics of the view from my room…that’s been done too. Better luck tomorrow i guess.

One more sleep until I take off for the UK to attend the Oxford Internet Institute Doctoral Summer Programme. The recently published schedule and participants’ bios [link removed on request] have built up a healthy level of excitement. I’m looking forward to the intense immersion in key questions around the internet, culture and society, working with some very interesting-sounding people from all over the world, and getting to know the two Brisbane-based buddies who are also attending even better.

Additionally, I’m excited about catching up with old friends in London, hoping for sunshine, and putting up a show of bravado about the warm beer. I’ll also be on the hunt for boring postcards to send out by snail mail. This could be quite a challenge in picturesque, iconic Oxford. If I find any and get near a scanner I’ll show and tell.

I meant to blog my notes from a seminar here at QUT the other day given by Stephen Coleman, visiting professor of e-democracy at the Oxford Internet Institute. Now, e-governance and e-voting aren’t exactly my bag, but cultural democracy (by which I mean a democratic cultural sphere) and the ways in which digital networks and digital technologies might enable us to improve its reach and effects definitely are my bag.

So I was pleased to meet and hear from Stephen on two counts - one, his emphasis on the relationship between affect and people’s levels of engagement; and two, he is on the faculty of the OII Doctoral Summer Programme, which I’m fortunate enough to be attending this year.

Stephen is the author of A Tale of Two Houses: The House of Commons, the Big Brother House and the people at home, a research study which examines the attitudes of ?political junkies? and Big Brother fans to politics, politicians and each other and calls for a more creative approach to political engagement. The talk at QUT was an elaboration on the findings of this research.

The aspects of this that really sparked my interest were those concerned with the mode of engagement, indeed the basis of engagement, of the Big Brother fanbase - it was to do with emotional intelligence, human relationships, ethics and morality, even trust and authenticity; and ultimately it is an affective, rather than rationalist (which is not to say irrational), domain. By contrast, the jockeying for position, strategism and hyper-rationality of formal politics seems to belong to a world of its own, a world utterly removed from the cultural frame of most of us. I’m with the BBs - I want to be given the right to think and talk about whether or not someone is a decent human being, and whether or not I trust them, when talking about federal politics.

There is a politics of cultural democracy that is closely linked to this, at least I hope so. I hope that grass-roots, or bottom-up, or amateur cultural production and intense cultural engagement are at least not irrelevant to genuine democracy. And that’s about as political as I want this blog ever to get.

I’m off to Perth until Wednesday, and will be tragically disconnected from the web for most of that time. Until I return, may I suggest that visits to the clever people on my blogroll should more than suffice. Be good, kids!

I know I’ve been quiet here lately, but that is because life is so noisy everywhere else. Here are the headlines:

teaching
It was with great trepidation that I introduced my undergraduate music/media studies students to research blogging this week. I was dumbfounded in some cases when I realised the size of the conceptual leap I was asking some people to make - from occasional email, chat and random googling to genuine network literacy. I guess it brings home the fact that “young people” are never, or at least not all, as wired as we “older people” think. Some of them are doing such cool things, though, that it warms the cockles of your heart.

I have also been and/or should now be:

coughing
and generally having the flu.

marking
All the essays by the above brilliant people…

thesising
I have my formal thesis proposal thingy due, well, imminently. ‘nuf said

travelling
Off to Perth for a couple of days on Sunday. Oooh, I forgot to announce, I’m also off to Oxford in July!

editing
The “porn” issue of M/C is jointly parented by me. we are snowed under with articles…

reviewing
3 books and an article, some already more overdue than others….
Listing things like this only makes it worse. I might go back to doing some of it now, instead of…

blogging, which often feels suspiciously like

procrastinating