Category: life in academia

Australian Blogging Conference this Friday

On Friday I’m going to be at the Australian Blogging Conference, which is being held here at the Creative Industries Precinct, QUT Kelvin Grove. A bit of the blurb:

BlogOzThe growth of the Australian blogging community has mirrored the expansion of the blogosphere elsewhere in the developed world. However, there have been only a few opportunities afforded to Australian bloggers to get together and discuss their common interest. This unconference, modelled on the successful BloggerCons in the United States, aims to redress this by providing a forum that will allow Australian bloggers to gather together and talk about blogging and the Australian blogosphere. It aims to be a user-focused conference for the Australian blogging community.

This will not be a conference in the traditional sense. It will be relatively informal. Instead of lengthy presentations, people will be invited lead discussions on various topics throughout the day – some practical, such as how to build a better blog, and some theoretical on the role, influence and future of blogs.

Melissa Gregg, Axel Bruns and I are leading the 10.30 am session ‘Researching Blogging and Blogging Research’. These are some of the questions we hope will provoke some really interesting and dynamic discussion:

* What’s there to research about blogging?
* What research methodologies can be used to research blogging?
* How do blogs support the research process?
* How do blogs contribute to disseminating research?

Looking forward to seeing some of you there, and for those who can’t attend I’m sure there will be video and/or blog entries galore on most of the sessions.

And the day before that, I’m graduating. Looking forward to finally wearing that floppy hat.

off to london

I’m off to London tonight to attend Cultural Studies Now, where I’ll be giving this paper on a panel with Mel Gregg, Kiley Gaffney and Nadia Mizner:

Terms of Engagement: Doing Cultural Studies in the Enterprise University

Simon During 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. 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 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.

That’s the background and the set of issues I want to intervene in, and I’ll mainly be concentrating on the work I did as hybrid ethnographer-participant-trainer in various digital storytelling workshops. More importantly, I will be chasing down photo ops with Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige and Judith Halberstam! I’m also really looking forward to this seminar on feminism and cultural theory at Goldsmiths.

Meanwhile, John Hartley has a new post over at Propagating Media (my ‘other’ blog) in response to an open letter we received the other day about the launch of the National Indigenous Television Network. John says:

It is a pity that no-one in government seems to be ‘joining the dots’ in relation to Aboriginal creativity. NITV, ICTV, NIRS – and other initiatives – need investment and strategic direction if they are to become what they claim to be – a ‘national’ resource with both economic and representational clout for an emergent Indigenous polity.

The full post is here.

‘an enhanced seriousness of mind’

The day after arriving back in Brisbane from MIT5 I hopped a plane to Adelaide for the CRN masterclass with John Urry on complexity theory and mobilities. As an ‘event’ it wasn’t exactly buzzing with dynamic engagement, but of course it improved once we got to dinner, and it was great to meet John in persona and discuss some of my ideas about complexity and cultural studies. If nothing else it forced me to dive into some of the theory I’m trying to get across for my postdoctoral research on YouTube and media change. Anyway, there was a significant pile of Urry readings we had to do in preparation – Glen has already blogged notes on them here and here while he was preparing for the Sydney masterclass, if anyone’s interested. I just wanted to share a little moment I had while doing these readings on the plane to Adelaide, feeling very much in between places and states of mind.

In Social Networks, Travel and Talk, Urry discusses the way that David Lodge’s novel Small World ‘reveals the complex, multi-layered and richly gossipy nature of conferences’ and especially the special qualities of what Urry calls ‘meetingness’ – where ‘meetingness’ is constituted by virtue of the need to travel to the conference, making it a somewhat extraordinary ‘occasion’.

Lodge describes the conference experience like this:

You journey to new and interesting places, meet new and interesting people, and form new and interesting relationships with them; exchange gossip and confidences…, eat, drink and make merry in their company every evening; and yet…return home with an enhanced seriousness of mind.

That’s always exactly how I feel, unless the conference was crap, but I’d never heard it put quite that well before. Of course, the irony of having this epiphany while being stuck in my seat on the plane with a sore back and a developing cold, burning human and mineral energy (not to mention cash) to engage in co-present talk on the topic of mobilities, co-presence, travel and talk didn’t escape me.

more on conferencing twittering

In the ‘questions and comments’ section of the final plenary at MIT5, David Silver made two comments about how the conference might be improved next time. He presented us with two problems:

1. The incongruity of the conference theme and the conference format. That is, should a conference that was investigating collaborative forms of cultural production and questioning the figures of the cultural ‘expert’ and the author be organised around the traditional ‘sage on the stage’ model of discourse, or should it become more like the thing it studies?

2. Taking advantage of the free wireless, the ‘audience’ was twittering, blogging and surfing too much during sessions and suffering from continuous partial attention, and maybe we needed to learn how to unplug.

Leaving aside the fact that being ‘plugged in’ and in a state of ‘continuous partial attention’ seems an entirely apt description of any good conference I’ve ever been to…

It seemed quite clear to me that the second ‘problem’ is an emergent and entirely rational response to the first one as well as an instantiation of precisely the kinds of ‘media transformation’ we were all busy discussing, describing and questioning. As far as I could see over people’s shoulders, and certainly in my own case, most of the time the twitterers were using their laptops and the internet to annotate, share, get background on, critique, and fact-check the papers they were listening to – and yes, they were also sometimes ‘playing around’ and socialising.

So as far as I’m concerned, on the one hand conferencing twittering, IM-ing, surfing and blogging is a user-led innovation that *amplifies* what is good about an academic conference – massive downloads of information, the collision of perspectives, and the intensive social engagement. On the other, such behaviour represents a material critique of what is not so great – the parallel sessions, the non-interactivity, and the dominance of particular top-down modes of engagement.

Of course, as with any emergent phenomenon, the ethics and most effective applications of these practices are still being worked out, but where they get worked out is in practice.

Why am I blogging this now instead of marching down to the microphone on the day? Well, I was twitching to say all of that at the time, but had an attack of girlish shyness. Which is funny, given that the next comment was from someone (didn’t catch the name) who thought the conference might have been a bit masculinist and that we needed to think about innovative ways of creating access to voice for those who didn’t necessarily have the bravado to engage in antagonistic modes of discourse.

So what I’ve done here is to take advantage of the opportunity afforded by alternative modes of communication to respond without having to stand at the microphone with my heart beating in terror, as she did.

Brief MIT5 update

you know you're at MIT when...

you know you’re at MIT when…


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.

Collaboration 2.0: C3 symposium

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.

MIT hallway

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.

MIT5 ahoy

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.

Wealth of Networks Wiki

This Wiki is an invitation to collaborate on building a learning and research environment based on Yochai Benkler’s book, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, available under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Sharealike license.

A good idea, and one that tests and amplifies the basic propositions of Benkler’s arguments. But I hope the space will also be used to generate a sustained critical dialogue around the issues raised in the book, as well as to “build a learning and research environment” based on it…

On the plan for ‘growing’ the Wiki

The basic idea is to make this Wiki a place for at least five things:

  1. Collaborate on writing a summary of the ideas and claims of the book (see Table of Contents)
  2. Collaborate on writing commentaries and elaborating and refining the presentation
  3. Provide an easy platform through which to access underlying research materials:
    *those used in the book’s notes
    *and resources that are useful for further research, refinement, and updating
  4. Describe, link to, and analyze examples of the phenomena the book describes
    *The purpose is not to “make the case” for the book or find “gotcha” counter examples. What we are trying to do is provide a real research tool, annotated bibliography, and platform for collaborative learning. Examples and counter-examples should be selected and described with that purpose in mind.
  5. Demonstrate and discover what is valuable in a learning platform
    *Through separate pages devoted to ideas and experiments of what can be done with an online book to make it a learning platform, we hope to expand the range of uses to which this Wiki can be available.
    *Through creative, systematic and interactive uses of this wiki, we hope to enhance our individual and collective skills & experience in a wiki world

There is a link from the wiki to the Crooked Timber seminar on the book, which was an early site of critical dialogue, including responses from Benkler to the contributions of participants.

CFP: M/C Journal – ‘mobile’

M/C Journal
Call for Papers: ‘mobile’
Edited by Larissa Hjorth & Olivia Khoo

Convergence has become part of burgeoning mobile media. The mobile phone
has come of age. As an integral component of visual media cultures, camera
phone practices are arguably both extending and creating emerging ways of
seeing and representing. In media footage of late, camera phones have been
heralded as providing everyday users with the possibility of self-
expression and voice in the once unidirectional model of mass media. In
addition, the “exchange” and gift-giving economy underpinning mobile phone
practices (Taylor and Harper 2003) is further enunciated by the camera
phone’s ability to “share” moments between intimates (and strangers)
through various contextual frameworks and archives from MMS, blogs, virtual
community sites to actual face-to-face digital storytelling.

This is particularly the case in the Asia-Pacific region, where mobile
practices in locations such as Tokyo and Seoul have brought about new forms
of media use; for example, mobile phones are increasing being deployed to
connect to, among other things, Web 2.0′s burgeoning landscape of social
software. In much of the rhetoric of current media criticism, users are
being interpellated as prosumers (producers plus consumers), but what is
the reality behind this so-called agency? Do users really feel empowered by
the structures of immediacy connected to user-generated content (UGC)? Are
they ‘liberated’ by the multi-media functions of the mobile phone or is the
increasing convergence of mobile media causing more complications than
pleasures?

This issue of M/C Journal seeks papers exploring the role of convergent
mobile technologies in the Asia-Pacific region. The issue aims to explore
the socio-cultural particularities of various adaptations of mobile media,
from case studies on mobile communication in the Asia Pacific, to cross-
cultural analyses of the transborder flows of mobile media production,
representation and consumption. Topics may include:

- Convergent mobile technologies
- The use of mobile technologies in the construction, regulation and upkeep
of social software and virtual communities
- Pervasive mobile gaming
- Mobile communication case studies in the region
- The role of co-presence and maintenance of intimacy and community through
mobile communication
- The “future” of mobile media
- Creativity and mobile media; the aesthetics of mobile media
- Critiques of prosumer rhetoric in mass media
- Emerging forms of techno-nationalism and governmental policies around
‘mobility’ and digital convergent cultures
- The changing role of temporality and spatiality in contemporary case
studies of mobile telephony

Submit your essays of 3000 words in length to the editors at
mobile@journal.media-culture.org.au

Article deadline: 17 January 2007
Issue release date: 14 March 2007

PS, yes I am still alive, but as my supervisor says, I am ‘great with thesis’ so no time for whimsical blog entries just now. Expect a Big Announcement in the next few weeks.