Small steps

Posted on | March 26, 2007 | 7 Comments

I’ve been back in Brisbane since Saturday and I’m having trouble adjusting. My mind and my heart are still back in the UK, and my body, while very much here, is aching and complaining about the lack of sleep on the flights home. I’ve been too tired and fluey to go out and walk around in the sun and the fresh air – something that I know would help a lot. I think I’ll focus on that as tomorrow’s goal, because going in to work today just made me feel worse. I also have a few good books to get through before I head home for Easter, so maybe I can alternate between the couch and the park as I progress:

- Out of our Minds, by Ken Robinson: Sir Ken is the main guest at the Digital Literacies Symposium I’m participating in on Friday at the spunky new State Library at Southbank. The book is making me feel a lot more optimistic about the event than I had been, but I’m still not sure how I’m going to adopt an appropriately QUT-esque manifesto style of performance if I’m brave enough to speak at all. But hey, after hanging out chatting with the heavyweights at LSE the other day, I feel a bit more confident about this whole roundtable thing. It might even be fun – and it will definitely be useful to speak to a semi-public audience for a change.

- Identity Anecdotes, by Meaghan Morris: I’m reviewing this for MIA, and it’s proving a surprisingly productive companion to Robinson’s book. Meaghan’s insistence on the need for specificity of context and institutional location in writing helps me understand why I have such difficulties with the unquestionable authority of the corporate-savvy business press ‘voice’ – of Robinson, of Florida, of the creative industries discourse, which is different in nature to the actual work that gets done by real humans in creative industries and creative industries research faculties. Meaghan’s work is also a great contrast to the David Lodge novel I’m reading at the moment, a book that was intended as some amusing long haul fiction, but actually came a bit too close for comfort to the reality of my life in hotels lately. Unlike Lodge’s fiction, which seems even more fantastic to a reader of my age given that it’s written in a pre-internet era of academic practice, Meaghan’s work offers insight into the massive shifts affecting work in universities over the past twenty years, from the point of view of someone watching from the outside, gradually working her way in. Speaking of which:

- Fans, Bloggers and Gamers, by Henry Jenkins: This is part of a painfully slow and ongoing lit review for the online cultural studies project I’m doing with Catherine Driscoll. We are working on our sample chapter for a couple of interested publishers at the moment, so it’s timely that this story came along in The Weekend Australian Magazine (link is to the longer, New York Mag version). This could be one of the most sympathetic articles on young people’s use of online space that I’ve read, whether in academic or popular writing. The revolutionary framing is still unhelpful, at least in terms of the argument our book will be making, but isn’t it worrying that I haven’t heard anything this perceptive at any of the numerous conference papers on ‘young people and the internet’ I’ve been to in the last few years?

Some snippets:

More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would—and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy. From their perspective, it’s the extreme caution of the earlier generation that’s the narcissistic thing. Or, as Kitty put it to me, ‘Why not? What’s the worst that’s going to happen? Twenty years down the road, someone’s gonna find your picture? Just make sure it’s a great picture.’

[...]

At 17, Oppermann is conversant with the conventional wisdom about the online world—that it’s a sketchy bus station packed with pedophiles. (In fact, that’s pretty much the standard response I’ve gotten when I’ve spoken about this piece with anyone over 39: ‘But what about the perverts?’ For teenagers, who have grown up laughing at porn pop-ups and the occasional instant message from a sleezy stranger, this is about as logical as the question ‘How can you move to New York? You’ll get mugged!’) She argues that when it comes to online relationships, ‘you’re getting what you’re being.’

[...]

The biggest issue of living in public, of course, is simply that when people see you, they judge you. It’s no wonder Paris Hilton has become a peculiarly contemporary role model, blurring as she does the distinction between exposing oneself and being exposed, mortifying details spilling from her at regular intervals like hard candy from a piñata. She may not be likable, but she offers a perverse blueprint for surviving scandal: Just keep walking through those flames until you find a way to take them as a compliment.

Category: Reading

Comments

7 Responses to “Small steps”

  1. jean
    March 26th, 2007 @ 11:05 pm

    the symposium will be heaps fun, I will be there. if you come on thursday you can even hear my manifesto. I haven’t read Sir Ken, preferring to keep him as a surprise. but as you can imagine I’ve heard quite a lot about him…

  2. danny
    March 27th, 2007 @ 7:10 am

    Good to see you back. My advice is not to be too ambitious getting back on top of things, getting into small metal cylinders and hurtling to the other side of the world is not what our bodies are designed for and it takes a while to adjust. Sun in the mornings and swimming work for me.

    There’s a good Sir Ken warmup from TED:

    http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=ken_robinson. I haven’t read his books but I think I’d prefer the performance. I’d also like to hear Jean’s manifesto – any chance of some vlogging Jean?

    Finally, did you know that Katie King has a blog? Doesn’t seem to get updated very often but I just found it last week and there is stuff that seems to resonate with some of your work.

    http://katiekin.blogspot.com/2006/11/what-price-citation.html.

    Hope to see you and the rest of Brisvegas in May, take it easy!

  3. creativity/machine » morning gazette
    March 27th, 2007 @ 8:43 am

    [...] And via 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. Sir Ken is the special guest star at this week’s Digital Literacies symposium at the State Library of Queensland, which I’m speaking at along with most of the other researchers here. It’s a joint initiative of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation where I work, and the ARC Cultural Research Network, run out of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at UQ. These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]

  4. jean
    March 27th, 2007 @ 8:53 am

    thanks for the video danny. I think they’re recording video of all the sessions, for later editing and uploading. Must remember to wear Best Frock.

  5. melgregg
    March 27th, 2007 @ 10:08 am

    Note to self: don’t mention Paris Hilton on blog if spam is unwanted…

    Oops I did it again…

  6. Mel
    March 27th, 2007 @ 3:21 pm

    Re: young people and online space. Last year I wrote a dumbarse story that touches on this; there should be another one on a similar topic appearing in the SMH soon.

    Of course, I’m rather annoyed that major Australian weekend magazines would rather reprint a story like this from overseas rather than commission it from a local writer.

  7. melgregg
    March 27th, 2007 @ 5:45 pm

    I was fuming too, but not surprised. There seems to be a disconnect between generalist stories like these that can *only* be written by an international journo and the archly parochial approach of News Ltd’s state-based publications that interpret these phenomena in local terms… (my recent experience with The Courier Mail comes to mind)

    Or it’s nowhere near as complicated as this, but just economics.

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