Grizzling about Facebook

Posted on | November 3, 2008 | No Comments

Setting up my new office, I’m reminded that my first task at Sydney is to introduce and chair this seminar on Friday. All are welcome.

Professor Meaghan Morris
‘Grizzling About Facebook’

Friday, 7th Nov, 2pm
The Refectory, Main Quadrangle, University of Sydney
Followed by drinks at Manning Bar

Abstract:
In journalistic usage, “new media” talk often suggests that one set of innovations will displace another. Reality is more complex: old media are reinvented interactively with new ones, and their relative accessibility gives old media a key role in narrating the advent of new technologies in the context of particular societies. Google records 580 million mentions of the social networking site “Facebook” world-wide over the past four years (with more than 5 million in Australia alone), and many of these arise from newspaper articles attempting to shape perceptions both of Facebook as a phenomenon, and to diagnose Facebook users as contemporary cultural ‘types’ whose ways of spending time and sustaining relationships are held to be symptomatic or even productive of diverse social ills.

The limitations of a morphological social criticism of popular cultural genres have now been demonstrated many times, but this approach remains fundamental to one of the major modes of public debate entrenched in Australian media during the Howard era: grizzling, or ‘fretful complaint’. As a Facebook user, for whom the modes of interaction the site provides has mostly represented an improvement in affective quality of life, I would like to reflect in this paper on Facebook as an experience, and on the difficulties of discussing social experiments in cultural criticism today.

MEAGHAN MORRIS is Professor at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney, and Chair Professor of Cultural Studies at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She does not work on new media, but has an enduring interest in prose, in cinema, and in rhetorics of nationality in colonial and transnational conditions. Her recent books include Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture (2006), Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema (co-ed. with Siu-leung Li and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu, 2005); and New Keywords: a Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (co-ed with Tony Bennett and Lawrence Grossberg, 2005).

Category: Events, Web(log) Stuff

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