I’m so grateful to Rebecca for her work on this and the experience of collaborating together. It’s taught me a lot about the difficulty of writing interdisciplinary analysis – and reminded me of the challenges in producing internet research beyond social sciences paradigms. I really value the determination and imagination Becky is showing in bringing together different disciplinary influences in her PhD work, which this paper has developed from.

Unfortunately in the process of peer review we were asked to remove the song lyrics we originally included in the paper. (I hadn’t realised that copyright was so strict… and have had song lyrics published in the same journal before). Anyway, when reading, know that we originally wanted this as our main intertextual reference. Lily says it better than us.

The paper is called “The Return of Organization Man” and I’m just trying to figure out the final part of the analysis, which follows on from a discussion of the film adaptations of The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and Revolutionary Road.

I think overall I am trying to illustrate the shift from organizations to networks, at least as this manifests in certain representations of commuter space on screen… hence the choice of examples. But my other objective is to tease out some of the ideological work that The Organization Man has done over the decades as a trope for a specifically US obsession with individualism versus conformity.

Put simply, the final switch in the argument will be to substitute Google for the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit as a model for the kind of compromised surveillance we accept following on from The Organization. All the while the suburbs remain a resilient index of conformity. This makes me wonder about the class composition – and cultural geographies – that bands like The Arcade Fire speak to in their representations of “the suburbs.” Here I am taking the apparent uproar about their Grammy win as symptomatic of something broader, i.e. could it be that networked employment may in fact only be the dominant model for some city-based types? It may not be so obvious for the many workers who still choose to live and work in the suburbs (and who I suspect despise Mad Men).

But I need help. It’s now clear that The Wilderness Downtown has become something of an industry darling – not least because it managed to get so many users to make the switch to Chrome. The first question for any friends reading this in North America is: how well does it work on your computer? I am just trying to gauge how much the whole project relies on the (North American) bias of Google Maps for its full effect. Given current broadband speeds in Australia, it’s also not possible to tell from here exactly how good the images and much lauded “experience” might be. So of course other responses are welcome from elsewhere too.

While I’m at it – and this is really for music friends: has anyone read anything interesting about The Arcade Fire aside from the typical tour interview + album review? Specifically their obsession with suburban nostalgia? There must be stuff I’m missing. I’d love to know about anything that takes on the website collaboration/ experiment from a slightly critical or scholarly point of view. Given the nature of the interwebs, it’s hard – and way too time consuming – to wade through the Grammy and FWA accolades to narrow a search.

Which is maybe something to do with what the paper is about.

One of Geert’s main points was to convey the challenge of doing critical internet studies when the sheer mass of data is impossible to conceive, and when the “object” of research changes so quickly. Indeed, how many of these examples are already out of date?

Things that happen on the internet every 60 seconds.

World map of social networks – June 2011. Go here for a comparison over the past three years.

Other notes:

* Privacy paranoia regarding social networking sites should be matched with critical accounts of personalisation, particularly how referrals and targeted searches can amount to censorship from within: the censorship that we ourselves actively facilitate (this bears some relevance to Kylie Jarrett’s paper at Console-ing Passions last month, on Google and immaterial labour).

* Books worrying about the internet’s impact on concentration habits – eg. Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows – seem to pivot on increasing levels of multi-tasking, and yet women have been multi-tasking for decades. Why is it only a problem when educated white men have to do it?

* Examples of sites/ activist projects attacking social media monopolies:

Reclaim privacy
Give me my data
Web 2.0 suicide machine (similar to seppukoo)
Gnu social
The Appleseed project
Diaspora
Noserub
Thimbl

* Experiments in online economies/ payment systems:

Kickstarter
Flattr
Share Your Love
Kachingle
Thank This

If you know of others, please do add them below…

It was a nice coincidence to arrive at work to a copy of Genevieve Bell’s final report for the Adelaide Thinkers in Residence Program, Getting Connected, Staying Connected: Exploring South Australia’s Digital Futures. Her recommendations show what it would take to develop a “whole-of-government” approach to technology use and roll-out, and in particular, the need to invest in community hubs that enact connectedness beyond the individual home.

Genevieve’s ideas also reinforce the need to consider issues such as service provision, maintenance and disposal – the ongoing infrastructure that IT policy initiatives often overlook. As an anthropologist, she does this with requisite attention to the specifics of (South) Australia’s unique cultural and demographic make up.

Imagine if these recommendations could be implemented nationally…

An intention I have for this blog is to further the cultural studies tradition of sharing “Working Papers”. Researching my PhD, I tracked down a number of the original “Working Papers” published by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. These were pretty rudimentary photocopies of typed scripts, but they were useful for showing the kind of research being done within the Centre, as well as the development of staff and students’ ideas over time.

The Centre actually developed this concept to publish a specific journal, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, from 1971. As Graeme Turner explains, the Centre’s collectivist practice – students often published in collaboration with staff – worked against the established hierarchies of teacher and pupil, indeed the publishing program itself was a measure of the Centre’s unconventional institutional ambitions.

We can see this tradition continuing in other initiatives since this time. In Australia, for instance, M/C Journal began in a similar fashion (it would be great to hear more about this history if anyone involved is reading!). Meanwhile postgraduate journals like Melbourne University’s Antithesis offer an important role for students seeking to get involved in publishing, and to have their writing read alongside more senior scholars (the blogroll on that site has links to other postgraduate journals of this type).

At a time when publishing seemed to matter as much as thesis completion, there were conflicts in the BCCCS between the perceived urgency of political and intellectual consolidation and the need to produce more sanctioned qualifications. This is a tension that continues to drive many students in our Department, and I hope that by sharing their work here they may be able to come to some kind of accommodation.

For feminists in the BCCCS, working groups were also important. The Women Thesis Writers’ Group invited feminist grad students and other friends of the Centre “to exchange written work, provide and receive feedback, and discuss ideas” according to the editors of Off Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies . This important book marked the 10 year anniversary of Women Take Issue – the feminist edition of the Working Papers journal, which holds particular meaning in the scholarly history our Department follows. Perhaps this space can offer a similar, if wider, function of support.

As I have argued in my own research, blogging is useful for thesis writers in particular because it breaks the isolation of the sole-authored project. In increasingly professionalised and competitive graduate programs for cultural studies, it may even provide a space for dialogue across campuses and regions so that the politics and ethics for contemporary cultural theory may continue to be defined and realised.

ana australiana: solidarities, fetishism, urbanism, nuns, begging, privilege, faith and reading.

Auslang: my colleague Jane comes to terms with Australian slang

Perspiring Dreams: a new Australian blog focusing on the state of higher education

Fashademic: PhD student Rosie and her adventures researching style blogs

The Last Sofa: Brady Robards writes about his PhD research on social networking sites

Artisans of a New Humanity: Remy Low writes about faith, education and politics, among other passions…

Update: A couple more…

The carriage held but just ourselves: Meredith Jones on life and work…

Pondering Postfeminism: Pen’s wonderfully alliterative blog!

I wrote this paper while living in Brisbane, and it has had several initial airings – at AoIR 2006, in a fantastic panel with Jean Burgess among others, and Cultural Studies Now in London. That was the Sunday morning time slot that all long-haul flying Australians lament as their fate but it was acutely memorable for me… it was perhaps the only time I’ll share an academic platform with the remarkable Nadia Mizner and Kiley Gaffney: such amazing women doing incredible things.

A lot of HCT readers will see themselves in this piece in one way or another, so I wanted to thank those of you who were part of the moment it’s trying to capture. The more I see of graduate and junior faculty life the more I appreciate the generosity and significance of what can take place here and other precious online spaces. (If you don’t have access to the journal and would like a copy, let me know).

In the past year especially Facebook and Twitter have irreparably changed the sensibility and community described in the piece, and in many ways that is hardly a bad thing. But their more encompassing reach and their capacity to make familiar the broadcast impulse behind blogging hardly change my concerns about the split between virtual and actual labour politics. Both must be realised in combination to change the present conditions of academic life.

I was asking the students what they understood by the term privacy and what they do to protect it… we looked at ads for internet protection software and their use of peodophile stereotypes… we read a range of websites that operate through the confessional mode, from Post Secret to Passive-Aggressive Notes. I even sang a version of a song from my childhood that was part of a series of “stranger danger” campaigns (My Body, which Google tells me was written by Peter Alsop): “My body’s nobody’s body but mine; You run your own body, let me run mine”.

But for me, the most disturbing revelation came in tutorials, when students started talking about how many employers are now asking for print-outs of Facebook profiles from job applicants. It sounded particularly common in entertainment and service industries, even though I detected some were suggesting it was commonplace in corporate interviews as well–that it should be taken for granted if you were looking to work for a significant firm.

What struck me about this was that even though students were incredibly articulate about protecting their reputation from the perceptions of others in their peer group, they seemed less capable of arguing how to respond to these other kinds of privacy invasion coming from the workplace. This brings together a range of concerns I’ve been writing about in recent years, and I’d be keen to hear from those who know more about it to reassure me that this is definitely illegal. And, if you have any tips as to which companies engage in this profiling practice please get in touch, publicly or privately

It strikes me that there has been a tipping point, really, in the way that some of us are able to overlook the contradictions affecting cultural studies in its current academic formations. Dogpossum‘s comment captures this in the most wrenching way. I acknowledge that there has always been navel gazing in this discipline, but there haven’t necessarily been quite so many ex-students wondering what they did with the past few years of their life. As a recession confronts us, there are serious questions at stake here. Obviously it’s my hope that the State of the Industry conference can provide a way forward, by highlighting the ideas, the passion, and the disappointments of recent graduates looking for academic careers. It is one effort to address and work to improve this complex situation.

In the meantime, I’ve been wondering whether anyone else is grateful for the conversation that took place last week, and whether there might be other ways of developing it. For instance, I have been asked to consider submitting a version of the thread in article form for the forthcoming issue of M/C on “obsolescence”. Some of you may remember something similar happened a few years ago, when Cultural Studies Review published an edited piece based on an feisty exchange on the CSAA-forum.

I am hesitant about this, because although I half wanted to motivate myself to write something for that issue by posting here, I didn’t have any sense that this thread would take off quite the way that it did. It is actually your energy that has made me think that it could be worthwhile making more of this. But, I am also conscious that publishing in a journal may go against the very politics being expressed in a number of the contributions–I would like to talk more about this if possible. I can appreciate that this idea might be completely inappropriate, because what I also treasured most about the thread was that it showed me this was a space you considered to be “safer” than others in sharing what you have. So, I will be contacting some of you directly about your thoughts and your willingness to be cited, but of course let me know what you think here, too. We need to decide in the next week.

But also, thanks for making me feel like I could open something up again on this blog, at a time when I’m spinning quite a lot between the things that usually motivate me, and the causes I’m usually invested in. Moving state and starting a new job has had some delayed impacts, I think. So it’s especially nice to know that a lot of you are still with me wherever I am.