home cooked theory

Facebook journalism, continued

The recent post about Rudd’s social networking strategy is now available over at Online Opinion. Since I wrote the piece there have been some pretty spectacular examples of Facebook journalism–the most notable being The Courier Mail’s massive headline last Saturday, June 7: “FACEBOOK MURDER”. The web version of the story includes a link to the [...]

Blog reader survey – please help

A message from Bo, my wonderful RA. Please consider linking to this post if you are a blogger and want to support more cultural research in this area!

Do you have a favourite blogger that you want to talk about?
I am an Honours student from the University of Queensland, Australia and I am conducting [...]

The social networking strategy that wasn’t

When photos of the Prime Minister’s ‘butler’ appeared in various Sunday papers this past weekend it was the latest example of an emerging genre of so-called news stories based on allegedly revealing photos available on Facebook (Australian readers may well remember the media frenzy around swimming star, Stephanie Rice).
Rudd’s apparent reaction to the front page [...]

A screen without a mouse: On TV bashing

**This post is also a response to the Passion Quilt Meme. I tag Supervalent Thought, Purse Lip Square Jaw, Unemployed at Last!, and tactical.**
Some people will have seen that one of UQ’s most respected television scholars made the editorial of Brisbane’s Courier Mail on Friday, after giving an address to The Sopranos conference at Fordham [...]

Other kinds of internet history

To become insomniac, love-struck or bulimic is to enter into another everydayness – Henri Lefebvre
On Saturday June 14 I’m going to “Internet Histories 2: Australia and Asia-Pacific” at the State Library of Western Australia. It’s part of a two day workshop organised by Gerard Goggin, Mark McLelland and the Cultural Research Network (the program and [...]

Changes

It seems important to write something about Tasmania.* I found out early in the day that Paul Lennon had resigned as Premier and just watched the telly footage from the various press conferences. Wow though: the amount of time being devoted to the story says something about the status of my home state in relation [...]

Over to you

Thanks to everyone who responded to my call-out for help! I am now very happily assisted and looking forward to the year of work ahead. Except that I’m unlikely to be blogging with any regularity for the time being. On top of the Working From Home project and the online cultural studies book, plans are [...]

Blog readers research

Yesterday I met with an Honours student who wants to write her thesis on non-commenting blog readers. Specifically, she’s trying to explore and understand whether long-term blog readers develop a ‘para-social’ relationship to their favoured blogger, even when they may not participate on the blog itself – how readers form attachments to particular writers and [...]

Manifesto caution

On Saturday night some friends and I went to see Ang Lee’s latest film, Lust Caution. At the time, it felt long, exhausting and tragic — especially given I was already tired from the night before and dissecting the week that spawned not one but two quasi-manifestos from lady bloggers. Was there something in the [...]

Wired women

Another book I picked up last month in Yungaburra was Lynn Cherny and Elizabeth Reba Weise’s Wired Women collection from 1996. Subtitled “Gender and New Realities in Cyberspace”, it gives an insight into the imaginaries and experiences of women heading online when Usenet and IRC were at a peak. Having come to the internet — [...]

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