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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 — [...]

Various forms of constraint

I am shifting to Google Reader today after years of Bloglines. Am I making the right decision? Do I care? I’m not overjoyed that Google will have even more information about me because of this – they already have all of my most intimate email. But Bloglines is just slow and it started to bore [...]

Settling

2008 marks my fifth year in Brisbane, and by the end of February I will have been here longer than I lived in Sydney. Given how much I have struggled to embrace Brisbane as a long-term location, that’s quite a psychological turning point for me to wrestle with. A few things have conspired recently that [...]

« go back — keep looking »