Book reviews, excerpts & party!

Posted on | October 21, 2011 | 1 Comment

Work’s Intimacy has been out in Australia for a few weeks now after an earlier release in the UK. Some reviews are coming in already; this one from The Guardian is very exciting, as is this in The Irish Times. There is also a write up in the Times Higher Education.

In Australia a couple of excerpts have been published online if you are after a peek. At Inside Story, “Home Offices and Remote Parents” comes from chapter seven of the book. This is the chapter that lots of readers seem to react to, as it contains some of the most troubling stories of working parents with signs of chronic connectivity. Thanks to Peter Browne for his efforts putting this together.

Over at The Conversation, the piece I intended to write was sidelined with the news of Steve Jobs’ passing. As it happens, Jobs has a significant place in the concluding arguments for the book, so I decided to share some of them here. Thanks to Pat McGrath for that opportunity.

There have been some great radio experiences I have been lucky to have over the past little while, too, which I just wanted to store here for posterity. Thanks to Steve Austin and Richard Glover for having me on their programs as well.

The string of events that have unfolded since the book’s release – which also now include Occupy Wall Street – makes me realise how much more I would like to say about work and intimacy in future. For the moment, though, I want to announce the launch party for the book in Sydney in a few weeks. Everyone is welcome. The details are here and below. Come if you can!

Date: Thursday November 17th 6.00 for a 6.30pm

Place: The Beauchamp Hotel – Terrace Bar – 1st Floor
Corner of Oxford & South Dowling Sts, Darlinghurst, Sydney

To be launched by Annabel Crabb, the ABC’s chief political online writer and presenter of The Drum

RSVPs advised by November 15th to Simon Spivak at sspivak@wiley.com

Category: Events, Publications

Next project

Posted on | September 27, 2011 | No Comments

Lots happening on the book front this week, which I’ll post about separately. For now, I just wanted to mention that I’ve updated my current research section to include a description of the project I hope to do next year while on sabbatical. ‘Work Smarter, Not Harder’ extends some of my previous work on technology and office culture by going back to the archives. The intention is to trace the emergence of efficiency regimes and management mantras as they appear in various funded studies and curricula formative in the development of HR.

As part of this, I am trying to expand the idea of professional technologies to include psychological processes as much as externally imposed devices (and here I’m influenced by Dom Pettman’s work, in Love and Other Technologies, as much as by Foucault and his successors). I’m really keen to get some feedback on these ideas, so please take a look if you’re interested.

The proposal includes an extended period in the US some time after July 2012 and I’m currently looking for hosts and schemes that might support a trip of about 4 months’ length. If anyone would like me to do a talk or visit during the second half of next year to help with this, please get in touch!

Category: Research, Travel

Rethinking Convergence/Culture

Posted on | September 27, 2011 | No Comments

Just doing some tidying up around here – and thought it worth mentioning that the new issue of Cultural Studies is out. This double issue, edited by Nick Couldry and James Hay, is a response to the “convergence culture” theory. It has some fantastic papers:

RETHINKING CONVERGENCE/CULTURE
An introduction
James Hay & Nick Couldry

MORE SOCIOLOGY, MORE CULTURE, MORE POLITICS
Or, a modest proposal for ‘convergence’ studies
Nick Couldry

ARE WE ALL PRODUSERS NOW?
Convergence and media audience practices
S. Elizabeth Bird

CONTEXTUALISING AUTHOR-AUDIENCE CONVERGENCES
‘New’ technologies’ claims to increased participation, novelty and uniqueness
Nico Carpentier

THE POLITICS OF CONVERGENCE
On the role of the mobile object
Ginette Verstraete

WOMEN’S WORK
Affective labour and convergence culture
Laurie Ouellette & Julie Wilson

CONVERGENCE CULTURE AND THE LEGACY OF FEMINIST CULTURAL STUDIES
Catherine Driscoll & Melissa Gregg

OLD, NEW AND MIDDLE-AGED MEDIA CONVERGENCE
Richard Maxwell & Toby Miller

THE WORK THAT AFFECTIVE ECONOMICS DOES
Mark Andrejevic

USER-GENERATED DISCONTENT
Convergence, polemology and dissent
Jack Bratich

CONVERGENCE ON THE STREET
Rethinking the authentic/commercial binary
Sarah Banet-Weiser

‘POPULAR CULTURE’ IN A CRITIQUE OF THE NEW POLITICAL REASON
James Hay

SURRENDERING THE SPACE
Convergence culture, Cultural Studies and the curriculum
Graeme Turner

Thanks to Nick and James for their work on this, and for the invitation to be part of the project.

Category: Cultural Studies, Publications

Sydney MACS

Posted on | September 12, 2011 | 1 Comment

On Wednesday I am planning the launch of Sydney MACS – a cross-institutional network of media and cultural studies researchers. This is another branch of the network I first started in Brisbane back in 2004 (remember?!), and which my mates Ellie and Jinna have now extended to Melbourne. This blurb from the Facebook group explains what it’s all about:

The idea for MACS arose from a sense that PhD students and junior staff are often at a distance from existing forms of collaboration between researchers in different universities within the one city. While much emphasis is placed on the end product of research, and there are plenty of avenues for presenting and publishing our work, the early stages of an academic career involve particular anxieties that can be ameliorated with the support of a community of peers. The MACS group is an attempt to create a space for discussing everything to do with our work aside from the end product, to share accumulated knowledge and resources to gain insight into the opportunities available within our field of research. It aims to provide a space for networking, information exchange, peer support and mentoring. MACS meets at an off campus venue that is designed to be centrally located.

Since I began teaching in a department setting I’ve found it increasingly difficult to see how postgrads and ‘ECR’s can connect with each other across institutions without significant leadership. While there have been advances at some levels – the postgrad bursary schemes attached to symposia and conferences in various fields, for instance, and the CRN Early Career Researchers node which culminated in the 2009 State of the Industry conference – we lack a sustained response to the situation in which junior scholars regularly feel alone in their field at a local level.

There are major obstacles discouraging young researchers from finding their peers within institutions as much as across them. It depends on context, of course, but in universities the size of Sydney (and these are the universities with large grad student cohorts) it is hard enough for those on faculty to know their colleagues in other disciplines, leaving aside the productivity pressures that challenge the whimsy of collaborative collegiality in the first place.

The isolation that can affect students within particular departments is further compounded by the culture shock of those who travel large distances to enrol in research higher degrees, sometimes from the other side of the world. This situation calls for an amount of professional and pastoral care that the competitive world of the contemporary university hardly encourages.

In recent years it seems clear that Facebook has emerged to fill some of this void. Its non-committal affect is a less time-consuming version of the PhD/junior faculty blogosphere I have written about elsewhere. But as a result it is also less useful for facilitating ongoing relationships of critical experimentation, exploration and trust. We would do well to have reservations about encouraging students to turn to a corporate entity with dubious political motives in order to solve a problem with the university experience.

Anyway, rather than get carried away in a critique of white collar networking and its self-promotional dynamics here, I’ve started a new MACS blog to house debates like these. Part of the aim is to provide an archive of discussions relating to the research conditions young scholars inherit. There are already excellent resources online addressing many of these issues, some local, some not. But the point – as my “Banal Bohemia” piece argued – is that we need to get better at making connections between cyberspaces of support and the industrial conditions that make it hard to have these conversations face to face. The field of cultural studies began by attacking the forms of elitism evident in the humanities; a natural extension of this project today must surely involve collaborative activism targeted at the point of reproduction for a still exclusive system.

Alongside the announcements that are part of the network’s rationale, I imagine it might be useful to have a schedule of guest posts on the MACS blog too. These could include research and industry matters, advice from established academics, features on current PhD projects and so on. Feedback on these ideas is welcome, as are volunteers!

Finally, I should acknowledge that this initiative is also designed to make a clearer distinction between the mentoring and professional development work that this blog has sometimes been used for (looking back at that link makes me realise how little has changed), and more reflective writing of my own that is both personal and research oriented. With any luck, this should mean more writing in two places.

Category: Academia, Randoms

Nominees for ACS Board & Chair

Posted on | August 23, 2011 | No Comments

This is a repost for any locals not subscribed to the CSAA-forum, and for anyone with an interest in cultural studies…

In coming months, the Association for Cultural Studies (ACS – the organisation that runs Crossroads) will be calling for nominations for a board election that will take place prior to the general assembly in Paris, 2012.

After serving on this board as the Australia/New Zealand representative since 2004 I will not be seeking reelection.

Our region is represented proportionately like others, and there is now a vacancy for a representative from Australia or New Zealand. So this is just some advance notice that the board will soon be seeking formal expressions of interest – and candidate statements – from those of you interested in running. All current ACS members will then be asked to vote.

As part of the election, key executive positions are also up for nomination, which means that anyone considering running as a regional rep has the opportunity to run for Chair or Vice Chair.

With this in mind, I am very keen to encourage and invite all scholars in our region, particularly the established leaders in our field, to consider offering themselves as candidates.

The ACS has representatives from all over the world, so this same information applies to other areas too.

Feel free to contact me for further details.

Category: Academia

Lost in The Suburbs

Posted on | August 22, 2011 | 3 Comments

So the paper I am currently writing is about Mad Men, commuter narratives, the suburbs and this website (for some reason I seem to be on a run of articles analysing viral marketing campaigns. Not sure why that’s the case…)

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.

Category: Research, Viewing, Web studies

‘The horrors’

Posted on | August 10, 2011 | 5 Comments

When I finished writing my book manuscript in early 2010, I included an epigraph from the late George Orwell:

Even the middle classes, for the first time in their history, are feeling the pinch. They have not known actual hunger yet, but more and more of them find themselves floundering in a sort of deadly net of frustration in which it is harder and harder to persuade yourself that you are either happy, active, or useful. Even the lucky ones at the top, the real bourgeoisie, are haunted periodically by a consciousness of the miseries below, and still more by fears of the menacing future. And this is merely a preliminary stage, in a country still rich with the loot of a hundred years. Presently there may be coming God knows what horrors – horrors of which, in this sheltered island, we have not even a traditional knowledge. – George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

At the time, this passage seemed to capture some of the texture of the 2008 financial crisis – an event that marked a turning point for many of the employees studied in my book.

Whether it was the sense of foreboding haunting the workplace as job losses became a reality, or the broader feeling of anxiety that the turmoil in global markets spelled for investors, the middle class office workers I interviewed in boom time Brisbane were far from encountering actual hunger or poverty.

Their tremendous work ethic, which saw them attached to their email from morning to night, stemmed from a different set of fears: that the happiness and success to which they felt entitled as ambitious professionals could suddenly not be their destiny. “I’m starting to realize I might have to go down almost 50 per cent of what I was getting paid,” a retrenched marketing manager told me: “maybe even less, because there’s just so much competition out there.”

The publication of my book in the past week has coincided with a renewed period of economic uncertainty. As the US battles the prospect of recession, and volatility reigns on the share market, riots have spread across Orwell’s “sheltered island,” to the disbelief of so many. We have witnessed scenes of horror as the extent of ordinary political disaffection has been revealed.

Watching these events – on cable television, Facebook and YouTube – an already clear division in the experience of power and participation in a knowledge economy is further reinforced. Our culture is one that values and rewards ambition, particularly when this is appropriately targeted to the pursuit of paid work. But it cannot afford to acknowledge that such aspirations will never be sustainable for all. It is abundantly clear that there are structural conditions that determine the distribution of opportunity, in spite of the ways neoliberal discourses try to make failure a personal responsibility.

A major motivation for my recent research has been to better understand a situation in which so many educated professionals remain protected from an awareness of others’ lack of access to work – how social inequalities fall off the radar in the course of busy day-to-day priorities. When your own job is both demanding and rewarding, it is hard to relate to the much larger majority in a global economy for whom (to use the words of Andre Gorz) the spoils of a merit-based society are forever distant, the prospect of fulfilling work “a bad joke.”

I wanted to mark this week by returning to Orwell, especially since the quotation above was cut from my manuscript in the production process. For the publisher, the difficulty of securing copyright for the passage outweighed the significance of its message. And right now this seems to be just another indication of our misplaced legal and political priorities.

Category: Politics, Publications
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Notes from Geert Lovink’s Sydney talk

Posted on | August 9, 2011 | 2 Comments

Last week’s lecture by Geert Lovink at UTS covered a lot of territory that I didn’t record, including an overview of the research initiatives taking place at the Institute of Network Cultures. This is nothing like a summary, then; I just wanted to note some of the projects and websites he mentioned in the spirit of sharing info and to see how far these projects manage to get in coming years.

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?

60 Seconds

Things that happen on the internet every 60 seconds.

World Map of Social Networks

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…

Category: Web studies

Moral economies of creative labour

Posted on | July 20, 2011 | 2 Comments

Here is a pdf of my plenary talk at the Moral Economies of Creative Labour conference in Leeds. This piece will be extended in coming months for a new edited collection, so I welcome feedback. Eventually I’d like this paper to link up with some other ideas about time and measure inspired by Wendy Brown (on the former) and Lisa Adkins and Patricia Clough (on the latter). But I also suspect such ideas might be another paper entirely… indeed, one of those ongoing fantasy papers that haunts for years in the midst of everything else that has to happen.

Category: Research

Academia.edu

Posted on | June 27, 2011 | 1 Comment

After resisting for some time I have finally joined academia.edu. Initially I was reluctant to provide another online profile given that all my publications are listed here anyway. I was also hesitant because it had been recommended as yet another form of department promotion/branding at a time when I was already struggling with extensive online obligations. But there are at least a couple of things I can think of that are good about an online networking site for academics.

One is that it breaks the stranglehold of multinational publishing houses owning the terms of access to our work. While I always appreciate the effort that goes in to editing and peer-review, traditional scholarly publishing is not always an ideal way to share new ideas. This is particularly important for those of us who want to be read by people other than currently employed academics and enrolled students. Given the politics of institutional subscriptions to journals it is hardly the case that publication guarantees a relevant readership anyway, leaving aside the open secret about just how much time teaching academics have to read articles at all.

Tied to this is the way in which existing networks of academic exchange – be they conference circuits or “walled gardens” like Facebook – sometimes constitute a narrowing of consensus among established interest groups. What’s striking to me within 24 hours of joining academia.edu is the number of non-Anglosphere users. This is genuinely exciting and pedagogical and it ties in with some of my longer term efforts (through involvement with the International Association of Cultural Studies, for instance) to agitate against Anglo-American dominance in scholarship.

I was reminded and re-angered about this recently at the Boston ICA during the session on “The university in crisis.” Despite the different geographical location of the four speakers, and a searing indictment of the Bologna Process offered by my fellow panellist Isabel Gil, question time was dominated by US speakers spanning several generations seeking to discuss exclusively US experiences. This left me lamenting the function of “international” as well as “communication” in “International Communication Association” – and wondering what lessons might need to be learned for such a grouping to attract associates from further afield. (To the young guy who came up to Isabel and I afterwards and apologised on behalf of his peers: thanks for noticing.)

So, I will continue to post publications here on the blog – and it’s perhaps not a coincidence that there is a new one I’m adding today on autonomism and the politics of love. But in an effort to expand critical horizons (and be open to the “common wealth” of scholarly peers beyond Empire, to draw from Hardt and Negri), I will also be urging lots of you to make use of this fantastic, open-access resource.

Category: Academia, Publications, Research
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