The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

This year I have been teaching again for the first time in a couple of years, which is at least part of the reason that I haven’t been posting quite as often as perhaps I should. I know that the matter of teaching has been discussed both here and elsewhere recently, but I’m going to add yet another post on the topic, although from a slightly different angle.

First, I need to point out that I love teaching, have been teaching casually on and off for many years, particularly love my first year students, and am going to genuinely miss teaching students over the next little while. However, having had a break of a couple of years before these last two semesters, I have noticed some distinct differences from the previous times that I have taught. On the basis of the little evidence that I have from colleagues, it is not only me noticing these changes.

Some of you reading this (admittedly, not many) have come to this post because of a notification from Twitter. As I have mentioned previously, the magic of Twitterfeed and RSS provides an automatic system to advise of new posts on the blog. I set this up for a couple of reasons: first, obviously, I’d like to increase the readership of the blog and this seemed like a good place to start; second, I am exploring various technologies that might help keep a group of people in touch with activities, when I cannot rely on them actively seeking out the information.

Increasingly we are seeing Twitter used for this purpose: news services such as The Age have Twitter accounts, as do CNN, Crikey, and others—including some that only exist on Twitter —as do social and political groups, and of course, politicians. Even The University of Queensland has its own news feed.

But I have my reservations about this.

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I previewed this back in September, but the Government blog has become a reality. Timely perhaps, given the current campaign over Internet censorship which at the time of writing had been referenced by two of the three commenters.

You can find the blog here. Not the most user-friendly URL I have ever seen, which suggests that the department might have a way to go before it really “gets” blogging.

Lindsay Tanner’s welcome is full of the rhetoric we’ve come to expect from governments:

We are also genuine about wanting to use online consultation to improve government-citizen relationships around public policy. We want real outcomes from online consultation, not a new channel to distribute a press release.

So this is a learning process. These are trials so we may get things wrong. But we hope to come out the other side with a better picture of how engaged, responsive, timely and comprehensive we need to be in order to engage effectively with citizens online.

Time will tell whether they can live up to these brave statements…

An interesting piece by Margaret Simons in Inside Story where she points out the irony of the recent Walkley Awards where a significant number of awards were given to defunct publications:

Other winners included the ABC’s Radio Eye (for best broadcast feature), which will finish up this year, and illustrator Simon Bosch (best artwork) formerly of the Sydney Morning Herald, who was “let go” in the Fairfax blood-letting a few weeks ago. Among those shortlisted for awards were a Julie-Anne Davies story in the Bulletin, which no longer exists, and an article in Time, a publication that has just announced the sacking of all its Australian journalists and the probable closure of its Australian bureau.

There is something profoundly sad and profoundly disturbing about an industry giving its highest awards to outlets that no longer exist, or are in decline.

Read the full article here

I should also note that Margaret is now blogging at Crikey, and you should take a look.

Homan, Shane (ed), Access All Eras: Tribute Bands and Global Pop Culture, Open University Press, Maidenhead, 2006. Publisher’s website

As Shane Homan says in his introduction to this fascinating collection of essays, “the tribute act has received little critical attention in popular music or cultural studies” (2) and attributes this to the suspicion with which the “inauthentic” is held within the industry as well as within the academy. A specialist subset of cover bands, tribute acts are those bands who “exclusively perform the recordings of one band or artist, and may even concentrate on a specific period of the artist/group” (5). This is the first collection of essays to deal exclusively with the tribute phenomena, despite the format gaining significantly in popularity (if not respect) since tribute bands first started appearing in the early 1980s, and connected no doubt to the surprising paucity of publications dealing with “pop” as opposed to “rock” music (again, that issue of “authenticity”). This collection deliberately steers a path between the rejection of tribute acts as merely formulaic mimicry, and a postmodern celebration of simulacra, and instead “seeks to understand contemporary thinking about pop and rock history as it is performed on a nightly, global basis” (14).

The 14 essays in this collection cover a broad range of issues and themes, from discussions of postmodern pastiche and parody, through analyses of the fans’ attitudes to tribute acts and their place in the global economy of popular music, to discussions of the way in which tribute acts challenge the dominant rock discourses of originality and stardom.

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I’m not normally prone to conspiracy theories, but I just can’t help but imagine that there was once a conversation on the upper floors of a certain building in George Street that went something like this:

“Anna, we’re screwed: we’ve tried everything, and we just can’t find a way to convince the public that recycled drinking water is the go.”

“Wait a minute! Let’s pretend we are going to build a dam in an important, environmentally sensitive beauty-spot. We’ll push on despite the community outrage, the blatant inappropriateness of the location, and clear illogic of the project. Then, just as it seems the dam will go ahead—we might even schedule a little preliminary bulldozing to lend it credibility—we’ll cave in on environmental concerns. The communities and lobbyists will be so relieved that they won’t even notice when the recycled water starts pouring into Wivenhoe Dam.”

“Anna, you’re a genius! I guess that’s why Pete left you in charge!”

OK, probably not.

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The has been a lot of discussion about the role of social networking in the recent US elections, as well as in the 2007 Australian Federal election. Sometime Memes commenter Barry Saunders looked at Obama’s online strategy and its implications for the Australian political landscape in a recent article for ABC Online:

However, as we watch Kevin Rudd getting back on the bandwagon and the political fallout of Obama’s win in the USA, we can take comfort that early adopters are giving the political process a boot up the proverbial, and thanks to Obama, nerds are hot. (“Fireside chats in the 21st century”, ABC Online)

Now I don’t disagree with Barry, but it uses a rhetoric that is increasingly popular in recent times, and is perhaps best marked by the phrase “the first internet election”. This has been used to describe the US presidential election and the 2007 Australian federal election, although technically the honour should probably go to Eastern Ontario voters, who back in 2003 participated in “what is being called the first all-electronic election of North America” by registering their votes by phone, or on the internet. The argument is that the diversity and speed of online media has lead to a greater scrutiny of—or at least, better access to—the political process. The New York Times puts it this way:

Many of the media outlets influencing the 2008 election simply were not around in 2004. YouTube did not exist, and Facebook barely reached beyond the Ivy League. There was no Huffington Post to encourage citizen reporters, so Mr. Obama’s comment about voters clinging to guns or religion may have passed unnoticed. These sites and countless others have redefined how many Americans get their political news. (NYT, 3 November 2008)

Fair enough. But some commentators go further and claim that this access and prominence has somehow led to a further democratisation of the political process.

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With three years worth of postings, we felt it was time to introduce a search function to the blog. Look under “Site Navigation” in the left-hand side-bar. As far as I can tell, it only indexes the posts, not the comments, and I’m not sure about the titles even, but in a few tests I ran yesterday, the returned results seemed to be accurate.

If you find any problems, let us know in the comments.

A Weblog about Special Effects, Videogames, Film, and Television by Swarthmore’s Bob Rehak. Writings range from discussion of the cinematic primal scene of starship construction to the aesthetics of Panic Room’s CGI titles. Terrific stuff.

A study reported by the BBC claims that the largely discredited six degrees of separation theory might in fact be correct after all:

A US study of instant messaging suggests the theory that it takes only six steps to link everyone may be right – though seven seems more accurate.

The study which was published in March this year was conducted by researchers from Microsoft and looked at the addresses of 30 billion instant messages sent during a single month in 2006.

One of the researchers on the Microsoft Messenger project, Eric Horvitz, said he had been shocked by the results.

“What we’re seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity,” he was quoted as saying by the Washington Post newspaper.

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