The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

The Sony Walkman was released 30 years ago today, apparantly. It not only changed the way we listen to music, it played a key role in the development of that new-fangled cultural studies thingy: Doing Cultural Studies is dated, but still essential reading. Compared to the 120GB iPod with its capacity of 30,000 songs, the Walkman now looks as quaint as its gender-specific name, but in its day it was an engineering miracle.

In the spirit of nostalgia for the incredibly short-lived batteries, the tape that “wowed” every time you took a step (“Standperfectlystillman” might have been a more accurate name), and a portable listening device that held 12 songs, I provide this review courtesy of the BBC by 13 year-old, Scott Campbell, who swapped his iPod for an antique Walkman for a week. Favourite sections include:

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

So happy birthday, Walkman. In celebration I urge everyone to listen to the song that was inspired by the device. Of course, if you have any taste, you’ll listen to the B(if)tek cover instead.

An interesting article by Lynne Spender in Meanjin about Google’s ambitions to digitise the world’s books (probably behind the paywall):

Perhaps I am optimistic by nature, but when Google first announced that it was planning to digitise the world’s books and create the greatest library ever, I was enthusiastic. I thought it was an example of digital technology doing for our generation—and those that follow—what print technology did for the generations of readers and writers after its introduction in the fifteenth century. Just as Gutenberg’s printing press brought increased and independent access to knowledge and information 600 years ago, it seemed possible that the Google Library Project’s searchable database of the world’s books would allow access to our entire cultural heritage in digital format. It would be a new res publica litterarum for a new age of digital enlightenment.

Spender’s article focused mainly on the IP and copyright issues of digitising books, but my interest is in the fundamental issue of a for-profit company owning potentially the only digital copies of the Western literary heritage. I’ve written about this before.

To this point Google seems to have acted honourably (the “Paper of Record” issue notwithstanding), but I still fear that one day all this treasure will find itself behind a paywall. Organisations such as Project Gutenberg cannot compete with the finances of Google and will be left behind.

As an update to my earlier post, it seems that Google has finally sorted out the technical problems and most of the material that was available through “Paper of Record” is now available through the Google News Archive Search. There is an interesting overview here from Inside Higher Ed. However, there remain complaints that the search interface is not nearly as user-friendly as the original.

OK people, we are rapidly closing on our 1,000th comment. Who will hit the jackpot? The 1,000th comment will earn an honoured place in the history of Memes and its author will enter the annals as one of the most significant contributors in a prestigious and honoured medium. There may even be a cash prize*.

Quickly, to your keyboards!

*There definitely won’t be a cash prize.

A new study reported by Ars Technica reveals that more than half of the people with Twitter accounts have never sent a tweet and have no followers:

A new report about how the majority of the population uses Twitter reveals that most people, well… don’t really use it. The microblogging service has grown exponentially over the last year, but a little more than half of its users have never sent a single tweet, according to the latest report from HubSpot. The report reminds us that, like many Web services, much of the content is produced by a small number of users while everyone else likes to look in and watch.

In breaking news, I can also reveal that many people who buy books never get around to reading them; that video-tapes and DVR harddrives are full of shows that never get watched; and that a significant number of wardrobes in this country contain unused exercise equipment bought from late-night infomercial programmes.

sigh…

Research Assistants: The Pain and the Pleasure

Friday, 12 June 2009
3:00pm – 4:30pm
Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, Seminar Room
Level 4 Forgan Smith Tower,
The University of Queensland

All welcome

Most research higher degree students will at some point in their candidature work as a research assistant. Often this is a good career move as it provides training, work experience, and often an insight into a project or field apart from their own thesis. But let’s face it, we usually do it for the money.

In this session we want to talk about RAs from both perspectives: if you’re an RA, what are the obligations, the unspoken rules, the traps to avoid; if you are a researcher trying to employ an RA, what are, well, the obligations, the unspoken rules, and the traps to avoid? We will have a couple of speakers (to be confirmed) who will address these questions, and also talk about the employment aspects of the role.

But mainly we want to hear about your experiences: those horror stories about the senior professor who screwed you over and took all the credit (pseudonyms are recommended); the academic who asked for a list of references and ended up giving you a co-authorship on the paper; the assistant who took all the money the project had and never completed the work.

But while a whinge-fest can be cathartic, we’d rather this was a productive session, providing advice and guidance to RHD students and ECRs who might be new to this process. Hopefully, some of the mis-conceptions can be dispelled on both sides of the arrangement, leading to a better experience for both employer and employed.

The other day I was sitting in the car listening to talk radio while waiting for an off-campus meeting to start. The story that had sparked the calls was something to do with the government paying for lap band surgery. I don’t know whether they are going to or not as it was not the issue that I was interested in but rather the responses of the callers.

There were, of course, the standard callers who claimed that obesity was the result of over-eating, lack of exercise, poor personal discipline, etc., although the stories of most of the obese people who phoned in called these explanations into serious doubt. The caller who caught my attention though was an obese man who was brave enough to share his story.

If there’s a stack of old newspapers gathering dust under the bed or out in the shed, Australian libraries want to know about it. The search is on for these valuable pieces of our social history, as part of the Australian Newspaper Plan, a nation-wide initiative of state and territory libraries designed to find, collect and preserve access to historic newspapers.

Some of Australia’s most wanted newspapers include:

• Cairns Advocate (1897-1882);
• Croydon Miner (1887-1888)
• Mundic Miner and Etheridge Gazette (1889-1917);
• Pilbarra Goldfields News (1901);
• Renmark Pioneer (1893-1895).

Once the wanted newspapers have been tracked down, they will be saved to ensure their preservation for future generations. Access will be available through the libraries. For a full list of the wanted newspapers, go to www.nla.gov.au/anplan

─Judith Dahl Taylor
Communications and Marketing Manager
National Library of Australia

I don’t mean to boast, but I got a rare gig on Saturday, and my blues three-piece got to come out of the lounge room and play in front of an actual audience of actual people. Actually, we were supporting a 50s-60s covers band who were doing a fund-raiser for the local church’s Girl Brigade group, so the presence of a lot of impressionable nine-year-old girls in the audience was slightly amusing considering the songs in our set:

“Undercover Agent for the Blues”, Tony Joe White (“I was blinded by the blackness of her long silk stockings”; “She kept on getting kinkier”)

“I’m a Stranger Babe”, John Lee Hooker (“Don’t drive me from your door / Let me stay the night with you”)

“In the Midnight Hour”, Wilson Pickett (“Oh babe I’m gonna hold you / Do all the things I told you”)

OK, unlike a lot of blues, these are suggestive rather than overt, and I’m sure no one could understand my vocals anyway, but an old bluesman (I can’t remember who it was, but he was interviewed in one of the PBS documentaries introduced by Martin Scorsese) claims that the only real blues songs are about “S. E. X.”

This intersected nicely with an article I was reading the day before, which had the thesis that what we understand as the blues tradition was carefully shaped by blues scholars to elide the raunchy, explicit songs that were popular at the time.

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I’m sure that I’ve written about this topic before on this blog, but for the life of me can’t find it in the archives just at the present.

Much is made in the research literature, and also in popular discussion, about how ‘young people’ are not interested or involved in politics (or indeed civic participation, as my last post went on about). A colleague and I remarked a couple of years ago that there did seem, however, to be a growth in grass roots political activism that wasn’t necessarily connected to political parties and that was based around particular areas of social life or issues. This has been borne out in recent research, and is variously referred to as “advocacy” politics, “issue politics”, “new” politics, “life” politics, or “sub-politics” (Dahlgren and Olsson 494-495). Increasingly, the point is being made that much disconnection from traditional politics is because people don’t feel that politicians and institutions are listening to them, and this is no less the case for young people (Couldry, Livingstone, and Markham 189; Couldry 394; Harris and Wyn 335-6).

Warning: this post is going to be a bit of a ‘when I was a nipper’ rant, so if you don’t like it either tune out now or go and put on your VHS of “The Three Yorkshiremen”.