The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

Just so that you know that we are not all dead in memesland, I just read this article by John Birmingham on the Brisbane News website. His argument is that despite the popular stereotype of the social media user being a sad, lonely, loser, alone at a keyboard, his experience is the opposite:

The net and its various ways of connecting people is not driving us all apart. Quite the opposite. It’s creating virtual communities which can easily, and often do transform themselves into real world friendship circles or social networks, to use an uglier, more sociological term. I’ve been online for years now, and although I gathered my oldest and closest friends to me long before I sent my first tweet or wrote my first blog entry, most of my new friends, and they are real friends for the most part, have come from the unreal world of the web, from the supposedly isolating, distancing digital realms.

Most of the friends I connect with regularly on Facebook, Twitter, and other networks we have developed over the years are people I knew before the relationships moved online, the social network provides another channel to exercise that relationship. There are also people I only know through social networks, and I look forward to meeting them in person, sometime.

My eldest is an avid user of Twitter, and on turning 18 started attending the monthly meetup of Brisbane Twitter users, moving hitherto online relationships to face to face ones.

I know of research being conducted that suggests that this sort of social media use—using online mechanisms to enhance pre-existing relationships—is common. Maybe a bit more about that later…

In the meantime, Birmingham’s take is a refreshing antidote to the doom and gloom that usually surrounds social media use.

A couple of weeks ago, I took part in an Amnesty International campaign objecting to the suspension of asylum applications from people from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. It’s one of these things where you fill in your details and they give you the outline of a letter. Of course, you can personalise the wording and I do so. I figure if I care enough about an issue to send an email, then I should care enough to think about what actually goes in it. I was rather surprised and impressed that my local member (or at least his office) replied very shortly after receiving my emails. Got to give him credit for that. It is years since I’ve received a quick reply from a politician in relation to an organised campaign. He seems to be a decent bloke. Most people are, as individuals.

For those of you who missed it, on 9 April this year the federal government announced that they were suspending the processing of asylum applications from people from Afghanistan and Sri Lanka on the grounds that the situation in each of those countries was improving and is under review by the UNHCR and that the government had denied an increasing number of applications from people from those countries in recent months. The government also intends to reopen the Curtin detention centre, as the offshore centres are overflowing.

Now obviously I have problems with the suspension, but I also have problems with the practice of routine detention, still recognising that a period of quarantine while health checks are carried out is probably in everyone’s interest. What especially gets my goat is the way that asylum seekers have been used as a political football by governments and media in a process that brings out the worst in us as Australians and deters the public expression of compassion.

Within hours of Tourism Australia announcing their new tourism campaign, There’s Nothing Like Australia, to be launched on 15 April, there was a spoof site registered under the domain http://www.nothinglikeaustralia.net. The campaign plans to mobilise social networking and user produced content to spread its message, a policy that might be a little risky, if the spoof is anything to go by.

The Australian reports that the tourism body is taking an unusually relaxed approach to the spoof:

Tourism Australia has had its new $150 million advertising campaign “There’s nothing like Australia” spoofed by a “brandjacker” using images of Lindy Chamberlain, the Cronulla riots and Steve Irwin.

But after investigating the website the tourism body has decided to take no action, despite the mock ads using TA’s intellectual property.

Of course, this isn’t the first time this has happened. The previous major campaign, the much maligned “Where the Bloody Hell Are You?” effort attracted a number of spoofs, most famously by Dan Ilic, and the one by the Chaser team. (Warning, possibly not safe for work). There’s even a New Zealand version. Here’s the original, if you don’t remember it.

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Interesting link from Kevin Drum on one of the consequences of the decline in traditional newspaper reporting budgets — newspapers are less likely to file lawsuits to obtain information from public bodies.

Drum wraps up with a sentence that tickled me somewhat:

In the great power struggle between government secrecy and the public’s right to know, the demise of the newspaper industry is a victory for the bad guys.

Well, of course. It’s because we let the bad guys — hi, Rupert! — buy up the entire newspaper industry.

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.

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’ve just been reading Henry A. Giroux talking about child beauty pageants in the US and the way that they teach children to assume particular, very narrow, powerless, and sexualised identities. Giroux argues that this constitutes a form of child abuse, and frankly, I’m inclined to agree with him.

Since it was started in 1997, Google’s mantra has been “Don’t be evil”, perhaps with a sideways glance at another world-straddling software company that started out with guileless and youthful exuberance, and ended up as the evil empire. And certainly Google’s image is one of benign access, not control. We love the way they change the famous logo to celebrate holidays and significant events, and we all got nostalgic for their tenth birthday and marvelled at the clunky old designs, despite the fact that this pre-history only went back to 1995!

But I’ve been nervous about the fact that Google is buying up online archives, and embarking on their own digitisation programmes. Yes, there is a lot of stuff out there that needs to be preserved, but isn’t that the role of national libraries? I’m worried about the prospect of a private company owning so much of a nation’s heritage: even a non-evil company like Google.

Then the other day I heard about the case of a small newspaper archive site that disappeared after being vacuumed up by the Google machine:

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I’m part of a research team at the moment that is looking at the transmission of values, youth, and new media, so I get to read a lot about how the young people are all on Web 2.0 and the oldies aren’t. I’ve also been spending quite a lot of time on YouTube of late – hey, it’s a tough job, but someone has to do it :-) – and finding that many of the people hanging out there aren’t really that young.

Some of my colleagues and I have been talking about these things, and in our experience the generational divide is not so clear.

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.