The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

Brisbane-based, News Ltd daily, The Courier-Mail, has an expose on the flagrant misuse of taxpayer’s money by an arrogant, elitist, money-grubbing academic at UQ. His crime? He went to a conference! Shock! Horror!

Link here

In this case, Assoc. Prof. Jacobs was an invited speaker at an international conference…

Clay Shirkey’s talk, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus from the 2008 Web 2.0 conference is being linked to from basically everywhere right now — so I’d be remiss in not sharing it too.

This is something that people in the media world don’t understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race—consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you’ll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it ‘s three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share.

I think he overstates his case: in drawing an equivalence between consuming television and the excesses of gin consumption at the start of the industrial age, he’s glossing over the ways that media consumption itself has always had creative and meaningful outcomes — but it’s a provocative piece all the same.

Back in 2003 Miranda Devine accused me of stealing funds from cancer research. No, really.

It was one of those periodic, and predictable, attacks on those she saw as left-wing academics, mounted by the then-powerful demagogs on the right. My sin—along with several others—was to have had a bio on the M/C contributors page when Devine went looking for a soft target to illustrate her vacuous point, and the fact that my APA (Australian Postgraduate Award) was funded, and someone else’s wasn’t. She finishes the rant with the point:

But all research is not of equal value. There are presumably PhD students in Australia finding the cure for cancer or solving Fermat’s second last theorem or investigating the worth of superannuation, as Zaffar Subedar is doing. Maybe there should be an inverse proportionality formula applied. The more “fun” a topic, the less chance of funding.

Now this report was characterised by all the sloppy research that the divine Miranda is renowned for: she reveals no knowledge of the ranking procedures for APAs, or an understanding of the way higher education funding works. She even confuses the roles of the ARC and the NHMRC (National Health and Medical Research Council). But not to worry: we are used to this sort of thing from Devine and her ilk, and this, of course, is really old news.

But in the News Ltd press this weekend comes the report of New Zealand scientists producing a no-tear onion. Now, assuming funding works the same way in New Zealand as it does in Australia, the source of funding for bio-technology is the same as that for cancer research. I’m not going to indulge in the sorts of simplistic arguments that say that any research must be at the expense of another, or to try and rank the relative value of different type of research.

I’m merely wondering, where’s Miranda now? Hello! Hello, Miranda, you still out there?

Today’s issue of The Bulletin magazine will be the last. In spite of a circulation of 57,000, the magazine was not profitable enough for the private equity group that Jamie Packer sold it to in recent years.

According to ACP Magazines chief executive Scott Lorson :

“The Bulletin has been an institution in Australian publishing and has provided its loyal readers with the best quality, in-depth news and current affairs analysis in the country.”

The Bulletin was founded in 1880, and I can’t help feeling that if it was a house, picketers would already be gathering to stop the bulldozers from razing something that was too important a part of Australian history to be destroyed. As The Bulletin isn’t a house, there is no crowd, and possibly little regret.

Because the journal is in private hands, the question of cultural importance and history is not considered, and certainly it was a load of right-wing drivel for most of its life. But isn’t the organ that launched the careers of Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson worth a little respect?

Could lead to more space for gaming criticism?

James Wagner Au neatly summarises the commercial trends and scandals currently rocking online gaming communities

Now that such a prominent figure as Gertsmann has been removed, and for what many believe are dubious reasons, this essential chain in the promotion cycle is broken. Why? Because from this point forward, gamers will doubt the word of any reviewer on a site heavy with publisher ads, and reviewers will begin self-censoring, fearful of being too forthright and potentially suffering Gerstmann’s fate. Publishers will no longer be able to rely on the implicit pressure of their advertising dollars for good reviews, so they’ll have to earn a profit the old-fashioned way: by making good games. But that’s an inherently risky enterprise, especially when your potential audience is so small.

Sometime in the last week, while I was eating far too much fantastic Italian cuisine in Melbourne, the Meme’s second anniversary passed unnoticed. It seems a little arrogant to attempt a retrospective on our first two years, when it has been the better part of two months since the last substantive posting, but I should take the opportunity to thank our regular readers (if there are any left) and as always, to encourage you to engage with the debate.

I was prompted to write by the confluence of three things that happened today that all hit a chord…

Free TV Australia, the consortium of commercial television networks, are calling for public comments on its proposal to alter the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice to allow an extra minute of political advertising each hour between 6:00pm and midnight during the upcoming election campaign. This will allow them to take part in the multi-million dollar advertising bonanza, without having to stop screwing business for its advertising revenue.

As Crikey explains (behind the paywall unfortunately):

That would see the amount of advertising rise from 13 to 14 minutes an hour during the campaign, from 6pm to midnight. That’s an extra six minutes of political ads a night per network.

In the current tight and boom-like conditions, that would deliver more than a million dollars a week extra for the networks and possibly over two million each a week during the campaign, depending on the rate deals and the programs selected.

And the networks would not have to forgo other ads to achieve an average 13 minutes an hour, across the six hours of prime time, as they’ve had to do in the past.

Just another reason to visit Bittorrent…

The new clean, green CEO of News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch (you might have heard of him) delivered a global address webcast to News Corp employees today, in which he stated that News Corp would be carbon neutral by 2010:

The Australian attempts to spin up some high-velocity moral outrage about Harry Potter with Emma MacDonald’s op-ed piece, Harry’s Magic Wearing Thin.

MacDonald suggests that the depiction of the Potter characters’ growing pains constitue Rowling’s endorsement of juvenile misbehaviour: “It’s as if Potter author J.K. Rowling is insinuating that cheating, plastic surgery and spiking drinks is acceptable.”

In the real world there are signs of a deep waywardness. Could there be any connection with the news that 10 children between the ages of 12 and 14 were recently arrested in Lancashire, England suspected of smashing 230 windows of the train used in the Harry Potter films?

No, Emma, I doubt it.

As if this battiness is contagious, US scientists have now come up with “a workable design” – not to tackle poverty or drought – but for an invisibility cloak that head researcher at Indiana’s Purdue University Vladimir Shalaev says “would work exactly like Harry Potter’s”.

Because, of course, every other scientist in the world was working on poverty and drought before Harry Potter came along.

The research I’ve done suggests that the craze has really been adults pretending to get carried away (rushing to buy it for themselves or their kids, who more often than not put it on a shelf without reading it) rather than children themselves.

I’d really like to take a look at MacDonald’s methodology. I’m sure she conducted her research most scrupulously.

Apparantly when former ABC journalist and presenter Maxine McKew runs for parliament it is evidence of the left-wing bias of the national broadcaster, but when a opinion writer for News Limited writes undisclosed speeches for the Foreign Minister, that’s fine:

THE Howard Government has paid $11,364 in taxpayer funds to the conservative News Ltd columnist Christopher Pearson to write speeches for the Foreign Affairs Minister, Alexander Downer, including an address to the Hillsong Church.

Full article here

I’ve read a bit of Chris Pearson: not sure Alexander’s getting his money’s worth…