The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

That is, things you really don’t want to find written on your draft chapter when you get it back from your supervisor. A potentially continuing series.

Number one: “cliché-a-rama”.

Ouch!

Public transport ticket inspectors with police powers. What could possibly go wrong? (more)

A little spam attack (since fixed, I hope) brought the blog back to mind, and I realised that no one has posted for over a month (inexcusable!) In our defence, we’ve all been really busy…

I’m back studying full-time for three months, courtesy of a completion scholarship, and I hope to state posting parts of the thesis here, looking for comments and advice (which was part of the purpose for the blog in the first place), so watch this space. In the meantime, it seems I’ve found Lisa’s room of my own: I’ve got the run of the house, iTunes is on overload, and I can spread across the table (even if I do have to move everything back before I can start getting dinner on!)

But anyway, back to the problematics of a touristic construction of a temporary and contingent community…

Just lately I’ve been reading Mel Gregg’s Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices. She recounts Richard Hoggart’s description of the working class living room and his points about the obstacles to academic activity faced by the working classes when they are unable even to find a private space to read quietly. Mel associates this with the transitional phase after the Second World War when scholarships and more universal education opened the universities to the working classes for the first time and many students were the first in their family to have the opportunity.

This part of the book came back to me as I was reading an article this evening in preparation for a tutorial tomorrow . . .

I have nothing substantive to say at this point, but thought I should keep the old thing ticking over.

I was going to post something about the lack of women at Kevin’s 2020 love-in, but the entire blogosphere beat me to it. For what it’s worth, “Women on Boards”, a “national program to improve the gender balance on Australian company boards” has distributed a press-release with some interesting points. My favourite was a quotation from Albert Einstein insisting that “you can’t solve the problem with the same thinking that created it.” See the presser here.

On another note, Paul Keating, with nothing left to prove and rapidly approaching the elder-statesman phase of life (and with his own musical to boot!), apparently just doesn’t care what he says anymore. Of fellow Oz opinion writer, Janet Albrechtsen, he says: “Albrechtsen is a no-talent proselytiser for causes overtaken by history and events”. Link here.

It’s fun when you find yourself back in the cool kids team.

One for the “grumpy old curmudgeon” file…

July Nielsen NetRating figures show that Australian MySpace users spent a 4.5 million hours on the social networking site last month resulting from an average of 1 hour and thirty three minutes per user. MySpace has continued its growth with unique visitors increasing to 2.9 million in July and total registered Australian users now at 3.87 million.

People: get a life. A real one.

From Crikey’s editorial comment.

This a very poorly edited quotation and I suspect there might be a phrase missing, but this very clearly says 1 hour 33 minutes per user per month. That’s three minutes a day! But even if they mean 1 hour 33 minutes per user, per day, it’s still a lot less than most people spend watching TV, or I spend answering email!

Way to try and drum up a moral panic about them young people and that internet thingy!

I’m not sure if they are trying to tell me something, but two friends have independently emailed me to say that Queen guitarist Brian May has completed the PhD thesis he started in 1971. Read about it here…

OK, I’ve been going for a while, but I’m not that extended!

And anyway, how much do you reckon the physics of interplanetary dust might have changed in 30 years? I mean, how much additional research did he have to do, I wonder…

Daring Fireball John Gruber on constructing well-mannered emails.

Writing an email is like writing an article. Only quote the relevant parts, interspersing your new remarks between the quoted passages. Don’t quote anything at all from the original message if you don’t have to.

edit: added the link. D’oh.

Music videos are big business. Record companies can throw lots of dollars at them, and many are made by well-known directors, such as Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, and Damien Hirst. The Queensland Art Gallery even ran an exhibition of video clips in 2004: the only exhibition I have ever seen that had to have a rating, because they played Chris Cunningham’s video for Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy.

So it is all the more gratifying that this year’s Grammy for the best video went to four nerds with one camera and eight treadmills!

Here it is, if you want to see it again…

Dear valued readers, commentators, and writers. We’ve discovered that some heretofore undetected configuration of the security software that protects this website from spam and other attacks is causing the server to reject some comments. You’ll know that this has happened to you if you post a comment and a “412 Precondition Failed” error is returned. Please contact me if your comment is rejected with this error.

For the technically minded, the error and its cause is discussed at the Textdrive help site. It looks like some re-configuration is in my future.