The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

Well that seems to be about it then.

I’ll turn comments off and we’ll discuss what to do with the content: either leave it here to gather dust, or to take it down and archive off-line, or just trash the lot…

Thank you to everyone who has been involved with this project over the years, as writers, readers, and commenters. Big thanks especially to Nick who floated the original idea and has maintained the backend for seven years. Not a bad innings for a blog, given that I think the moment was on the point of passing back in 2005 when we started this.

So that’s goodbye from all of us. Over and out.

That is the question we’ve been tossing back and forth for some months now. We’ve been involved with this blog since it launched in 2005. When it started, it was intended to be a “Cult-stud group-blog frenzy” enabling “more practical engagement between the wider world and that of cultural studies” and it had fifteen invited staff writers. While not all invitees took up the offer, the number of active writers dwindled fairly quickly and for the last few years John and I have pretty much been the only contributors, while Nick has had continued input into editorial decisions.

Maintaining a blog, as many of you already know, requires a considerable time and energy commitment, which we have had to fit into the small gaps between teaching and writing frenzies, and the moments that we can salvage in the midst of doing other things.

The blog has also drifted considerably from its original remit so that what we post now is often related to things that are on our mind at the time or the things that we find interesting. Consequently, the connection to Cultural Studies as a discipline has been, at times, tangential at best, even though it is still a discipline that we love and in which we continue to work.

Our main reason for persisting so long has been the desire to connect with others over issues that we regard as important and to get conversations going. However the number of conversations, like the number of authors, has also diminished over time.

So we’re really wondering if this is a boat worth keeping afloat. We know that we have a couple of faithful readers who we appreciate greatly and with whom we can connect in other ways. Beyond that, we really don’t know who is reading the blog and whether our posts are of any interest to anyone other than us.

So, if you swing by the blog on even a semi-regular basis, let us know that you’re out there. Otherwise, if we are just talking to ourselves, we can do that just as easily over the kitchen table.

Thank you to Jason Gross at Popmatters for naming us alongside writers like Trent Reznor and publications such as Salon and The Wall Street Journal in their 2009 Best Music Scribbling Awards.

It’s nice to get some acknowledgment, especially from a professional in the industry.

The post he liked was this one.

But make sure you visit Popmatters and read the other articles as well—they are some great ideas, well put.

Thanks for the nod, OnlineCourses, I hope we can live up to the endorsement.

100 Best Blogs for the Literati

If you feel that you’re destined to be an intellectual long after you graduate from college, you’re going to have to work a little harder to keep up with high brow culture and scholarly debates on your own. These 100 blogs will help you jump in on the discussions influencing the art, literature, political and culture worlds, even without the support of your professors and fellow classmates.

“High brow culture”? That reminds me: I better get to work on the next Eurovision post…

On other blogs when the authors are too busy to post, the convention is to post a Lolcat or something, just to kick the RSS feed over once or twice. At Memes, we are far to arrogant to do that.

Trust me: something will turn up here again very soon. I might even get to tell you about my sekrit project!

Until then…

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.

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.

November 4: an auspicious day. One of the most significant presidential elections in recent memory; in Australia, it’s the day of the horse race that “stops a nation” (apparently); and back in 2005, it was the day that Nick decided that writing a blog would be cool and published our first post.

It’s only been three years, but a lot seems to have happened: wars, environmental crises; financial crises; a change of government in Australia; Nick saw the light and moved from academia to web design; Lisa finally finished the PhD; John keeps plugging away at his.

Memes isn’t the sort of blog where we chat about ourselves (not that we are saying there is anything wrong with that), by I think we can take the indulgence occasionally. So, by way of a smug “happy birthday”, here are some statistics that we thought were amusing.

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I’ve set up a Twitter account for Memes with an automatic RSS feed. If you’re on Twitter, feel free to follow us.

It seems a little too much of the self promotion thing, but I’m actually exploring mechanisms for providing web-based information largely automatically. More about this later, maybe.

I’m putting the site on comments moderation for the time being as we’re experiencing a sustained spam attack on an older post. I’ve deleted the existing spam comments and banned the IP addresses associated with those comments. It looks like the scum-sucking spam merchants have learned too much about Textpattern. I’ll be investigating our options for spam-blocking plugins over the next couple of days. I like the idea of an unencumbered public forum, which is why this site hasn’t defaulted to moderation until now. But spam is why we can’t have nice things.