conversations

the horizons of academic blogging

I have followed up Melissa Greg's link to her draft paper Banal bohemia: Blogging from the ivory tower hot-desk that she mentioned in the comments in this earlier post. The text refers to the academic blogger—especially those younger scholars aspiring for employment following their PhDs who blog to maintain their momentum and prospects during candidature--- within the university sausage factory.

Greg says:

These students display alarming conscientiousness about the requirements for career success, yet the decision to blog rather than write exclusively for refereed journals places them in direct opposition to current notions of appropriate academic performance.

Why do they do so? Why the transgression in a wold increasingly marked by diminished opportunities for tenure and the casualisation of the academic workforce? Greg says that:

Blogs serve as a sort of short-term ideological resolution to the contradictions of the contemporary university workplace, a safe space to share the disappointment arising from the end of guaranteed ongoing employment, the growth of casualisation and the lack of agency that persists in large organisations of the knowledge industries. At a time when traditional versions of labour-related union-led activity appear in decline, blogs are an interesting instance of emergent co-worker solidarity amassed in virtual space.

This academic labour and class mobility territory was explored by Invisible Adjunct---the experience of early career academics being part of ‘a volunteer low-wage workforce for whom ‘low compensation for a high workload’ has become ‘a rationalized feature of the job’. Greg's article is concerned with those PhD students or junior faculty members who have developed blogging communities to keep them company as they move along their career paths. These blogs help sustain motivation, ease loneliness and mark time in a world where many are being excluded from or pushed to the margins of the vocational university life that is promised but not delivered under neo-liberal governmentality.

Greg says that the focus of the subculture of the American blogs that have developed in the wake of Invisible Adjunct (Adjunct Whore, Ferule and Fescule, New Kid on the Hallway, Professorial Confessions, Lumpen Professoriat and Profgrrrl)

... give voice to a range of personal and work-related issues that arise for their authors as the reality of professional identity sets in. The various grievances endemic to the industry that feature in discussion include teaching loads, unmotivated students and intimidating senior colleagues. But the blogs also offer plenty of advice and suggestions about developing a research profile, coping with living away from loved ones for work, even riding out bouts of jealousy or bitterness at others’ success.

They are about the trials and tribulations of academia (including conferencing) rather than stepping beyond outside the walls of academia to the wider public culture and playing around with, and assessing, different ideas from the perspective of their discipline. The key concern of this US academic subculture of bloggers to use their weblogs to “bitch”,or to “badge” their identity in the hope of boosting career prospects.

Sharing and conversing about ideas are not central in the work environment of this academic community and so there is little by way of an intellectual community ---its more imagined than real. This brings us to the limits of Greg's paper.

Firstly only a few Australian bloggers are mentioned ----John Quiggin as senior faculty and for junior faculty Lucy Tartan's Sorrow at Sills Bend, and Glenn Fuller's Event Mechanics. Surely more PhD's and are junior faculty are blogging? The paper is largely based on the US with Australia as an addendum.

Secondly, the PhD's and are junior faculty using their blogs to write about more than bitching or badging about their careers in what Glenn Fuller calls the university factory’, even if they desire to become part of the ‘new’ technocratic regime of ’specialists’ . What about their ideas in their PhD's and papers and linking these to public debates?

universities, innovation, public sphere

Michael Gibbons, director of science and technology policy research at Britain's Sussex University, has said universities must abandon their centuries-old model of linear knowledge transfer and instead open their doors and minds to knowledge exchange with competitors and students:

Universities need to flick their switches from "transmit" to "receive" in order to adapt to new patterns of knowledge transfer.The accent in universities has always been that they provide the front end of the chain, the bright ideas that other people pick up and take through the industrial system and out to the marketplace to you and me.University people, left to themselves, always want to go back to first principles" of identifying a problem and solving it. (Yet) so many of the ideas that are going to make their way into (the innovation system) have been discovered by someone else. Universities need to develop a cadre of people who are good at finding out what already exists and using that in the innovation process. If someone has already done it, you might as well move on.

A knowledge exchange. That opens the door to a greater flow of knowledge between the university and the public sphere and civil society and a wider conversation about ideas. That would change the way the universities are always on transmit, they are never on receive.

Gibbons then gives a model of how this might be done:

I see the next generation of university/graduate employees as being Linux-type people: they find their problems in a way that is open-ended and rigorously honest. To be able to participate in the process, you have to join a community. If you are sufficiently able to keep up, you are kept in the community. You are at the leading edge of what you know, so your ability to make use of the stuff that you are learning depends on how clever you are. If you try to cheat or take something away, they cut you off.

The conventional understanding of innovation would need to be broadened. The standard innovation policies emphasis the junction between industry and commercial ideas. It is assumed there will continue to be researchers with creative imaginations who produce ideas and policy sets out to ensure that a greater proportion of these ideas can be commercialised and that industry supports them.

Simon Marginson observes:

Today's innovation policies had their genesis in the Thatcher government in Britain in the second half of the 1980s. Her government developed financial incentives and product formats in research, designed to harness university work more closely to industry. In their famous Mode 1-Mode 2 model Michael Gibbons and collaborators argued that the future belonged to university science driven externally by industry, markets and government. The argument was influential, underpinning instrumentalist approaches to research policy in many countries.

So there would need to be a restoration of public benefit as one of the primary objectives of innovation and research; public benefit widely understood to embrace the fostering of creativity: the generation of breakthrough ideas.

This takes us to Richard Florida's argument about the "creative economy".which examines the factors that attract highly creative people to particular places in numbers and diversity, and the freedom they need to produce brilliant ideas and talk about them in an engaging manner. It is about their interactions, for example between creative people in the sciences and the arts. It is about programs and reward systems that attract and hold top-flight people and emerging stars, and more effectively utilising global networks.

Space and Culture

Space and Culture looks interesting. However, the journal is tucked behind a subscription wall and the homereading group at the University of Alberta is not online though some of the texts discussed are. The weblog is online and they are shifting some of the journal's book reviews onto the weblog to make them more accessible.

Australia day

It's Australia Day. So I celebrate Aboriginal achievement.

Kathleen Petyarre, My Country - Bush Seeds (Sandstorm) 2003. Acrylic on linen

Marcia Langton writes in The Australian

It seems almost axiomatic to most Australians that Aborigines should be marginalised: poor, sick and forever on the verge of extinction. At the heart of this idea is a belief in the inevitability of our incapability, the acceptance of our "descent into hell". This is part of the cultural and political wrong-headedness that dominates thinking about the role of Aboriginal property rights and economic behaviour in the transition from settler colonialism to modernity. In this mindset, the potential of an economically empowered, free-thinking, free-speaking Aborigine has been set to one side because it is more interesting to play with the warm, cuddly, cultural Aborigine, the one who is so demoralised that the only available role is as a passive player. The dominance of the "reconciliation and justice" rhetoric in the Australian discourse on Aboriginal issues is a part of this.

academia, blogging, public sphere

Melissa Greg has kindly provided an online link to her Feeling Ordinary: Blogging as conversational scholarship paper in Continuum that I indirectly referred to in this post. The paper is a defence of academic blogging.

Greg mentions the potential that self-publishing platforms like weblogs have for academia in terms of both what an academic career can involve—and involving to an interested public:

Blogs have made scholarly work accessible and accountable to a readership outside the academy, an achievement that seems important in the history of cultural studies’ concerns... The ‘interpellative imperative’ of criticism as a genre...seems to have avoided discussion of how practices like blogging fit within a tradition of public intellectualism otherwise mourned .... As I want to argue here, it has also overlooked blogging’s role in carrying out cultural studies’ long-standing commitment to scholarship which reaches beyond the limited range of the academic sphere.

The institutional constraints on academics that challenged the objectives of sharing knowledge and fostering conversation with an audience outside the university are then mentioned in relation to the ethos of cultural studies which asks that academics make a career out of ‘rocking the boat’. These constraints in Australia are:

* the effects of the bureaucratisation of the university on the writing of academics in the humanities and social sciences’. Academics now write in order to fulfill the criteria of a carefully managed university institution and this pushing their writing ‘away from contribution to culture and society. Academics publish regularly in refereed journals to secure their career and professional advancement.

* academic professionalism brings a necessary end to a certain cherished sense of political engagement as public intellectuals.

So blogging is seen as extra-curricular intellectual engagement (community work) or viewed with hostility. So the intellectual life of the walled university is that of a gated community and that outside is defined in terms of self-serving, self-aggrandising or self-delusional. Why so? Gregg says that the ‘publish or perish’ dictum has been particularly effective in narrowing the ambitions many academics hold for their writing to the extent that a ‘yearning to work with words when there is no clear benefit’ is regularly met with disbelief, if not also disapproval, from colleagues.

Surely blogs are a different kind of writing for a different audience from the closed world of academia? Gregg suggests that blogging lies in the ‘mid-range’ between disciplinary insularism and public intellectual practice, and she unpacks it thus:

the ‘conversational scholarship’ it gives rise to can be seen to follow a tradition that includes independent and small press publishing, reading groups, salons and even café culture; that is, before the real estate boom and rising standards of living demanded that urban-based students work full time to support their study, severely limiting other forms of recreational intellectual practice.

This is how I've understood it. its a continuation and development of that tradition. It has always amazed me how few of the chapters, draft papers, little magazines, reading groups, salons and even café culture are online. It is not just academia that resists the changes wrought by digital publishing.

Gregg then states the significant potential that blogging offers for cultural studies. She says that in the world of blogs:

..knowledge loses any sense of being something to be guarded. It instead becomes something to be facilitated, discussed and improved. Blogs can create an economy of generosity and gift at the expense of jealousy and possessiveness.... They encourage collaboration as much as competition. The participatory nature of writing, response and counter-argument on blogs allows for ongoing debate, critical refinement and thinking-in-process. In this they illustrate very well that version of cultural studies practice described by Stuart Hall, which is ‘to work with our always inadequate theories to help move understanding “a little further on down the road”’.

Precisely, even the traditional academic culture has a deep fear of the democratic public sphere.

Gregg defends the middle ground by saying that blogging can contribute to and mirrors traditional scholarly practice rather than just threatening it. Graduate students have taken them up with such fervour is that blogs offer solidarity out of isolation, especially on long projects. They create the conditions for collegiality, brainstorming and frank, fast feedback while also generating and maintaining interest, enthusiasm since blogging offers an exciting new avenue for academics and non-academics alike to ‘speak to each other’.

This potential has to be actualized.The best way to do this is to recognize that blogs can foster conversational scholarship by actively seeking the voices of others and that blogs are a modest political tool in that they can help overturn the hierarchies of speech traditionally securing academic privilege.

wired pastoral

Gerard Goggin in ‘Rural Lines of Flight: Telecommunications and Post-Metro Dreaming in Transformations writes that it is the:

vision of a wired pastoral which speaks to a tangle of desires of the traveller leaving behind the dystopian city. New spaces in rural regions are being conjured in opposition to the histories and futures of the modern and postmodern city, and the wired pastoral connects metaphorically and literally with these novel lines of flight created from this conjuncture. The wired pastoral gives a twist to one of the great topoi of Australian communications history, communications as a way to overcome the isolation of the bush

Or the coastal region in my case. However, private telecommunications companies have been slow to meet the needs and expectations of country and coastal dwellers.

As Goggin says:

In my residence only twenty kilometres away from Lismore, a medium-sized rural centre, I do not have free-to-air television, have no mobile phone coverage, and have coped over the past few years with poor quality and slow internet access via the public telecommunications network. Broadband technologies already available in cities, such as cable modem and digital subscriber line, are likely not to be available in my community for a very long time, if at all, and satellite, wireless and mobile telecommunications will remain costly and inadequate for some time to come.

Creating an information economy is long and slow. If large corporations based in metropoles have been surprisingly slow to recognise some of the possibilities for rural communications, then the local telecommunications model, which has attracted much attention, has resulted in the actual number of new infrastructure providers in non-metropolitan Australia remaining small.

early academic career blogging

This quote on early career academic blogging amidst the rapid dissemination of digital technology in the first decade of the 21st century comes from some articles (not online) by Melissa Greg, and it is courtesy of Anne Galloway:

The participatory nature of writing, response and counter-argument on blogs allows for ongoing debate, critical refinement and thinking-in-process. In this sense, what is rarely acknowledged about blogging is how much it contributes to and mirrors traditional scholarly practice rather than threatening it. One of the main reasons graduate students have taken them up with such fervour is that blogs offer solidarity out of isolation, especially on long projects. They create the conditions for collegiality, brainstorming and frank, fast feedback while also generating and maintaining interest, enthusiasm and motivation. Even the best supervision in the most convivial university department cannot offer this kind of support on a regular basis. The persistence with which established academics condemn blogging as a distraction preventing graduate students from timely completion and participation in their desired career does a disservice to the many instances whereby blogs are utilized as a sophisticated research tool. It also wilfully ignores the wider economic and political circumstances making the potential for a tenured academic career increasingly unlikely for a new generation of graduates.

This is pretty much how I understand the situation. It blurs the blurs the easy distinction between ‘in’ and ‘outside’ the academy and the politics of this distinction. What is unclear from this summary is what the 'many instances whereby blogs are utilized as a sophisticated research tool actually means.

Does it refer to expressing discontent with their difficult situation in an increasingly corporate university system within a neo-liberal mode of governance? Does it refer to bringing their ideas and knowledge to bear on public issues? Does it refer to opening up the ideas circulating in the university system to the wider intellectual culture? The content of blogs being utilized as a sophisticated research tools by early career academics is unclear, given the recent shift from a mass-mediated public sphere to a networked public sphere and the formation of the digital humanities.

If, as Fredric Jameson claims, narrative is the fundamental cultural model for the 20th century, then networks and participatory culture define our current moment, and they bring with them a different set of themes, structures, practices and ideological constraints. Does this mean that critical scholarly argument is being let loose from the tight constraints of linearity, of the watchful eye of a single author intent on shaping meaning for their passive audience? If the data base (eg., Flickr, Wikipedia) is not coming to replace narrative (it is still there in films, novels computer games) then what is the relationship between the two?

a digital world means....

Kevin Robins in will image move us still? in The Photographic Image in Digital Culture (ed., Martin Lister, Routledge, London,1995) says that the development of new digital electronic technologies for the registration, manipulation and storage of images is significant:

Over the past decade or so, we have seen the increasing convergence of photographic technologies with video and computer technologies, and this convergence seems set to bring about a new context in which still images will constitute just one small element in the encompassing domain of what has been termed hypermedia. Virtual technologies, with their capacity to originate a ‘realistic’ image on the basis of mathematical applications that model reality, add to the sense of anticipation and expectation.What is happening to our image culture–whatever it may amount to–is generally being interpreted in terms of technological revolution, and of revolutionary implications for those who produce and consume images.

He adds the interpretation of the new technologies associate them with the emergence of a wholly new kind of visual discourse. This, it is argued, has profoundly transformed our ideas of reality, knowledge and truth.

Robins then introduces William Mitchell, who says in The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (1992) that:

Today, as we enter the post-photographic era, we must face once again the ineradicable fragility of our ontological distinctions between the imaginary and the real, and the tragic elusiveness of the Cartesian dream.(p. 225)

And Jonathan Crary, who in Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century,(1992) conceives of the new order in terms of a new ‘model of vision’:

The rapid development in little more than a decade of a vast array of computer graphics techniques is part of a sweeping reconfiguration of relations between an observing subject and modes of representation that effectively nullifies most of the culturally established meanings of the terms observer and representation. The formalization and diffusion of computer-generated imagery heralds the ubiquitous implantation of fabricated visual ‘spaces’ radically different from the mimetic capacities of film, photography, and television. (p.1).

We are, says Crary, 'in the midst of a transformation in the nature of visuality probably more profound than the break that separates medieval imagery from Renaissance perspective’ (ibid.).

Robins says that according to this line of interpretation the technological and visual revolution associated with new digital techniques is understood, to be at the very heart of broader cultural revolution.

There is the belief that the transformation in image cultures is central to the historical transition from the condition of modernity to that of postmodernity. Digital imaging is seen as ‘felicitously adapted to the diverse projects of our postmodern era’ (Mitchell ibid, p 8). The postmodern order is considered to be one in which the primacy of the material world over that of the image is contested, in which the domain of the image has become autonomous,

the demotic turn

Graeme Turner invented the term "demotic turn" to describe the current convergence of celebrity and the ordinary, or the elevation of the ordinary to celebrity status. He writes:

"In Understanding Celebrity (2004), I coined the term 'the demotic turn' as a means of referring to the increasing visibility of the 'ordinary person' as they turn themselves into media content through celebrity culture, reality TV, DIY websites, talk radio and the like. In the context of the book, it was used as a means of understanding the proliferation of celebrity across the media since the 1980s, as well as celebrity's colonization of the expectations of everyday life in contemporary western societies, particularly among teenagers and young adults."

Enter Corey Delaney. He's an example of what Chris Rojek calls a celetoid. Turner quotes Rojek:

"Celetoids are the accessories of cultures organized around mass communications and staged authenticity. Examples include lottery winners, one-hit wonders, stalkers, whistle-blowers, sports' arena streakers, have-a-go-heroes, mistresses of public figures and the various other social types who command media attention one day and are forgotten the next."

Although if Corey plays his cards right his celetoid moment could land him a good job in event management or PR.

Turner thinks "we need to reconsider our understandings of what kind of cultural apparatus the media has become". It's gone beyond broadcasting information about what's going on and who we are, to shaping both of those. In our democratic culture the elevation of the ordinary appears to be a democratising process, but like everything else produced by the entertainment industry the impression is false. What if Corey had been Aboriginal?

Turner argues that "it is important to remember that celebrity still remains a systematically hierarchical and exclusive category, no matter how much it proliferates". This is how I understand the blogosphere as well. There is a hierarchy of sites, then mini hierarchies within sites from the most knowledgeable and articulate down to the semi-literate hysteric. A lot of bloggers strike me as celebrity opinion columnist wannabees, duplicating the offline environment online, while appearing to be ordinary, democratic, egalitarian.

On developments in media and reality TV Turner says we need to reconsider the idea that media is simply a mediator, that perhaps it has become "an author rather than a mediator or translator of cultural identity". Has it rewritten us as celebrities? Is celebrity becoming the Australian way of life?

critical aesthetic distance

In her Reshaping Spectatorship: Immersive and Distributed Aesthetics in the interesting Fibre Culture Edwina Bartlem says that:

It is worth noting that critical distance has remained a dominant discourse in art history and theory. Modern aesthetic philosophy has often struggled to account for sensory-aesthetics in the body of the spectator, tending to privilege rational thought over sensory perception and a body that simultaneously thinks and feels ..... Modern aesthetic theory that asserts the need for critical distance tends to perpetuate a mind/body dualism where the mind of the spectator is seen as the primary site of interpretation. The inability of modern aesthetic theory to adequately deal with sensory-aesthetics is somewhat ironic given that Alexander Baumgarten coined the term ‘aesthetics’ (from the Greek ‘aesthesis’) to describe his project of creating a theory of ‘sensory knowledge’

And:

...Kant also acknowledges that the subject’s experience of ‘pleasure and displeasure’ are central to the aesthetic experience, however he suggests that there is a serial temporality to sensation, reflective thought and meaning...Kantian aesthetics implies that a form of emotional detachment and critical distance are necessary on the part of the viewer to adequately judge art and to experience a sublime encounter (Kant, 1957: 41-42). Thus, the viewer must maintain a position that is outside of the artwork or event.

The idea of a secure place outside of an event, culture or artwork has, of course, been critiqued by Friedrich Nietzsche, Pierre Bourdieu and postmodern theorists such as Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Why not contemplate an art object or environment from within the architecture of the work? We do that with film do we not?

Facebook: the downside

The early Australian reaction to Facebook has often been a critical one--witness this piece by Guy Rundle at Crikey. Rundle says that:

After the novelty of having 900 'friends' wears off, people will find that, though useful, social networking is cold and non-reciprocal, the measure of an atomised society rather than the answer to it.

Social interaction is debased (cold and non-reciprocal) by being online is Rundle's argument. Surely, Facebook is another form of social interaction (networking) that supplements the face-to-face one. In the impersonal cities where I live and work, no one looks each other in the eye or speaks to strangers on the bus. Yet there is warmth bubbling away online. A good response to Rundle is given by Mark Bahnisch at Larvatus Prodeo. He suggests that Facebook won't pale into yesterday's fad, like the dot.com boom.

Now we have Tom Hodgkinson's op-ed in The Guardian on Facebook. He sure doesn't like the Facebook networking form of online presence, and he wants to campaign against the substitution of digital networking for real life. He starts by introducing the narcissism argument:

Facebook appeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us, too. If I put up a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things, I can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get sex or approval. ("I like Facebook," said another friend. "I got a shag out of it.") It also encourages a disturbing competitivness around friendship: it seems that with friends today, quality counts for nothing and quantity is king. The more friends you have, the better you are. You are "popular", in the sense much loved in American high schools.

The implication is that Facebook, nay the blogosphere, is ruled by a "lust for recognition." But don't we all have public masks? Why is a digital mask vain and narcissistic when the non-digital face (personality) is okay? Isn't Facebook more than that superficial kind of social networking of being popular? Flickr.com, the photo website, is a well-regarded pioneer because it served a brilliant purpose: making it simple to share your pictures with family and friends. Facebook allows you to connect up with people with similar interests---an example. What has yet to happen is doing something constructive with this kind of network. It is not obvious that the software driving Facebook prevents this from happening.

Hodgkinson asks: does Facebook really connect people? His reply is:

Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

Why amusing photos instead of good or meaningful ones? An online presence is different from face-to face presence and it can lead to face-to face contact for some. But this possibility is not explored. Instead we Facebook users are damned because we are alone, depressed addicts and chained to our desks--ie., we are the depressed slaves of technology. This is technological determinism with a vengeance that is coupled with the blogo-barbarians pounding on the gates of civilization.

Hodgkinson digs behind the surface to the ethos behind Facebook and he discovers that it is about venture capitalists making money and libertarianism. On the capitalism bit Hodgkinson says:

Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway....The creators of the site need do very little bar fiddle with the programme. In the main, they simply sit back and watch as millions of Facebook addicts voluntarily upload their ID details, photographs and lists of their favourite consumer objects.

Isn't the lefty Guardian also about making money? So is it the easy money return on the capital that is the issue? Or the idea of the global village? Hodgkinson then describes the libertarianism thus:

Here at last is the Enlightenment state longed for since the Puritans of the 17th century sailed away to North America, a world where everyone is free to express themselves as they please, according to who is watching. National boundaries are a thing of the past and everyone cavorts together in freewheeling virtual space. Nature has been conquered through man's boundless ingenuity.

This is the standard public philosophy of the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, is it not? I'm not sure that Facebook can be junked because of that public philosophy. Like Flickr, Facebook depends on how good and useful it is in helping us to engage in social networking.

He ends by saying that he will have nothing to do with :

this heavily-funded programme to create an arid global virtual republic,where your own self and your relationships with your friends are converted into commodites on sale to giant global brands. ... For my own part, I am going to retreat from the whole thing, remain as unplugged as possible, and spend the time I save by not going on Facebook doing something useful, such as reading books. And if I want to connect with the people around me, I will revert to an old piece of technology. It's free, it's easy and it delivers a uniquely individual experience in sharing information: it's called talking.

This is heroic Luddite silliness--all anti-technology posturing. You can read books, talk to friends and connect through Facebook. It's not an either or choice at all. Nor is it treated as such.

So we have cultural conservatism appearing in a lefty newspaper that iis endeavouring to inoculate itself against the Internet's excesses. The days of wine and old-fashioned cafes)gives way to an equally unrecognizable dystopia where our laptops "socially and psychologically cut us off from our fellow caffeine drinkers, thereby destroying "the concrete, undeniable, immutable fact of our being in the world." Etc etc.

postcolonial thinking is...?

Achille Mbembe in this interview at Eurozine says that despite postcolonial thinking being marked by a fragmented way of thinking, there are some forms of reasoning, and some arguments, which distinguish this current of thought and which have made a major contribution to alternative ways of reading our modernity. He adds:

To begin with I'd draw your attention to the critique, not of the West per se, but of the effects of cruelty and blindness produced by a certain conception – I'd call it colonial - of reason, of humanism, and of universalism. This critique is different from that once made by the existentialist, phenomenological and post-structuralist movements in post-war France. Of course, it is chiefly concerned with the issue of self-creation and self-government. But its approach is not wholly confined to the problem of the "death of God" à la Nietzsche. It differs in many respects from the Sartrean idea of "man without God" taking the place vacated by the "dead God", and hardly subscribes either to Foucault's notion that "God being dead, man is dead too".

Mbembe says that postcolonial thinking puts its finger on two things. Firstly, it exposes both the violence inherent in a particular concept of reason, and the gulf separating European moral philosophy from its practical, political and symbolic outcomes. Secondly, postcolonial thinking stresses humanity-in-the-making, the humanity that will emerge once the colonial figures of the inhuman and of racial difference have been swept away.

Wim Wenders

I haven't seen many films of Wim Wenders apart from Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire

Wenders was part of the New German Cinema, a disparate movement united simply by its members' determination to make personal films, whatever the cost, and which included Fassbinder and Herzog. In this s article in Sight and Sound Nick Roddick says that:

Movements usually start with a public get-together of sorts (in the case of New German Cinema, the 1962 Oberhausen Manifesto), which no one notices at the time. They yield results locally, but by the time they gain international recognition the first flush is generally over. Then they move into a kind of international afterlife, referenced as a reality long after they are gone. This is especially true of cinema and even truer of German cinema.

He adds:

Film needs money as much as artistic commitment, so those who begin on the fringes with almost no money are grudgingly co-opted into the mainstream as soon as their money-making potential becomes clear. As a result, making film is all about making compromises; movements, on the other hand, are about remaining pure. One of the interesting things about Wenders is that he embraced those compromises - in a way Fassbinder and Herzog did not - in the evident belief that his artistic vision coupled with his deep love of American cinema would overcome the obstacles.

Urban Informatics

I just stumbled upon a reference to Urban Informatics: Community Integration and Implementation, which is about the new media in the urban village. It recognizes and explores the way internet has advanced to become the prime communication medium that connects many threads across the fabric of urban life. I'm exploring to see how much is online.

Why the use of urban village rather than urban life?

I live in a townhouse in the very heart of the CBD in Adelaide and it ain't no urban village.There is no community. Nor are there any bonds. Can the CBD be construed as a series of villages since it contains a lot of residential areas within the grid that marks the urban off from the suburban? Not really. The south east corner had a neighbourhood context and feel, but that is the exception.

However, it appears that, as urban densities in the inner city increase with high rise living the language of community is making come back with vengeance in policy areas that ignored it for many years. I can accept cties are becoming collections of distinctive communities and neighbourhoods that become all the more differentiated as the cities grow in size and complexity. As the city expands---eg Sydney--- people remain focused on their small part of it. It is the only way to manage urban life.

This 2007 Conference on Communications and Technologies provides a way into what is being explored. It states that

personalised mobile devices penetrate new urban spaces with a need for innovative products and services that enable the creative and consumption process to account for shifting social, cultural and psychological conditions. City residents now have the ability to communicate within groups, access media and entertainment content and manage their ‘digital lifestyle’ through SMS, mobile email, pictures and video. These innovative applications of locative media incorporate cultural and social patterns of interaction and user-led innovations that are yet to be fully explored.

And:

In addition to these informational and locative functions of new technologies, ICTs increasingly serve a discursive function as well. This is being manifested in a variety of rapidly emerging content genres (e.g., digital storytelling, blogs, e-zines, etc.) which are deployed between individuals as well as in networks of individuals .... Digital cities have been promoted as a civic platform for citizens’ visions of the space they live and work in, complementary (and sometimes even alternative) to the much more institutional view of conventional e-government approaches. Locative media and mobile technology can enhance and augment digital cities and connect them in new ways to the physical city ... enhancing civic participation and deliberation.

cybercities

The argument is this. For too long information and communications technologies have been lazily portrayed as means to simply escape into a parallel world - to withdraw from the body, or the city, in some utopian, or dystopian, stampede on-line. Such perspectives deny the fact that the so-called 'information society' is also an increasingly urban society. They ignore the ways in which new technologies now mediate every dimension of the fabric of everyday urban life. And they tend to obscure a key question : how do the multifaceted realities of city regions interrelate in practice with new technologies in different ways in different places ?

Many continue to view the city as the world, in all its various aspects, as "discrete" and not continuous in form. He used the word discrete in mathematical terms, meaning composed of separate, divisible parts. Instead of a series of linear images that formed a sequence or a system of places, thought now appeared as a series of discontinuous states and combinatorial relays

The city is otherwise. It is networked, a series of flows.

Urban Informatics on Facebook

In the light of the previous post about global roaming and the digital urban I went hunting for some stuff on mobile in a city and urban informatics---and surprise, surprise I found a group on Facebook. This confirms my intuition that Facebook is being used by professionals for networking and to build their social capital. The Facebook blurb, written by Dr Marcus Foth, says:

Driven by curiosity, initiative and interdisciplinary exchange, urban informatics is an emerging cluster of people interested in research and development at the intersection of people, place and technology with a focus on cities, locative media and mobile technology.

Sounds interesting--mobile communications in the city is where I kinda belong in the sense of that being where I am personally situated:feeling the urban impacts of technology, though not the Internet-linked mobile phone or the GPS navigation devices.

an unwirelessed world

I've posted this portrait from our holidays to Wilsons Promontory not for the photo, but to highlight the limitations of a digital world in Australia. The photo was taken with a digital camera and I wanted to post it to my junk for code weblog with an account of the trip.

There was no wireless on the ferry, my sister's place in Safety Beach had an internet connection in a room that was being used as a bedroom but no wireless modem, and I had no time to hunt for an internet cafe in Safety Beach that night or in Mornington the next morning.

Gary Sauer-Thompson, Suzanne, Queenscliff ferry, Victoria, 2007

Global roaming is what is required but it is outrageously expensive with very limited downlands. So it was not possible to access my weblogs whilst travelling--only if I stayed in a place that had broadband. And they were few and far between. So we have the limitations of urban social networking for those who are mobile or nomadic.