Here is a timely new journal called Fast Capitalism that was introduced to me by Ben Agger of the University of Texas.
“Recently, I and some others started an electronic journal, Fast Capitalism, in which people address the impact of rapid ICTs on self, society and culture in the 21st century. The first issue has just been posted to www.fastcapitalism.com. We are planning FC 1.2, for which the deadline for papers is May 2005″.
Comments off
Center for Digital Storytelling
Last week I was involved in a Digital Story Telling workshop at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (at Federation Square here in Melbourne). Digital story-telling is a genre that seeks to record and preserve the individual stories that form the collective identity of a community. We recorded some of the people that helped create the early Melbourne Moomba Festival (The festival is 50 years old this year). Gordon Chisholm and myself made a movie about Max Kirwan who introduced waterskiing to Melbourne’s Yarra River in 1956.
Comments off
This school at Deakin University (a ‘progressive’ university as opposed to a ‘real world’ university) has an interesting convergence of conversations and skills. They have recently advertised a PhD Scholarship in ‘Landscape and Memory: Exhibiting with New Media’ in conjunction with Experimedia at the State Library of Victoria. www.research.deakin.edu.au/scholarships If only I had my time again.
Comments off
The relationship between weblogs and journalism is being mapped. But I wonder how weblogs, journalism, and historiography can be mapped?
Comments off
The Center for Cultural Studies Resident Fellowship Program
UCSC, one of my favourite universities anywhere has a fellowship on ‘globalisation’…especially the globalisation of historical knowledge.
Comments off
(this is one of my favourite songs from the year. It is from the Northern Californian band ‘Grandaddy‘ from their CD called the ‘Sophtware Slump’…says it all really)
adrift again 2000 man
you lost your maps,
you lost the plans
did you hear them yell
“Land Damn It Land!”
you said you can’t,
well I hope you can
I hope you can
how’s it going 2000 man
welcome back to solid ground my friend
I heard all your controls
were jammed
well it’s just nice
to have you back again
but I guess they still
don’t understand
and they can never understand
and they said go find 2000 man
and they said tell him
we’ve got new plans
but instead I’m here
to tell you, friend
I belive they want
you to give in
Are you giving in 2000 man?
(Did you love this world
and did this world not love you?)
Are you giving in 2000 man?
Don’t give in 2000 man
From Grandaddy
The Sophtware Slump
Comments off
Google has a new service that searches for scholarly articles. Their motto is ‘Stand on the Shoulder of Giants”…just like Google I suppose.
Comments off
Digitize This: The Cultural Studies E.Archive Project.
A couple of years ago I placed a challenge for Cultural Studies to engage more whole-heartedly with the technlogies that they critique. The result is the E Archive Project (see article by Gary Hall)
My challenge to those that use Derrida or Bey or Adorno or Bourdieu within their disciplinary frameworks to advance our understanding of new media, is can you enact the ideas of these thinkers in a sophisticated way through new media, or can it only be done through writing books about books? I challenge cultural studies and new media theorists to produce a Derrida engine or a Bourdieu database or a Bey GIS map. I am not aware of any major contribution that cultural studies has made within this medium beyond using it as a publishing and networking mechanism, and beyond writing innumerable valuable books to critique it from a distance. We need more people engaged in building academic resources on-line that help us to look at things in new ways.
Craig Bellamy, “The Milk Bar Challenge,”
posted on the fibreculture mailing
Comments off
HUM 202 — Toward a Literacy of Cooperation
This link was sent by Andrew Garton of Toysatellite. It concerns a lecture series at Stanford University about the history of cooperation (as apposed to ‘Darwins blind spot’ being his theory of natural selection). It proposes that the history of evolution overlooks the history of coopertaion (and ‘cooperation’ is what Sociologists call ‘Social Capital’).
Darwin had a blind spot. It wasn’t that he didn’t see the role of cooperation in evolution. He just didn’t see how important it is. So for two centuries — a time during which the world passed from an agrarian landscape into a global post-industrial culture of unprecedented scale and complexity — science, society, public policy and commerce have attended almost exclusively to the role of competition. The stories people tell themselves about what is possible, the mythical narratives that organizations and societies depend upon, have been variations of “survival of the fittest.” The role of cooperation has been largely unmapped.
Comments off
http://julia1926.net/ Johannes Weymann (about a woman with Alzheimers (thanks to jill/txt)
Stuart Maulthrop: Reagan Library (I think the title is ironic).
http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/rl/pages/intro.htm
Comments off
Call for Papers - Largest listing of call for papers in all areas of specialization
I’ve been looking for this Journal Call For Papers Aggregetion site for quite some time. I am not sure if there are others, but this one looks OK and has a modest subscription charge.
Comments off
(This conference in August of next year (and organised by Australians) has plenty of room to discuss New Media in the Humanities).
Humanities Conference 2005
Third International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities
Location Homerton College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Event Starts On August 2, 2005
Event Ends On August 5, 2005
Language English
Organizer Common Ground
Important Dates
Last Date of Submission of Manuscripts March 31, 2005
Call for Paper Details
Scope
‘The Humanities in a Knowledge Society’
The conference will address a range of critically important themes in the various fields that make up the humanities. This is a conference for any person with an interest in, and concern for, the humanities. All are encouraged to register and attend this significant and timely conference.
Anthropology, Archaeology, Classics, Communication, English, Fine Arts, Geography, Government, History, Journalism, Languages, Linguistics, Literature, Media Studies, Philosophy, Politics, Sociology or Religion-these are just some of the many disciplines represented at the Humanities Conference. The focus of papers ranges from the finely grained and empirical to the expansive and theoretical.
To the world outside of education and academe, the humanities seems at best ephemeral, and at worst esoteric. They appear to be of less significance and practical ‘value’ than the domains of economics, technology and science. This conference examines, and exemplifies, the inherent worth of the humanities.
Topics
Papers are invited on…
The Meaning of ‘Knowledge’
The stuff of knowledge in a ‘knowledge society’ or ‘knowledge economy’
Modern, postmodern and other ways of knowing
Subjectivity and objectivity, truth and relativity
Consciousness revisited
Ethics and knowledge
Semiotics: the modalities of meaning
The social mind: linguistics in theory and application
Old forms and new insights: the novel, poetry and other literatures
New media, new messages, new meanings
The art of engagement: music, visual arts, theatre
Philosophy in the humanities
Making knowledge: research in the humanities
Intellectual property: private property or creative commons?
Interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity
The Nature of the Social
The dynamics of culture and identity
Differences: gender, sexuality, families, race, ethnicity, class, (dis)ability
Family and community
Communicating: media, film, theatre
The literary and the less-than-literary: true stories and actual fantasies
Aesthetics and design
Place making in the humanities: geography and its sites
Land and place: framing indigenous identities
Language and linguistics in the humanities
Languages: global English, multilingualism, language death, language revival
Nationalism and racism
Religious meanings and their social human significance
Trajectories of Change
Globalism and localism; cosmopolitanism and backlash
History and its futures
Immigration, minorities, refugees, diaspora
Citizenship: national and global
Cities and regions: the dynamics of proximity and distance
Violence and peace
A third way? And the first or second futures of our recent past
Colonialism and neocolonialism
Terror and anti-terror
Roles for the Humanities
Teaching and learning in the humanities
Humanities in cyberspace
Meaning in the ‘information society’
Politics in the humanities
Science and humanity
The body examined: biotechnology, bioethics and other intrusions
Sustaining the human, ecologically and culturally
Archaeologies of the material and the ephemeral
Museums and cultural heritage
Technology, between humans and nature
The ‘ism’s of the humanities: feminism, multiculturalism
The conservative agenda for a new world order
The ‘new economy’ and the ‘knowledge economy’ - where do the humanities fit?
Specifications
Paper (30 minute):
A conference session involving a 15 min speaker presentation, followed by questions and answers. Presenters are requested to select a chair from amongst other conference participants. The role of the chair is to introduce the presenter, keep the presentation within the 15 minute time limit and manage the question and answer session. Presenters may also chair their own sessions, but are requested to keep to this format. Multiply authored presentations are welcome.
Papers should be approximately 2,000-5,000 words in length. They should be written as continuous expository narrative in a chapter or article style - not as lists of points or a PowerPoint presentation. The organizers require presenters to use Common Ground?s Microsoft Word authoring template (available at official website). Completed papers should be emailed as an attachment.
Submission/Contact Address
Email: papers@commongroundpublishing.com
Details of Workshop Proposals/Tutorials/Lectures and other supplementary events
Workshop (60 minute):
A conference session involving substantial interaction with the audience. This must not simply be a long paper - papers are for 30 minute sessions only.
Additional Information about the event
Submission Timetable:
24 July 2004: First date full papers can be submitted for 2005 edition of the Journal. Individual papers will be published one by one, as the refereeing and publication process is completed
1 October 2004: Deadline for the fist round call-for-papers
31 March 2005: Final date for submission of papers for double blind refereeing (for an explanation, see The Peer Referee Process)
5 September 2005: Final date for submission of papers for one way blind refereeing (for an explanation, see The Peer Referee Process)
November 2005: Individual papers published to web upon completion of full referee and production process
Approx February 2006: Full text of the 2005 edition of Journal compiled and published to CD
Colloquium (90 minute):
A session involving at least five registered participants (for instance, a chair plus four or more presenters who speak for no more than 15 minutes each). At least 15 minutes must be left for audience interaction. [The conference committee does not organise 90 minute Colloquium. Interested delegates will need to formulate such a session with other colleagues.]
Virtual Presentation:
A paper submitted without the presenter attending the conference in person, but included in the booklet and refereed and published as part of the conference proceedings (the Journal) in print and electronic formats.
Publication Details
Name International Journal of the Humanities
Language of Publication English
Medium of Publication Full Text, Electronic
Additional Information about Publication
The proceedings of the Humanities Conference are published in the International Journal of the Humanities. All papers are fully refereed. To submit, at least one author of each paper must be registered to attend the Humanities Conference (to a maximum of one paper per registered author - which means, for instance, that two registered authors may submit two jointly authored papers).
Additional Address For information about registration, program and general enquiries please contact:
PO Box K481
Haymarket
NSW 2000 Australia
Tel: +61 (0)2 9519 0303
Fax: +61 (0)2 9519 2203
Email: info@commongroundconferences.com
Additional Address For information about publication, journal and referee enquiries please contact:
PO Box 463
Altona
Victoria 3018 Australia
Tel: +61 (0)3 9398 8000
Fax: +61 (0)3 9398 8088
Website http://h05.cgpublisher.com/
Comments off
(Here is my suggestions on how to organsise a network like Fibreculture. It is best to organise an email list first then worry about taking over the world later).
1) Incorporate as a legal entity. Become a fully independent body that is not dependent on any institution (including universities) for its survival. If need be, seek advice on this from other successful organisations (ie. 3PS Radio here in Fitzroy is 25yo this year).
2) Don’t be scared to explore sustainable funding models. I recommend a ‘Paymate Express” link on the site and a suggestion of an annual $10 donation from all the subscribers. This would amount to $8000 per year (humbly, if you do this I will donate $100 to get the ball rolling). A subscriber-based funding model like the radio stations 3PBS or 3RRR could be explored.
3) Explore a democratic model. This is easy. Been done before.
And may I suggest as an incentive to subscribers that everyone who donates $10 to fibreculture has full rights to publish on the new community web log as well as voting in the annual general meeting (I can see all the Libertarians out there reaching for their belly buttons in shock at the thought of this).
4) Place a section for New Media book reviews on the site. Look at funding models for this (been done before).
5) Give away free www.fibreculture.org email addresses (and perhaps even weblogs). This would cost virtually nothing. Ask your host about this.
6) Perhaps look for a better model of distributed network that the listserv software. Listserv is not really that suited for the *real word* fibreculture demographic because it doesn’t promote interdisciplinary ‘multimedia’ forms. Listserv has (and does) serve the academy well but only in certain contexts and it is time to move on and broaden our understanding of a ‘creative network’ in this medium. If fibreculture’s ‘engine room’ is in Visual Arts, humanities and the applied-university community then listserv doesn’t serve this community well.
7) Write a direction statement and a mission statement (values, political beliefs etc). Is the list really interdisciplinary and do we know what this really means? And what does an ‘interdisciplinary’ space look like online, what technologies do you need to promote this, and why do you need to do this in the first place?
Don’t be scared to moderate. Moderation isn’t just about ‘censorship;’ it is also about ‘value adding’ to a community. And if you have a more transparent and democratic model of governance, then moderation will work better for everyone (and perhaps you could even pay the moderators).
9) Do an annual round up of activities etc etc.
Comments off
(I am not really sure what this is saying. I really don’t think it is saying anything. It is meant to be about an email discussion list called fiberculture that has 800 subscribers. But I think it is about something else).
Dawn of the Organized Networks [excerpt of a beta version]
By Ned Rossiter & Geert Lovink
November 2004
At first glance the concept of ‘organised networks’ appears oxymoronic.In technical terms, all networks are organised. There are founders, administrators, moderators and active members who all take up roles.Think back to the early work on cybernetics and the ’second order’cybernetics of Bateson and others. Networks consist of mobile relations whose arrangement at any particular time is shaped by the’constitutive outside’ of feedback or noise. The order of networks is made up of a continuum of relations governed by interests, passions, affects and pragmatic necessities of different actors. The network of relations is never static, but this is not to be mistaken for somekind of perpetual fluidity. Ephemerality is not a condition to celebrate for those wishing to function as political agents.
Dawn of the Organised Networks is to be read as a proposal, a draft, a concept in the process of becoming that needs active steering through disagreement and collective elaboration. What it doesn’t require is instant deconstruction. Everyone can do that. Needless to say, organised networks have existed for centuries. Their history can and will be written, but that doesn’t bring us much further. The networks we are talking about here are specific in that they are situated within technical media. They can be characterised by their advanced irrelevance and invisibility for old media. General network theory might be useful for enlightenment purposes, but that doesn’t answer the issues that new media based social networks face. Does it satisfy you to know that molecules and DNA patterns also network?
There are no networks outside of society. Like all human techno entities they are infected by power. Networks are ideal Foucault machines. They undermine power as they produce it. Their diagram of power may operate on a range of scales, traversing intra-local networks and overlapping with trans-national insurgencies. No matter how harmless they seem, networks bring on differences. Foucault’s dictum: power produces. Translate this over to organised networks and you get the force of invention. Indeed, translation is the condition of invention. Mediology is the practice of invention within the socio-technical system of networks. As a collaborative method of immanent critique, mediology assembles a multitude of components upon a network of relations as they coalesce around situated problems and unleashed passions. In this sense, the network constantly escapes attempts of command and control. Such is the entropic variability of networks.
The opposite of organized networks is not chaos. What organized networks attempt to achieve is to deal with the radical temporality of today’s mediasphere. Short-termism is the prevailing condition that inflicts governments, corporations, and everyday life. Pharmacology is the bio-technical management of this condition. Organised networks offer another possibility - the possibility of creativity, invention and purpose that is not determined in the first instance by the creaking, frequently bewildered grasps at maintaining control, as witnessed across a range of institutions that emerged during the era of the modern state and persist to this day within the complex of the corporate-state.
Users are not political party members. They do not see their circles of peers as a sect. Quite the opposite. Ties are loose, up to the point of breaking up. Thus the ontology of the user, in so many ways,mirrors the logic of capital. Indeed, the ‘user’ is the identity par excellence of capital that seeks to extract itself from rigid systems of regulation and control. Increasingly the user has become a term that corresponds with the auto-configuration of self-invention. Some would say the user is just a consumer. Silent and satisfied, until hell breaks lose. The user is the identity of control by other means. In this respect, the ‘user’ is the empty vessel awaiting the spectral allure of digital commodity cultures and their promise of ‘mobility’and ‘openness’. Let us harbour no fantasies: sociality is intimately bound within the dynamic array of technics exerted by the force of capital. Networks are everywhere. The challenge for the foreseeable future is to create new openings, new possibilities, new temporalities and new spaces within which life may assert its insistence for anethico-aesthetic existence.
The organised network is mirrored against the networked organisation. Roughly speaking, one can witness a ‘convergence’ between the informality of virtual networks and the formality of institutions. However, this process is anything but harmonious. Clashes between networks and organizations are occurring before our very own eyes on a daily basis. Debris spreads in every possible direction, depending on the locality. It is naive to believe that networks will win this battle (if you want to put it in those terms).
The organised network is primarily concerned with the task of sustainability. Networks are not hypes. They are here to stay. Nonetheless they are extremely fragile. This all may sound dull, but let’s not forget that pragmatism is built upon the passions, joys and thrills of invention. The time has come for cautious planning. There is a self-destructive tendency of networks faced with the challenge of organisation. Organised networks have to feel confident about defining their value systems in ways that are meaningful and relevant to the internal operations of their socio-technical complex. That’s actually not so difficult. The danger is that of ghettoisation. The trick is to work out how a collaborative value system that can deal with issues such as funding, internal power plays and the demand for”accountability” and “transparency” as they scale up their operations.
Networks are not institutions of representative democracy, despite the frequency with which they are expected model themselves on such failed institutions. There is a search for ‘post-democratic’ models of decision making that avoid classic models of representation. The emerging theme of non-representative democracies places an emphasis on process over its after-effect, consensus. Certainly, there’s something cute about process-oriented forms of governance. But ultimately the process model is about as sustainable as an earthworks sculpture burrowed into a patch of dirt called the 1970s. Process is fine as far as integrating a plurality of forces into the network. But the primary questions remain: Where does it go? How long does it last? Why do it in the first place? A focus on the vital forces that constitute socio-technical life is thus required. Herein lies the variability and wildcards of organised networks. The persistence of dispute and disagreement can be taken as a given. Rational consensus models of democracy have proven, in their failure, that such underlying conditions of social-political life cannot be eradicated.
Comments off
