‘Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse’ Public Lecture by Geert Lovink

November 30, 2006 at 1:48 pm · Filed under blogs, books, events, web2.0

(Dr Lovink is a co-founder of the Fibreculture Network; that is now well and truly dead. I can’t say that I miss it; it brought out my Nihlist instincts in me in a way that blogging never has. This is sure to be an excellent talk; bloggers in Sydney should attend).

‘Blogging, the Nihilist Impulse’
public lecture by Geert Lovink

Tuesday 12 December, 6 - 7.30pm
Eastern Avenue Lecture Theatre
Eastern Avenue Complex, University of Sydney

hosted by the Department of Media and Communication and Digital
Cultures Program, and the Research Institute for Humanities and Social
Sciences, University of Sydney

About the event:

This lecture-presentation will consist of three parts. In the
introduction Geert Lovink will give an overview of the Institute of
Network Cultures in Amsterdam which he founded in 2004, emphasizing
possible Euro-Australian collaborations. He will then present the main
thesis of his upcoming book ‘No Comments’, a General Theory of Blogging
that investigates the ‘nihilist impulse’ behind all the ranking,
linking and commenting.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Digital Humanities Podcasts

November 29, 2006 at 6:02 pm · Filed under education, humanities computing, web2.0

MITH (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) is pleased to announce that we have begun regular Podcasting of
our popular Digital Dialogues seminar series:
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/programs/digitaldialogue/podcasts.php
We have three Podcasts from recent Digital Dialogues already
available, including talks by Rice University’s Chuck Henry on
scholarly electronic publishing, Brown’s Vika Zafrin on collaboration
in the digital humanities, and game studies from internationally
renowned media theorist and author Stuart Moulthrop.

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What is the ARC Cultural Research Network ?

November 29, 2006 at 5:13 pm · Filed under education

The ARC Cultural Research Network is built on the outstanding reputation enjoyed by Australian researchers working on the production and consumption of culture. It responds to the centrality of culture as the focus of cutting edge humanities and social science research by developing research projects dealing with new media and cultural technologies, cultural histories, geographies and identities. It aims to generate a national benefit by enhancing Australia’s attractiveness as a postgraduate destination, as well as its capacity to generate innovative collaborative research partnerships and linkages. Finally, as the network develops in density and accrues outputs and expertise, it will address national needs for a more integrated research approach to understanding complex social, cultural and technological change (link).

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Your Rights at Work

November 29, 2006 at 12:04 pm · Filed under events, politics

(A reminder that this is on tomorrow)

One of the most important aspects of Australia; that distinguishes us from every other country in the region (except New Zealand) is our highly developed industrial relations system. But the Conservatives want to make Australia a plutocracy; this is, they want to create a system where money is the most important factor in our democratic structuring. ie. if you don’t have the social advantage of family money, then you won’t be able to succeed socially and even politically. Let’s hope that this one group of Australians don’t bugger it up for everyone. Time to kick the Conservatives out and let’s start thinking about the future of the country, and not just the future of one group who can’t see beyond themselves. Let’s put the equality of work back into the main stream as a social value, rather than self-interested, private pursuits. Let’s break the back if the Sydney business consevatives (rather than our workers); and let some other cities and groups have a say in how we are governed before it ends in tears! See you at the MCG.

Melbourne: fill the MCG!

The main Victorian community protest will take place on ‘People’s Ground,’ the Melbourne Cricket Ground, on Thursday November 30.
It will take place from 8am to 10am Melbourne-time, and will be broadcast by satellite to capital cities and more than three hundred regional centres across Australia. (link)

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What is CTheory.net ?

November 28, 2006 at 2:45 pm · Filed under books, journals

CTHEORY is an international peer-reviewed journal of theory, technology and culture. Articles, interviews, and key book reviews in contemporary discourse are published weekly as well as theorizations of major “event-scenes” in the mediascape.

Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker

Editorial Board: Jean Baudrillard (Paris), Paul Virilio (Paris), Bruce Sterling (Austin), Siegfried Zielinski (Koeln), Stelarc (Melbourne), DJ Spooky [Paul D. Miller] (NYC), Timothy Murray (Ithaca/Cornell), Lynn Hershman Leeson (San Francisco), Stephen Pfohl (Boston), Andrew Ross (NYC), Andrew Wernick (Peterborough), Maurice Charland (Montreal), Gad Horowitz (Toronto), Shannon Bell (Toronto), R.U. Sirius (San Francisco), Richard Kadrey (San Francisco) (link)

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Network Publics at the Annenburg Centre at USC

November 28, 2006 at 11:28 am · Filed under political communication, politics, web2.0

This is a good school that does good stuff..

netPublics explores the roles of audiences, activists, citizens, and producers in maturing networked media ecologies. These changes include but are not limited to the changing relationship between production and consumption, viral and peer-to-peer distribution, and networked lateral political mobilization. Although the Internet is clearly a central player, we consider media forms both old and new as part of a much broader media ecology undergoing profound social, technical, and cultural transformation (link).

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Preparing Students for User-Led Content Production

November 27, 2006 at 9:25 pm · Filed under blogs, education, pedagogy, social media, web2.0

Here is a recorded talk given by the prolific Axel Bruns of QUT at the ATOM Conference 2006 (link). Like most somewhat commercially-orientated researchers, this researcher works in a very crowded field and his most potent contribution seems to be in teaching rather that definable original research. I.e. too much process orientation, and not enough context and content, and I can’t really see anything original and significant apart from Bruns changing the words to describe what is already pretty much well-known in main stream thought. And I am indifferent to his research networks; but this happens in research, even in small countries. Pockets of like-minded people appear that are hostile to alternative views, but luckily in crowded fields, they aren’t that difficult to go around (a small speed hump rather than a mountain). His recent book on blogs perhaps reveals what happens in crowded fields; researchers retreat into islands of like-minded people that lack fresh insight and the ability to explore significant other contributions beyond comfortable and predictable networks of ‘like minded’ people. I wonder if this is common in the academy and how it effects research output? Now there is a research proposal for you; a Randall Collins type enquiry into academic networks in crowded fields in Australia.

Technorati : axel bruns, blogs, research, web2.0
Del.icio.us : axel bruns, blogs, research, web2.0

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Software tools from the Centre for History and New Media

November 26, 2006 at 10:29 am · Filed under web2.0

The Centre for History and New Media at George Mason University in the United States have developed some fantastic tools for academics and historians. Check out their H-Bot system (developed by Daniel Cohen and Simon Kornblith). The H-Bot system allows you to ask factual historical questions like ‘when was Australia discovered’ and receive answers from a number of online sources.

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Morning Coffee with Craig: Do you have time to think?

November 25, 2006 at 11:47 pm · Filed under pedagogy, political communication, video, video diary, web2.0

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Information, Communication, and Society Webcasts

November 25, 2006 at 3:28 pm · Filed under books, video, web2.0

In collaboration with the Oxford Internet Institute, the editors of the academic peer-reviewed journal Information, Communication, and Society have been producing and archiving webcasts featuring the author(s) of the lead article of selected issues. (check them out…link)

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PoliticalMashups

November 25, 2006 at 8:34 am · Filed under political communication, web2.0

Mashups are created when information is taken out of one or more database/s and then integrated into a web site. This is done through what’s called a public interface or ‘API’ (or by RSS feeds, or by JavaScript). Some well-known examples are the Chicago Crime Map, Weatherbonk, and mappr.

I haven’t come across too many mashups in terms of political communication. There is a nice project from the University of Indiana called ‘Following the Dollars‘ that maps political contributions (put in 90210 if you can’t think of a US post code). Also, if you want to see an extensive list of mashup sites (and how to make them) check out ProgrammableWeb). If anyone knows of any poltical mashups, I would be really interested to hear about them.

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THE AUGMENTED SOCIAL NETWORK

November 24, 2006 at 10:14 am · Filed under political communication, web2.0

Abstract (by Ken Jordan, Jan Hauser, and Steven Foster)

Could the next generation of online communications strengthen civil society by better connecting people to others with whom they share affinities, so they can more effectively exchange information and self-organize? Could such a system help to revitalize democracy in the 21st century? When networked personal computing was first developed, engineers concentrated on extending creativity among individuals and enhancing collaboration between a few. They did not much consider what social interaction among millions of Internet users would actually entail. It was thought that the Net’s technical architecture need not address the issues of “personal identity” and “trust,” since those matters tended to take care of themselves. This paper proposes the creation of an Augmented Social Network (ASN) that would build identity and trust into the architecture of the Internet, in the public interest, in order to facilitate introductions between people who share affinities or complimentary capabilities across social networks. The ASN has three main objectives: 1) To create an Internet-wide system that enables more efficient and effective knowledge sharing between people across institutional, geographic, and social boundaries. 2) To establish a form of persistent online identity that supports the public commons and the values of civil society. 3) To enhance the ability of citizens to form relationships and self-organize around shared interests in communities of practice in order to better engage in the process of democratic governance. In effect, the ASN proposes a form of “online citizenship” for the Information Age. (.pdf of the complete report).

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The Sound of One Hand Clapping

November 24, 2006 at 8:32 am · Filed under education, humanities computing, media, web2.0

Within the broader field of media, politics, and society there have been a number of outstanding contributions to the study of the Internet and politics in the past two years. These include The Internet and Politics; Citizens, Voters and Activists by Sarah Oates, Diana Owen and Rachel K Gibson (2006) and The Internet, Democracy and Democratisation by Peter Ferdinand (2005). And to a lesser degree; there is the recently released Reformatting Politics by Jon Anderson et.al (2006). These studies reveal a maturing, less ‘blue sky’ approach to the study of the Internet within politics and the growth of a well-defined, empirically grounded research body of work that can be adapted and tested in a range of political contexts.
Oates and Gibson do argue that ‘…Internet use and its effects needs to be systematic and grounded in empirical evidence’ (2006; p14). And it is possible to progress this argument even further and emphasise that: not only do studies need to be grounded in evidence, but they also need to be grounded in a less invocative and more technically mature understandings of the Internet technologies themselves. And as Lusoli and Ward argue in Oates and Gibson’s volume, large amounts of information online often means that users “…become overloaded and switch off, or avoid it and insulate themselves from alternative opinions by selecting only a narrow range of information sources (Lusoli and Ward; 2006 quoting Shapiro; 1999 and Sunstein; 2001). Likewise, researchers in the humanities are by no means free of this phenomenon and often invest exclusively in the academic codex at the expense of a more fruitful understanding of why and how Internet technologies advance within the humanities or elsewhere.
As we have learned from the field of Humanities Computing, the Internet is far from merely the ‘delivery boy’ of academic knowledge, political communication, or other forms of knowledge (McCarty; 2005). There is an intrinsic message within the medium itself beyond the heuristic offerings to the user that the technical developer provides. Without a developed understanding of this, many studies tend to inadvertently bias reference points that are only useful to advance academic discourses restricted by the technologies of the academic codex. The choices made by programmers and developers to present and order cultural knowledge are also a component of an opinion and without understanding the deliberative choice that constitute this opinion, it leaves a wide gap in our intellectual understanding of new technologies and their effective application and improvement within both the humanities disciplines and broader society. We need to attend equally and symmetrically to the digital tools as well as the academic codex (McCarty; 2006).

The Read/Write Web
Just like the academic codex, the Internet is not only about reading. It is also about writing. Discerning sociotechnical research investments in this highly technical and participatory medium will help to deepen our understanding of the Internet’s changing role in Australian society. We either have the choice to passively observe its progress in our society, or to take the lead and advance it ourselves. Federal and state governments and civil society groups are already investing a great deal of capital and effort into applying the Internet to political objectives, and we need to better understand this and we need to do this quickly. As Nigel Payne, the recent head of Development and Learning at the BBC (one of the world’s biggest broadcasters) claims, the first wave of Internet technologies were relatively easy to absorb; however this next wave (Web2.0) will be much more disruptive (Payne; 2006). This is because there will be literally millions of new entrants making Internet content and as Tim Berners-Lee warns, this information could be driven by ‘misinformation and undemocratic forces’ and ‘bad things’ (and thus we need more social studies to direct the Internet’s development) (Gosh; 2006)

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Born Digital Within Media Studies

November 24, 2006 at 8:29 am · Filed under education, humanities computing, media, web2.0

Most professions, academic disciplines, areas of government, and business have long realised the potential for software and other digital tools to assist them in their decision-making processes. Architects and engineers have used sophisticated Computer Aided Design (CAD) software since the early 1980s to help them design and build complex structures. Accountants and economists have availed of software to help them manage and map financial flows within their organisations and the broader economy. Surgeons have benefited from visualisation software to help them detect diseases within the human body that would be impossible to recognise and analyse otherwise. Governments and political parties have deployed sophisticated actuarial systems to chart the electorate and target resources to support their electoral campaigns. And historians and the broader humanities have relied on computers since they were invented in the 1940s to interrogate text and count empirical historical data that would be difficult to calculate otherwise.
However, the broad field of Media Studies in Australia has been slow in the uptake, despite the exacting body of literature within the field that deals with the rise of all things digital. Although there have been some reasonably successful attempts at online systems to ‘remediate’ older media (Bolter & Grusin; 2000) and systems that offer swift archival retrieval of ‘old’ media for academic analysis (and there are countless research blogs), there have been few serious attempts within Media Studies to engage with the materiality of the Internet in an innovative and scholarly ‘born digital’ way. The interdisciplinary field of Humanities Computing is well established internationally at the uppermost learned levels, and within Australia, History, Archaeology, Linguistics, Philosophy and Sociology have all made commendable contributions to the international field. However, the irony is that the field of Media Studies, which has a certain mandate to engage with and advance new technologies within our disciplinary needs (and does make some of the most strident claims about the effects of new technologies), unduly bears the burden of traditionally tapered approaches.
The study of digital technologies defies traditional approaches in a number of ways: one, digital technologies move so quickly that it is difficult to keep up (Oates, Own, & Gibson, 2006); and two, traditional approaches are often ‘socially determinist’ and fail to neither acknowledge nor understand the intellectual contributions that are being made by attending to the digital tools themselves. Approaches that engage with and advance digital technologies in a sophisticated, scholarly way, help us keep up with the technologies and help us claim our own territory within them on our own terms, free of the all too often intransigent dictates of the market and its merciless drive for obsolescence. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is one such way that the Humanities have addressed the problem of technological obsolescence head-on.
(more to come)

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Global Orgasm Day 22 December 2006

November 23, 2006 at 9:54 am · Filed under events, gadfly

(MX isn’t my usual source, however this protest looks interesting to say the least…perhaps we all do have something in common) Thanks to Stephen K for the link)

SOURCE:
MX News, 21st November, 2006.

GLOBAL ORGASM
Peace Protest coming

Peace demonstrations haven’t helped much. Nor has arranging naked bodies into peace signs. So now veteran anti-war demonstrators Donna Sheehan and Paul Reffell are hoping that a Global Orgasm for Peace can finally bring an end to conflict in the Middle East, it was reported today. The idea for the ultimate Make Love Not War action is for people around the globe to have an
orgasm on December 22 and to focus their moments of pleasure on world peace.

‘The orgasm gives out an incredible feeling of peace during and after it,” said Reffell, 54. “Your mind is like a blank. It’s like a meditative state. “And mass meditations have been shown to make a change.”

The event is timed to coincide with the northern hemisphere’s winter solstice - the shortest day of the year - and with the holiday season’s tradition of peace on earth. Sheehan, 76, made headlines when she started the naked protest group Baring Witness, in which thousands of people across the US arranged their naked bodies into peace signs and anti-war slogans in order to protest against the war in Iraq.

Sheehan thinks the new initiative will be more successful.

The group’s website, www.globalorgasm.org , has attracted more than 26,000 hits.
The goal is to “effect positive change in the energy field of the earth through the largest possible surge of human energy, a Synchronised Global Orgasm”.

An earnest Sheehan explains that “the combination of high energy orgasmic energy combined with mindful intention may have a much greater effect than previous mass meditations and prayers”.

And even if peace on earth remains unattainable, participants will at least have the satisfaction of making their earth move.

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