event mechanics

Way back when in the ancient 07s, I made this comment about the profound ignorance of various commentators on the Mickler & Lucy Online Opinion pieces:

Is this how a participatory online intellectual space functions? With a thought provoking work published online only so people can comment on how *they don’t understand the piece*!! Do people assume when they read something they don’t understand to then imagine that it is perfectly sensible to announce their own ignorance? And then somehow use it as a weapon against whatever the text they are not understanding?!?!?! The “If I don’t understand it, then it must be nonsense” attack.

Isn’t this another plank in the floor of the ‘postmodern left’ that Lucy and Mickler are denouncing? Not the left that thinks using some postmodernist tools, but the arm of the Left that is actually postmodern. Instead of trying to enlighten people by going go to war against stupidity, a *reified stupidity* is itself used as an (anti)intellectual weapon and seemingly a badge of honour.

The performative stupidity of conservative ignorance has made a few folks in the US scratch their respective heads when engaging with the Palin/McCain supporters:

The things that has always alarmed me most about the right wing Republican/conservative/FOX News-watching types is how they wear their own IGNORANCE as a badge of honor! I can’t get my head around the notion of how unashamed they are of their own ignorance. It used to be that abject stupidity was something to be embarrassed about. Is it somehow now HIP these days to be a total dumbass? Did I miss the memo?

Idea: Cabaret dinner theatre/bar where the main drawcard over Thursday-Sunday nights involves performers acting out the top five clips from youtube the day before. Two performances a night perhaps, one at 6:30 and one at 9:30. Tourist attraction? Finite sized establishment would introduce a weird new dynamic into the question of access. I am pretty sure with this sort of conceptual pop-culture approach you’d get the talent. Name? Youtube: The Musical

Each performance would be filmed and put back onto youtube. Thus entertaining the possibility, if the clip of a performance of a clip is the most popular clip on youtube, of a self-referential cabaret dinner theatre/bar infinite regress paradox that would destroy the universe.

POP!

Ted Striphas posts the below clip from what seems to be a fantastic documentary by Adam Curtis called The Trap. Curtis brilliantly problematises the recent socio-political conceptions of ‘freedom’ by investigating the ’science’ and theories behind the model of human nature upon which it is based.

I am seriously contemplating a major change away from an academic career path towards another industry. There are a number of reasons for this. First, due to not-so-unforeseen issues with my living arrangements I am going to have to move. Second, I have a contract for this semester and have organised work over summer, but have not actually signed anything yet. Beyond the summer session my future is much less secure. Third, I am tired, both physically and in terms of exhausted patience. Fourth, universities are difficult (ok, fucked) places to work and I often feel sick when witnessing good people in difficult circumstances. There is not enough investment in maintaining basic literacy standards and the like and too much of a focus on cash cow courses.

So where would I go?

Well the shift would be rather radical and back to more of a manual job, basically working as a TA in the resource industry. Due to family connections securing an entry level job (that currently pays near $100k pa) should not be too difficult. I worked on the mines a decade ago. The CFMEU will probably want me to pay some dues, lol.

I have not given up on academic career completely. To get a job means, in part, basically getting a book published, but I am finding it difficult to convince bourgie publishers to even look at a book on some facet of ‘bogon’ culture. (For overseas readers: Similar to rednecks or lumpen proletariat in culture, but now rather affluent due to resource boom, etc. So working class in neo-Marxist cultural materialism sense, middle-class in Weberian selling-skills-on-market sense.) There are a few more hospital passes that I can throw before I exhaust every possibility and this mainly involves printing off a set of submissions to give to publisher reps at book launches at work!. The academic areas that are primarily the focus of ‘cultural enterprise’ research are organised around museum studies and the like. My book is not targeted at academics, however. The book will sell as there is a definite market and nothing like it has existed before. It will also be quite radical for the car scene, as the scene is relativley conservative and my sort of book would shake things up a bit.

I would actually treat book selling as a second job and travel to car festivals and events with a mobile book stall. Anyway, I would basically use the mining gig to fund the follow up research I’d need to do to finish my book. I can write in the evenings as I used to do when I was 19. Being a member of the fluro-collar classes certainly won’t harm sales either.

One thing I have learnt this year, and had not really experienced since I shifted from a state primary school in a traditional working class suburb to an elite private high school in a highly affluent suburb, is that university is heavily structured around class. It really is the domain of the professional middle classes. I always imagined that I would not have to comport myself to ‘fit in’. Am I not a ‘bourgie’? How could I possibly not be a bourgie after existing in this social space for a decade? I don’t know, but I feel like an oddity when mixing with most academics. Maybe it is because I have a conception of bourgie as ‘other’? That is, I can feel the difference in the way people speak, what they make jokes about, and what they are interested in. It is a weird feeling, because on some levels I am right there with the capacity to mix and relate to people, but on other levels I feel alienated. I think that is why I am (and have been) very good friends with other phd students and academics that have a homologically similar cultural background. We seem to group together. I think it has something to do with dignity, which is the subject of another blog post long in the works. Dignity really is a problematic concept for me.

I am not bitter or feeling resentment towards anything or anyone; it is not a situation of me taking my bat and ball and going home. I have learnt many things this year about myself and the profession of university teaching. Rather, I feel exhausted and feel that the situation has exhausted itself. I was always going to give the academic career path two years to see what happens and what I could begin as it seems most friends and colleagues have taken a minimum of about two years of solid work to land a solid job. Yet, I have the capacity to be mobile in a radical sense (following Negri) and shift industries, and the way I look at it I am very lucky in that regard. There are many people in similar positions to me without this mobile capacity to redirect their labour in different directions. Some have supportive partners that carry some of the burden and stress, and I’ve had my folks, family and friends to help me in times of distress. So for me it is a question of being worthy of the situation. Perhaps I am better suited to be being a hyper-educated quasi-bogon?

Anyway, that is kind of where I am at the moment. Before I make any decisions I’ll let a few other things currently in the works play out to see what happens. Plus, for those readers feeling concerned, there is no need to be worried about me.

A quick note about a problem that has emerged again in my students’ essays. I encourage students to search the massive online journal databases to find material for their essays. Other students have also figured out that books can be read through Google Books and even Amazon.com. A minor problem that I am seeing is that students are treating these sources as online publications. From my perspective, they are not online publications. M/C Journal is an online publication while The British Journal of Criminology, for example, while it may appear online through the journal databases, is not an online publication. TBJoC is a print publication distributed online as a PDF (and potentially via one’s printer). On the other hand, online news sources are a good example of the sort of confusion that emerges. Media institutions like the ABC has its own online news stream and newspaper publish articles online, and these should be treated as online publications.

Here are some results from links and ideas various people have sent from my post to the cultstud list and blog several weeks ago. Here is another post. The reason I am posting this to my blog now is because Google Android’s mobile operating system has received some positive critical comments regarding its barcode scanning application (see end link below).

David Silver let me know about Microsoft’s endeavour to produce a Windows Mobile Media (WMM) based application for scanning barcodes with mobile devices and sending phones to urls, the Advance User Resource Annotation System (AURA). Senior Research Sociologist leading the Community Technologies Group, MarcSmith, on the system. An interview with him on CNET. Paper by Smith. A video where he explains the logic behind the system. As the above video attests ‘bringing people together’ means bringing ‘consumers together’, but because of the capacity to collectively annotate any barcode, it doesn’t just have to be ‘consumers’. A paper on a field test of the system. Here is a forum post by someone who explores how to actually use AURA as part of the test beta.

Beyond the Microsoft horizon there are many other interesting devices and systems that had been developed. There was also the Cuecat system (and fiasco!). Bryan Behrenshausen pointed me in the direction of http://www.nearfield.org/ which seems to be a group of Nordic researchers investigating the design potential of RFID systems. Bryan writes “I like the Touch project because it’s run by a collective with such varied backgrounds — computer science, sociology, anthropology, design, communication studies, etc. Consequently, the project can examine the history of touch, embodied practice, design directions, and social consequences of/for these new technologies.” He also pointed me towards the Barcode Battler, which is not a post-human rearticulation of the aspirational Australian lumpen proletariat, but a game that involved collecting bar-coded playing cards and using this proprietary reader to ‘battle’ (like a precursor to Pokémon or something).

Machine readable codes have a long history. Ted Striphas sent me an article of his on the function and history of code-based ISBN technology in the ‘back office’ of the publishing industry. He observes that the gradual introduction of the machine-readable coding technologies intensified the productivity (or, in Marxist terminology, increased the production of surplus-value) of logistics workers in the mega-bookseller companies such as amazon.com. It transformed the character of the industry from one that was slow and full of logistical redundancies to one that was streamlined by databases. The barcode becomes a literal representation of the exploitation of workers in an intensified Taylorist enterprise where workers are continually assessed by overseers for efficiency in the rate of logistical processing and dispatch. Ref: Ted Striphas “Cracking the Code: Technology, Historiography, and the “Back Office” of Mass Culture” Social Epistemology Vol. 19, Nos. 2-3, April-September 2005, pp. 261-282

What I am imagining is an inversion of this process. Not to sabotage the logistical chains of contemporary consumer culture, but a repurposing of the barcode and the database. Deleuze writes about code as the numerical language of control:

In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password […]. The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it.

For anyone who has grown up in this culture, and especially those who have worked in the service industry, all this is obvious.

Erik Hermansen discusses the logics behind ‘push’ versus ‘pull’ uses of barcode readers. He describes barcode readers as the killer app that will get people using the new feature laden smartphones:

Cell phones will start pulling information off the internet about products and companies. And nobody will be able to control it except the people doing the pulling. Who wins or loses when everybody gets the information they want to make spending decisions?

The consumer wins. Obviously. Dramatically. How many bad decisions have you made with no greater input than a price tag, product packaging, and the advice of a 19-year-old wearing a tie and sneakers? No more, my friend. Head into those flourescent-lit aisles armed with knowledge.

The mobile manufacturers win, because technology-assisted spending is the killer app that will finally cut through feature apathy. People are buying these sophisticated machines that they don’t really understand, so they mainly just use them as phones. Most people have figured out SMS and ring tones by now, but beyond that, the non-geeks don’t care much about all the bells and whistles. To make people truly interested in what mobile devices can do, a “gateway” feature with real-world value is needed. Save money on your shopping bill–everybody gets that, so lead with it!

From The Australian newspaper:

CRIMTRAC’s planned automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system could become a mass surveillance system, taking as many as 70 million photos of cars and drivers every day across a vast network of roadside cameras.

State and federal police forces want full-frontal images of vehicles, including the driver and front passenger, that are clear enough for identification purposes and usable as evidence in court.

Are question of privacy going to be the issue that shatters the illusion that the system of automobility is a system of freedom?

The system of automobility relies on the tight control of users down to the level of the very perception of the system itself. One of the triumphs of latter day governmentality is that drivers perceive the road and traffic system through the lense of road safety. Other perceptions include the environmental cost of subsidising automobility as a form of personal transport. In most cases, the road system is perceived purely in terms of mobility and access to that mobility.

By introducing questions of privacy, so that all every journey could potentially be tracked and logged in photographic databases, the implicit, embodied forms of control are rendered explicit. I wonder if this will be the beginning of the end for automobility? Or will the strong attraction for believing in personal freedoms (produced through systems of control) mean that the invasive tracking of individuals through digital recognition will be wholly accepted?

rofl

video embded (via)

1) Idea behind technology: Nationalistic Singstar editions.
Names: Singstar Australia Day Edition, Singstar Independence Day Edition, etc. these are only examples, as each national market would have its own particular name.
Description: Sony can tap into the affects of the popularist nationalism. A Singstar disk installment that collects all the popular pop and folk anthems for each respective country. Imagine how many they would sell for backyard BBQs for Australia Day for the Singstar Australia Day Edition? “Tie me kangaroo down, sport” “Down Under” (already on one of them) “Great Sourthern Land” “My Island Home” “Waltzing Matilda” some Bee Gee action, bit of Acka Dacka, and some latter day tunes like The Living End, maybe some Kasey Chambers and so on. Ok, so Australia is one market, perhaps a useful test market, but imagine the US version of Singstar Independence Day Edition (or Singstar Fourth of July Edition). Money maker, Sony!

2) Idea behind technology: Digital marking device for teachers.
Names: Tacticle Digital Editor (TDE) or ‘teddy’ ;).
Description: This technology would combine slim PC-based digital book or document reader + a touchscreen + some software not unlike Word’s “track changes” function. This is to address the problem in marking where 90% of students get 90% of the same comments. Markers and examiners can then have the text open on the screen and a menu of comments on one side of the screen. While reading the assessment the marker can touch the screen to highlight, drag and drop comments from the menu, and a plug-in a USB keyboard to add comments. The device would have a ‘comment library’ which markers would add to and swap. It could be connected via wifi to the big plagiarism checker search engine/databases as well as other databses such as bibliographies to provide further direction for reading material to students. I am thinking as a university educator, but it would be very useful for any text- or print-based design work. The core principle is having a portable ’sandbox’-type interface that receives tactile input to control digital data. It would be much bigger than a PDA, I am thinking about the size of a superslim 19-inch LCD screen. It would also function as a basic PC (ie with a retractable stand, so it becomes a monitor, and USB/WiFi/ethernet connections).