Blogs

Perth.
I'm spending the next few days at the PerthDAC conference here in Western Australia; I'll be presenting a paper on Sunday afternoon as well... Right now, though, it's Saturday, and we're just about to get started. Jason Lewis is the first speaker, presenting on the NextText project from Obx Labs at Concordia University in Montréal. He begins by showing a video presenting a number of interactive installations which aim to visualise everyday spoken interactions, lending a visual quality to such ephemeral interactions. Much of this is inspired by the interrelation between the structure and content of poetry (the contribution of rhyme and rhythm to the meaning-making process of poetry), as well as the use of text in comics and urban graffiti, and the experiments with layout and formatting in early-20th century avantgarde art. This produces a tight coupling of text and structure, and highlights questions of how to represent text visually, how to make use of interactive possibilities in new media technologies, and how to blur the literal and aesthetic functions of written language.

So I joined Facebook this week - not because I had a deep and burning desire to do so, but because we've created a youdecide2007 Facebook group as part of the support network for our youdecide2007.org citizen journalism Website for the upcoming Australian federal election. Since joining, I've received a good dozen of friends requests from friends and colleagues; people have left messages on my wall; I've been invited to events - all of which are pretty regular occurrences on the site, I guess. (The same keeps happening with my LinkedIn account, which I haven't even logged on to for months - apologies for those who've sent me messages wanting to make contact on that site.)

The thing is, though - I still feel deeply ambivalent about Facebook. I need to be on there for research reasons, which means I need to create an account for myself, but at the same time, frankly, I'm just not that interested in actively using that account for my own professional and personal networking. I'm already embedded in what I think are pretty good online and offline social networks (online using a variety of other technologies from email to blogs), and I don't feel a particularly strong urge to recreate them in yet another sociotechnical environment. Other friends and colleagues may feel differently about this, and that's fine, of course; at the same time, this may easily lead to a fragmentation rather than strengthening of social ties in my circle of personal relationships, and I assume that's true more broadly, too.

I'm very pleased to announce the launch of issue 10.4 of M/C Journal. Interestingly, one of our articles has already been noted in the mainstream press (even though they got the name of the journal somewhat wrong...). Speaking as a migrant to Australia, I'm not sure I agree with Gerard Henderson's views about the proposed citizenship test - that is to say, I'm pretty sure I don't -, but good to see that M/C Journal has been able to make a contribution to this debate.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 27 Aug. 2007

M/C - Media and Culture
is proud to present issue four in volume ten of

M/C Journal
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

'home' - Edited by Andrew Gorman-Murray and Robyn Dowling

As we're slowly approaching the official start of the Australian federal election campaign (not that the unofficial campaign hasn't already started...), we're also getting very close to the launch of our citizen journalism site to accompany the election. This is the first major project in a three-year ARC Linkage research programme around citizen journalism which involves SBS, On Line Opinion, Cisco Systems, the Brisbane Institute, and my colleagues and me at QUT Creative Industries.

A little while ago, I posted a request on this blog asking for graphics artists who would be able to convert my rough sketch of a graphic to illustrate the idea of the soft gentle slope of cultural participation into something a little more attractive. I was delighted to have received a very quick response to this request, and I'm very happy to post the updated image here. Update: in light of Jeremy's comment, I've also changed the term from 'soft' to 'gentle slope'. Thanks for that, Jeremy.

It may have taken a little while, but there were some interesting developments around my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production recently. To begin with, readers can now finally browse the book online at Amazon - of course the book itself has been available there for a couple of years already, but it's now been scanned and is available to explore in some more detail. Check it out...

On the other hand, there's also been some news from the real Amazon - a review of the book by Marcelo Träsel was published a little while ago in the Brazilian journal InTexto. Obviously, the review is in Portuguese, so I'm not entirely sure what it says, but the Babelfish translation looks generally positive. Thanks for letting me know, Marcelo!

Regular visitors to this blog may have noticed that for a few weeks now, there no longer is a trackback facility here. I'm a strong believer in trackbacks; they're an important tool for better connecting the distributed conversations which take place across different sites in the blogosphere. Unfortunately, however, trackback as it exists today remains a highly vulnerable technology; because of its extremely lightweight protocol, there's no reliable way to protect against spammers trying to game the Google PageRank of their Websites by posting thousands of trackbacks with links to their sites all over the Web.

Yes, there are trackback spam filters or general pre-publication approval functions which will at least ensure that such spam trackbacks are never visibly posted to my site; all that's left for me to do is to delete the spam from my trackback queue and to publish the small number of legitimate trackbacks buried in all the spam. But as I found out the hard way, by the time the spam has arrived, the damage is already done.

Heh. At least it seems like the Higher Education section of The Australian has managed to quarantine itself from the melt-down that's occurred amongst its political journalists. There's a nice piece there today about our efforts at QUT to develop the C4C framework of collaborative capacities required of graduates in the developing produsage environment - an article which was sparked by our paper at Mobile Media 2007 (and a similar paper I presented at ICE 3 earlier this year). Campus Review also reported on this recently, following a Sydney University press release. Neither note Trendwatching as the originators of the 'Generation C' meme, though, which is unfortunate...

In the meantime, and especially after reading Henry Jenkins's Convergence Culture, I'm beginning to think that we may have to expand our C4C of creative, collaborative, critical, and communicative capacities to a C5C, though, which would add a further combinatory capacity. In addition to what we've said in our papers so far, this fifth capacity could be described as follows:

I'm very happy to announce the next issue of M/C Journal:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 9 July 2007

M/C - Media and Culture
is proud to present issue three in volume ten of

M/C Journal
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

'complex' - Edited by Jayde Cahir and Sarah James

Sydney's City Rail has recently launched an advertising campaign with the slogan of "untangling our complex rail network". City Rail position Sydney's rail network as a complex system. Describing something as 'complex' can be the answer to many questions. Rather than positioning 'complex' as the end result we would like to explore it as a starting point. What is complex? How is it complex? Why is it complex?

Sydney.
I chaired another session in the morning, and so I couldn't blog it... The first post-lunch session at Mobile Media 2007 starts with a paper by Marsha Berry, whose interest is in cartographies of mobile mediascapes; mobile places are places in between, threshold places, sites of reception and production which are characterised by the interrelationship between imagination and bodily experiences. In these spaces we find ritual gestures (such as the use of SMS as quasi-postcards) and the performance of the self; they raise perennial questions of embodiment and consciousness of our own experiences. Additionally, we are also surrounded constantly by surveillance in such spaces, as well as enacting a form of sousveillance through our own cameraphones and mediamaking. Telepresence is ubiquitous.