Tag Archive for 'cultural studies'

Oh noes! The 80s are over! Don’t tell Jules…

Published
by
Mark
1 month ago
in Australiana, Culture, Economics, Film, TV, Video etc, History, Markets, Music, Sociology and USA
. 45 Comments

One of the longest bows I’ve seen drawn about the effects of the global financial crisis is this obituary (and not in elegiac style) for the 80s. And Gen X. Apparently because of Robert Zemeckis. And therefore Gordon Gekko.

I think I’m missing something here (though not surprised by the fact that whenever generationalism rears its head, the originary dissing of Gen X is reinscribed each time). Maybe it’s because the experience of the 80s was very different in Australia (and the UK) than in America, and this even similar cultural themes and texts and musical forms were read through distinctive lenses.

I feel so sorry for Generation X. They grew up without a unifying enemy. They grew up constantly criticized as a do-nothing care-nothing generation. They started the Internet boom but would eventually lose out to the young upstarts from the next generation, the Googles and Facebooks of the world. They truly are The Lost Generation, sandwiched between the crisis of Nixon and the crisis of today. Now, my generation is the second-born prodigal son, the boy-king who snatched the crown of influence directly from his parents, bypassing the first-born’s rule entirely. We are fighting the War on Terror. We are innovators in tech and energy and media.

Err… whatevs. Continue reading ‘Oh noes! The 80s are over! Don’t tell Jules…’

Australian accents: Speaking Our Language

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Australiana, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Education, History, Imperialism, Language, Media and Nationalism
. 95 Comments

Bruce Moore’s new book, Speaking Our Language: The Story of Australian Language got a fair bit more press coverage - in the news pages as opposed to the reviews sections - than is usual for a tome authored by an academic. And why not? It’s a lively read, and one that is likely to inspire a lot of curiosity and interest above and beyond the questions of whether Ned Kelly spoke with an Irish or an Australian accent and whether talking like Alexander Downer and Crocodile Dundee at opposite ends of the accent pole is on the way out.

What I found most interesting about Moore’s work was the close attention he gives to the intimate links between language, place and culture. (Incidentally, there’s something of a moral here about how cultural studies first arose - a tale told neatly by Raymond Williams in Writing in Society - as a counterpart to the separation of supposedly timeless aesthetic qualities from their social contexts.) Moore tracks the creation of new words, shifts in meaning and the appropriation of Indigenous names to the distinctive geographical and social formations of a culture forged by the interplay between colonisation, landscape and dispossession. The ups and downs of the reputation of Australian English follow the ebb and flows of nationalism, particularly as related to Britain and the idea of Empire.

Moore is well placed to communicate the results of recent academic research on the origins of accents - dispelling misconceptions about the putative derivation of the Australian accent from “Cockney” (he demonstrates in passing that “Cockney” didn’t mean what we think it means in the Nineteenth Century) intermingled with Irish forms of speech. After all, as he argues, the population composition of all the British outposts in the Southern hemisphere was quite similar - yet very distinct accents developed in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Falklands. He draws on research done in New Zealand to establish that new accents form through a process of selection among children of the second generation. Continue reading ‘Australian accents: Speaking Our Language‘

David Crystal: Txtng: The Gr8 Db8

Published
by
Kim
2 months ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Language, Sociology and Technology
. 16 Comments

Hot on the heels of lexicographer Erin McKean’s advice that if it feels wordish, use it, here comes some more legitimation for linguistic innovation. The well known author and linguist, David Crystal, has published a new book on sms-speak - Txtng: The Gr8 Db8.

In a fascinating piece in The Guardian, Crystal rebuts claims that texting is some sort of linguistic vandalism. Abbreviations and rebuses and other linguistic forms have a history as old as the written language, he argues. What’s distinctive about texting is the combination of linguistic features:

Some of its juxtapositions create forms which have little precedent, apart from in puzzles. All conceivable types of feature can be juxtaposed - sequences of shortened and full words (hldmecls “hold me close”), logograms and shortened words (2bctnd “to be continued”), logograms and nonstandard spellings (cu2nite) and so on. There are no less than four processes combined in iowan2bwu “I only want to be with you” - full word + an initialism + a shortened word + two logograms + an initialism + a logogram. And some messages contain unusual processes: in iohis4u “I only have eyes for you”, we see the addition of a plural ending to a logogram. One characteristic runs through all these examples: the letters, symbols and words are run together, without spaces. This is certainly unusual in the history of special writing systems. But few texts string together long sequences of puzzling graphic units.

Crystal also points out that only a minority of text messages are actually written in text speak. But most of all, in a similar spirit to McKean, he finds the linguistic challenges of text message composition, well, fun:

Continue reading ‘David Crystal: Txtng: The Gr8 Db8‘

The future of journalism - or its vanishing present

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 1 week ago
in Media and Sociology
. 0 Comments

As a supplement to my post on the Walkley Foundation Future of Journalism event I recently spoke at in Brisbane, here’s a link to the thoughts of my colleague and co-panelist Axel Bruns.

The Future of Journalism - reflections

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 2 weeks ago
in Blogging, Media, Politics and Sociology
. 33 Comments

As noted here and here, I attended the Walkley Foundation’s Future of Journalism event in Brisbane yesterday. Courtesy of the lovely folks at the ABC, the sessions were all recorded and will be viewable online, so that absolves me from the difficult task of trying to reconstruct a session in which I was a panelist after the fact. So what I wanted to do in this post is thank the organisers of the day - particularly Jonathan Este of the MEAA - and of my session - particularly Cristen Tilley from the ABC as Chair and my co-panelists Axel Bruns from QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty and blogger/journalist Marian Edmunds - for what I found was a stimulating and enjoyable experience. I also wanted to note some reflections which were prompted by many of the discussions.

The caveat I want to enter before proceeding further is that there’s a real sense in which I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m not a journalist or a journalism educator, and I don’t think “citizen journalism” is the best way of conceptualising what I do in my online writing, even when it most closely approaches reportage. My stake in all this is really that of a citizen and that of a media participant, and precisely because participation is a better model for engament in/with the media now than “audience” or “reader”, I don’t regard myself as being a privileged participant in these conversations, let alone in some way representative of the figure of “the blogger” which is in a real way a mythical one. A lot of what I bring to all this is probably more to do with my background and worldview as a sociologist.

That takes me to the first point I want to make - as I argued previously, I think the “bloggers v. journos” stoush is badly framed and misses most of what’s actually going on. It’s also worth noting, as I did at the outset of the session yesterday, that the debate as it plays out in the opinion columns and (ironically) the “blogs” at The Australian is more accurately seen as a subset of the culture wars and a struggle for hegemony and control over information and analysis than anything much to do with either the conditions of media work or the “fourth estate” role that the media supposedly plays. But more on that later. A lot of actually existing journos aside from columnists and right wing editors aren’t actually suffused with antagonism for blogs. It’s also interesting, and here I’d refer to the paragraph above, that some bloggers or “web evangelists” have an equal stake in continuing the “journos v. blogger wars”. (But for those interested in the latest series of “blogs are no longer the future of journalism” pronunciatos from the “fact and balance” crew, see this post from Stilgherrian, and my previous post.)

Continue reading ‘The Future of Journalism - reflections’

The future of journalism in Brisbane

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in Blogging, Brisbane, Media, Notices, Politics, Sociology and The Web
. 13 Comments

As Kim mentioned the other day, the Future of Journalism roadshow is coming to Brisbane on Saturday, and I’m speaking on a panel at 2pm called “Bloggers: amateur netizens or professionals of the future?”… Full details of the program are here if you’d like to attend. Starting points (at this stage, anyway) for my contribution are over the fold. They’re very rough notes, pasted in with just a bit of an edit from an email thread with my co-panelists, so I’d be really grateful for input.

Continue reading ‘The future of journalism in Brisbane’

McCain: Gaming the media and the blogosphere

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in Blogging, Ethics, Foreign Elections, Media, Polls, Sociology, USA and Women
. 129 Comments

Although aspects of his critique are tentatively sketched by his own admission, Jay Rosen has hit more nails than he’s missed with his analysis of the significance of the Sarah Palin veep selection by the McCain campaign. Rosen’s article is rightly getting a lot of attention. It’s “personalities, not issues” as McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis said, and the dark divisive arts of Karl Rove are being revived for the umpteenth time, and to date, are apparently working. Though in an somewhat problematic article in Salon, problematic because of the gender stereotypes it re-enacts while purportedly criticising them, Gary Kamiya provides some hope for thinking the Democrats might turn things around. But the controversy over Palin’s claims to have opposed the infamous “bridge to nowhere” illustrates the double bind the GOP have the Democrats in.

At least the turf this issue - the purported opposition to earmarks and pork that Palin is supposed to share with McCain - is being fought over is a public policy issue rather than all the personalised stuff which just puts the Democrats and the media where the GOP want them. But Obama’s reluctance to use the words “lies” and “liars” shows he knows the score. He’s being criticised for that by liberal bloggers, who are cheering on the media “fact checking” exercise.

But all this truthiness is also at great risk of playing into the GOP’s hands - because it reinforces the equation of the media and blogosphere with the Democrats Rosen identified as the tactical positioning the Republicans want - and which George W. Bush reinforced with his claims about “the angry left” in his RNC video link. The culture wars schtick works - because the America of Wal-Marts and small town “values” has more electoral power in the swing states that count than the wonky redoubts of the blue staters. And a lot of those voters - who don’t source their news from the internet but from cable tv - and get their analysis from others of like mind in their own circles rather than bloggers, commentators and wonks - are seeing what McCain wants them to see - a feisty outsider being beaten up by the Beltway elite. Hence McCain’s polling gains, among other demographics, with white women.

Continue reading ‘McCain: Gaming the media and the blogosphere’

Film as a guide to life: the thread we had to have

Published
by
Kim
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in Blogging, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, History, Lesbian and Gay, Life, Relationships, Sexuality and Sociology
. 6 Comments

Never let it be said that this blog lets a good idea from its commenters go to waste. Even when that good idea emerges in response to a monotonous manifestation of the enormous ego of one of the blogosphere’s most ubiquitous hydra headed trolls. While Pavlov’s Cat is no doubt right that basing one’s entire orientation to life on a film is somewhat superficial, on the other hand, as a number of commenters indicated, it might be a neat thought experiment. For there is a serious point here - the mass medium of the film does actually provide something of a socialising phenomenon in modernity. (Whether that’s still true in late or post modernity is perhaps another debate.) For instance, I was recently alerted - through reading Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz’ Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism - to a really huge project conducted in America in the 1930s - the Payne Fund Studies. Chicago School sociologist Henry Blumer asked adolescents about the impact of movies on them (and in many ways the 30s was the height of Hollywood dreaming). He found that a lot of teens modeled their dating behaviour consciously on film scripts, as it were:

When I saw “The Pagan” I fell harder than ever for Ramon Navarro. All my girl friends talk about is these wonderful love stories. When I see a picture like that it makes me like my steady boy friend all the more… it happens that through the movies I have learned to close my eyes, and I use that “Deep Bend” pose.

From watching love scenes in the movies I have noticed that when a girl is kissed she closes her eyes; this I found that I also unconsciously do. When [boys] go to make love, to kiss or hug, I put them off at first, but it always ends in them having their way. I guess I imitated this from the movies because I see it in almost every show I go to.

Continue reading ‘Film as a guide to life: the thread we had to have’

The future of quality journalism

Published
by
Kim
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in Activism, Media, Sociology and The Web
. 31 Comments

There’s a bit of an irony in the fact that News Ltd columnist Malcolm Colless chooses to take a swipe today at demands that Mike Carlton be reinstated as a columnist in the Sydney Morning Herald because of his popularity with readers. [Carlton, as folks may recall, refused to file his copy because of a journos’ strike at Fairfax.] The irony in question lies in the fact that Colless’ own usually impenetrable stream of consciousness efforts are no doubt read by very few, so incomprehensible most of his musings are. Possibly that extends to sub-editors. Surely “rebirthing” is a crime against the English language?

But there’s something more at stake here. Colless’ mind dumps very often give readers an insight into what passes for thought among the managerial minds of the press. Perhaps precisely because no one is reading his stuff, he’s departed from the News Limited correct line and failed to decry the Fairfax cost-cutting as a threat to the quality of journalism. What you can make of this tangled paragraph is probably up to you:

McCarthy cannot afford to be blindsided by sweeping and emotional claims that change, of itself, will necessarily destroy quality journalism. Quality, after all, often can be the exclusive prerogative of the creator. But at the same time he should be careful not to confuse muscle with fat as he wields his cost-cutting scythe.

But, unwittingly, with his union bashing schtick, Colless has actually exposed a fault line that bedevils and cripples the quality of the quality journalism debate. Continue reading ‘The future of quality journalism’

The mote in your own eye: civility, community and the MSM online

Published
by
Kim
3 months, 1 week ago
in Authoritarianism, Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Ethics, Levity, Media, Philosophy, Politics, Sociology and The Web
. 44 Comments

There was an interesting discussion on this post on the whole “what is different about blogs and MSM “blogs” theme” with George Megalogenis recently. I generally agree with those who argued that whatever takes place on the bulletin boards of the News Limited and Fairfax online empires, it ain’t blogging. Even the reference to commenters as “bloggers” is jarring to anyone who was actually around the blogosphere before the media tried to appropriate it. It’s the lingo, dude! That’s just a small sign of something different going on, but a significant one. Another is evident from Megalogenis’ blog today.

My concern is not what you argue but how you go about it.

My mind is open on pretty much every issue. It’s what journalists do for a living: keep their minds open in the hope that they catch the next new idea out there.

Sadly, what a significant minority of my bloggers do is begin their posts with an assumption that everyone who disagrees with them is a “moron”.

Here’s why those posts grate: My job as a journalist is to assume that the person who disagrees with me doesn’t know what I know. To increase the sum of their knowledge, I can only tell them what I know on their terms, in their language. Which must begin with an assumption that I am not better than my reader.

Continue reading ‘The mote in your own eye: civility, community and the MSM online’

Cities and suburbs and transcending the dichotomy - creatively

Published
by
Mark
3 months, 1 week ago
in Australiana, Brisbane, Climate change, Culture, History, Life, Media, Melbourne, Politics, Sociology, Sydney and Urbanism
. 76 Comments

I’m not sure where it came from, but there’s been a bit of praise for the suburbs around the joint lately, and dissing of the dissers of the suburbs.

Age columnist Shaun Carney attracted a bit of ridicule recently in some quarters when he wrote a column making the rather tenuous and certainly debatable claim that the Rudd government faced a delicate balancing act between inner city and suburban voters on climate change.

The article itself was entitled “Leftists who sneer at suburbs betray Labor”.

Carney mentioned that he’d been spending time recently in Carrum Downs “for family reasons”. Writing as if he were an anthropologist in unfamilar territory, he informed his readers:

You cannot get to the suburb by train. There are connecting buses from Frankston that snake their way through the suburbs in between, making it a very long journey. It would be very difficult to get around if you lived in Carrum Downs and did not have a car.

Now, the funny thing about this whole “latte left v. suburban real Australians” thing is that I’ve never met any “leftists who sneer at suburbs” and I’ve met a lot of lefties in my life. Having read a really silly column - whose author I’ve fortunately forgotten - in the SMH earlier this year where the writer really did manage to convey the idea that no Fairfax reader had ever stepped foot west of some imaginary line running through, say, Marrickville, I am willing to believe that there are some very urbane snobs around the shop. But I’m not sure they’re actually lefties in any meaningful sense. Small l liberal toffs who vote Labor, perhaps. It might also be the case that I have a different view on all this because I grew up in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, and though I now live in the “inner city”, there really hasn’t been any such thing in this town in the same sense as in Sydney or Melbourne.

Continue reading ‘Cities and suburbs and transcending the dichotomy - creatively’

Blogging political fiction

Published
by
Mark
3 months, 2 weeks ago
in Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing and Film, TV, Video etc
. 34 Comments

One of the rather egregious questions on last week’s Q&A asked the panel to comment on why there was no contemporary political fiction of the stature of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s. As with a lot of the queries posed on Q&A, it’s a bit of a silly one, but it did remind me that we discussed political fiction here at LP a while back, and to give folks the heads up that American speculative fiction writer and anthologist Jeff VanderMeer is blogging about political fiction at The Huffington Post.

[VanderMeer, along with regular guest bloggers, writes regularly at Ecstatic Days.]

Always on: the internet, social media, communications and everyday life

Published
by
Mark
3 months, 3 weeks ago
in Blogging, Consumerism, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, History, Life, Media, Music, Parenting, Relationships, Sociology, Technology and The Web
. 12 Comments

In doing a bit of reading for a couple of courses I’m teaching this semester, I was struck recently by the concision with which Mark Deuze pings how mediated so many aspects of our everyday lives now are - and how he deftly places this constant mediation - through email, mobile phones, the intertubes, and so much more - in its sociological context, leveraging off the work of Zygmunt Bauman. Some day, when I have time, I’ll have more to say about that, and there’s lots of nifty academic research - a fair bit from my colleagues at QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty - which is exploring many of the ramifications of everyday mediation. Loath as I normally am as a sociologist to believe the new new anything really is fundamentally new under the sun, I am starting to be convinced that a shift in the conditions of our everyday lives is taking place, though I’m totally unconvinced by claims that it’s “dumbing us down” or whatever.

Continue reading ‘Always on: the internet, social media, communications and everyday life’

Guest post by Aaron Darc: Morgan and the Multiplex

Published
by
Guest Poster
3 months, 3 weeks ago
in Consumerism, Culture, Film, TV, Video etc, Food, Foreign policy, Life, Masculinity, Relationships, Religion, Sociology, Terrorism, USA, Urbanism and War
. 194 Comments

Aaron Darc, whose work will be familiar to LPers from his incarnation as Eye on Big Brother, recently interviewed film maker Morgan Spurlock. Spurlock came to prominence with Super Size Me and his new film Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? will be released in Australia next week. You can read more of Aaron’s writing at Pop Psychology for Beautiful People.

MORGAN & THE MULTIPLEX

From fat to fatwah, Murgon Spurlock has lost the pounds he gained for his smash-hit, Super Size Me, and hired himself a camel, for his latest film, Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden? I caught up with Morgan, this week, on his press tour of Sydney.

My 20 year old brother, Glenn, lives in a distant galaxy from me, on a planet called Regional Suburbia. He likes football, easy girls and fast cars. His favourite film is The Fast & The Furious; he calls it “wicked sh*t.” It would never have dawned on me, it goes without saying, to peruse my brother’s DVD collection. I knew it would be large, and I knew it would have been entirely purchased at JB Hifi; I know probably more than I should about Revolution Plasma and its disturbing power to appeal to the working and middle classes, and replace what would once have been their lives; draining whatever connection to the real world they had, by offering their unconscious longing to escape, a glistening, mostly poisonous, apple. Here, everybody! Plug into this - you’ll find it… easier. You will have a purpose. You will own that 42″ plasma, even if you f*ck yourself up on credit to do it, and you will build thyself a DVD Tower. There, thy shall easily access The Fast & The Furious; it shall keep the company of Face Off, Rush Hour, the Terminator Trilogy and, but of course, the Die Hard Box Set. Got plasma? check. Got plasma tower? Check. Okay, then, you’re all set to waste a good deal of your life plugged right into consumer oblivion. Isn’t modernity just fabulous?!

I only neared my brother’s DVD tower, out of that familiar desperation to escape the reality of my awkward bi-monthly family visit. Somewhere, in between the time your mother has once again implicitly let it be known you’ve not amounted to what you should have, and the moment following eight meaningless remarks about the state of recent weather, you look around the room, and you think, quite simply, “What can I do, here, to pass the time without having to sincerely engage my family?” My brother’s DVD tower seemed like a pretty good idea.

Continue reading ‘Guest post by Aaron Darc: Morgan and the Multiplex’