event mechanics

My (recently) ex-colleague Jason Wilson has published an insightful piece on self-funded research. We’ve had a number of chats about this over the last year. The examples I raised of ‘self-funded’ research were of cultural studies scholars in the 1980s who did not receive ‘funds’ for research and even included those (for example, like Meaghan Morris) who worked on the fringes of academia as journalists and in the media industry.

Jason makes a number of key points. Firstly, you need to be relatively privileged so as to be able to afford to this in terms of time and money. Secondly, he did not plan for this to be self-funded and the circumstances emerged because the funding application did not work out. This has some implications that Jason notes and that I want to expand on below. Third, he notes it is incredibly mobile, or it is as mobile as Jason is, and the project goes wherever he does, so there is no need for complicated ‘handover’ processes. Lastly, he notes that this experience has made him realise that ‘funding’ and ‘research’ are separate and that receiving ‘funding’ does not necessarily valorise ‘research’ (even though we are encouraged to think in this way). I want to add two points.

First, I want to speculate on the valorising relationship between ‘funding’ and ‘research’. I’ve just finished Graeme Turner’s What’s Become of Cultural Studies (2012) and the below passage resonated with a weird exchange I had with a colleague from another university late last year at a conference. She told me she had never taught at university and I was dumb struck. My first thought was how the hell do you test your ideas from your research to see if they work? Another colleague with a research-focused career suggested that it was the ARC and the various mechanisms which judged the first colleague’s research as worthy. ‘Worthy’ in this context means that it aligns with the government-prescribed ‘national interest’. Maybe the first colleague would not think of themselves in cultural studies, the second colleague certainly would. Here is what Turner says about this phenomena:

I routinely find, when I present talks on research applications and professional development in general, that most of those who attend these seminars take the view that they are entitled to entertain ambitions of a fulltime research career. [...] [It] is hard not to feel that it is important for them to recognize that a research-only career remains an unrealistic ambition for 90 per cent of the academics working in cultural studies in Australia. In my own case, for example, the past 10 years of research-only employment have only come after decades of fulltime teaching.

It is the pragmatics of the situation that worry me most, then. And I wonder how these ambitions are being fed. Just what kinds of expectations are being sold to completing doctoral students and to junior staff members by their supervisors or by their university’s research office? Successful ARC applications result in significant funding benefits to the university, and so it is in the interests of Australian universities to encourage their staff to apply; the fact that so few will succeed ultimately does not bother the university much. It should bother us. It raises the possibility that we are going to be filling our teaching programmes with disappointed researchers who regard a conventional teaching appointment as the consolation prize. And it increases the possibility that those who are currently teaching cultural studies in our universities do not believe that the satisfaction teaching generates will play a fundamental role in sustaining them, personally or professionally. (emphasis added, pp 74-75)

I was very happy last year when I finally got to teach an upper-undergraduate unit that aligned with my research interests. My greatest challenge in doing research is not in producing new knowledge or thinking new ideas but in communicating them in a way that is sensible and which non-specialists can understand. I am not sure how teaching fits with others.

Relatedly, over the last year or so I’ve been experimenting with ‘modules’ within units in preparation of an exciting new unit ‘Newsroom’ in the Journalism program here at UC. ‘Newsroom’ is entirely based on research I’ve carried out over the last year on teaching methods for preparing students for the current industry context for media and journalism. It is based on my experience working in the magazine industry and working to adapt (or at least try to adapt) to a post-print industry, but extended beyond this. At its core is working with students to develop the capacity for producing their own expertise in industry contexts that we can’t even imagine. This production of professional expertise derived from the experience of testing out new practices and being confident in engaging with the world actually has more in common with the development of cultural studies in the 1970s and 1980s then it does with the conservative forms of ‘journalism’ education from the 1980s through to the early 2000s. I am hoping those familiar with the so-called ‘media wars’ of the late 1990s and early 2000s can appreciate the irony of all this. Turner as well as Grossberg in his recent book on cultural studies both locate the capacity of one’s student to produce knowledge as a central aim of cultural studies and this has little to do with particular methodologies except in the most abstract (and concrete! Oh, Deleuzian puns). This is a modification of the Kuhnian science-based model of scholarship where instead of the research problems being created on the edge of the scholarly field, and scholarship in part being a performative power struggle between proponents of competing ideas, the edge of the scholarly field (at least in cultural studies) is reoriented so it coincides with the edge of our students’ understanding. ‘Student’ in this context does not necessarily mean undergraduate students at university as it includes anyone we are trying to educate with new forms of knowledge.

Lastly, I want to extend Jason’s point regarding the relationship between research and funding. There is a parallel to the transformation to what we regard as ‘news’ in the journalism industry. By transforming the structural conditions through which ‘research’ is produced, academics are compelled to produce funding applications year in and year out, regardless of whether or not they have a funding-worthy research project. Note ‘funding-worthy research project’ is not determined necessarily by the individual academic or even the institution where he or she is employed but by the constraints of the funding guidelines. Ironically, one of the major expenses for humanities scholars factored into research funding applications, besides for research-only positions, is teaching buyout, so another academic can be paid to cover their teaching. The character of ‘news’ was transformed in the early 20^th century so instead of journalists finding news they produced news. News had to be produced because of the ‘news hole’ created by advertising schedules; something had to be put in the hole produced on the page between pre-sold advertising space. Similarly but not exactly the same, research has to be put in the hole produced by the current funding regime. Knowledge is not produced for its own sake, but as a consequence of the imperative to seek research funding. Separating the mechanisms by which research is valorised from the mechanisms by which funding is valorised will mean that knowledge production can be valorised for other reasons.

Here is useful test I might experiment with this year. Does my research help me with my teaching? Both ‘research’ and ‘teaching’ broadly understood.

 

Mel has a very interesting work in progress paper up on her blog on “The territory of the post-professional“. We sometimes share very similar research interests. I’ve also looked at questions of territory and technological assemblages in my Communications Technologies & Change unit this semester.

In one week we looked at the relation between predictive algorithms and the individuation of subjectivity. Here is the entry for that week:

Buying Stuff Online and How Your Credit Card is You

Transformations of economy, emergence of global market. Globalisation. Function of credit cards as technology of communication/identity. eBay, Steam and online commerce. Amazon.com and the algorithmic production of surplus value.

Required reading

Merskin, D. (1998). “The Show   for Those Who Owe: Normalization of Credit on Lifetime’s Debt.” Journal of   Communication Inquiry, 22(1), 10-26. [Particularly the section “A brief   history of credit”.]Merskin offers a critical reading of the reality TV show called Debt and the ways credit card and personal debt have become ‘normalised’ in US society. Read the section “A brief history of credit” (pages 11-16) for a quasi-genealogical account of the development of the credit card. What is the ‘credit card’ assemblage?

Recommended reading

de Vries, K. (2010).   “Identity, profiling algorithms and a world of ambient   intelligence.” Ethics and Information Technology 12(1):   71-85.This is another tough reading, but useful for thinking about the way the everyday technological assemblages of communication contribute to or produce our identity. ‘Identity’ here is meant in a cultural sense. The classic example that de Vries explores to some length is the use of algorithms to predict consumer behaviour on shopping websites and suggest commodities we might be interested in purchasing through   online shop fronts like Amazon.com. The relevant section is “Identity in a world of   profiling algorithms and ambient intelligence” (pages 76-79), but it is   worth exploring at length to gain a critical understanding of the ways   complex internet-based commercial interactions can affect the production (and   prediction) of identity.

In the lecture I did a kind of archaeology of the credit card in terms of the shifting composition of socio-technological relations across the long histories of some of the elements that constitute the ‘credit card assemblage’. The required research for this, so as to do the lecture, was a bit crazy. I learnt a great deal! Then I shifted gears a bit to talk about the function of predictive algorithms that are part of online shopping platforms. The de Vries reading is very good on this (and also pretty tough for third year undergraduates). In the context of predictive algorithms and algorithmic-based platforms (that aren’t necessarily ‘predictive’) there are two points I want to make with regards to Mel’s paper, specifically the paragraph introducing ‘algorithmic living’.

Firstly, unlike previous forms of self-knowledge in familiar ‘quantifications of the self’ (Weight Watchers, etc.) determined by a medium/average (statistical sense) of rough (molar) demographic categories, algorithmic indicators are far more mobile and the level of quantification is determined by the ‘resolution’ of the algorithm. ‘Resolution’ in this sense pertains to the ‘machinic affects’ of the ‘counting assemblage’; what are the forms of machinic visbility afforded by the technological assemblage of which the algorithm is but one (protocol) level? What are the ‘actions’ or ‘gestures’ being indeed by the algorithm?

Secondly, the (algorithmic) map (of aggregate molecular ‘actions’ of user-mulitiplicities) has become the (existential) territory (for the individuating assemblage of an ‘app’ or ‘platform’ user). Yes, the map is the territory (I’m phrasing it like that just to fuck with the old school semioticians a little bit:). The classic examples of this are Amazon.com or Google. Amazon indexes various ‘actions’ by users and users this for the ‘suggestions’ section. The capacity to index such actions are one of the affordances (action possibilities) of the platform or what I would call the machinic affects of the algorithm. The machinic affects are determined by the resolution of the algorithm. What actual action does the algorithm index? Visits? Location of mouse pointer or scrolling behaviour? Maybe. Definitely (in the case of Amazon): purchases, wishlist contents, ‘Kindle’ sharing behaviour, and so on. The aggregate map is produced by a multiplicity of such actions, this map then serves as part of the ‘territory’ by which other users of the same platform are individuated (as ‘dividuals’, cf. Deleuze). ‘Territory’ in this context is derived from the later work of Guattari.

What is interesting about Mel’s focus on ‘time’ and its management as a mode of self-governance is that by taking into account the above process of individuating there are two versions of temporality are in play: intensive and extensive. Management of time is traditionally ‘time’ as extension; there is  a range, which is divisible into ‘units’ of time. The individuation of a subject is an intensive process and operates at the level of ‘anticipation’ (relations of futurity) and ‘retention’ (relations of pastness). The ‘past’ in this context is literally and practically active; a multiplicity of ‘pasts’ from a multiplicity of users indexed according to their actions ‘feed’ (‘feed’ in the sense of both ‘appetite’ or ‘appetition’ (Whitehead) and ‘user feeds’ ie who you follow) into the pure present of algorithmic mapping and serve as a dynamic/selective virtual architecture that scaffolds the embodied process of the individuating subject who is actively anticipating his or her ‘next’ action. The ‘next’ action is the subject of such operations; this ‘next’ is an intensive temporal relation.

Management of time is only traditionally premised on the extensive dimension, as contemporary ‘social’ platform-based apps also include a valorising function which tempers time with a qualitiative experiential dimension. If you had a good time, then you’ll ‘like’ the shared photo. If you ‘like’ the book and ‘rate’ it on Amazon, then you bestow the assumed extensive time taken to read the book with a valorised experiential quality.

Below is a draft weekly schedule for a final year undergraduate unit I am teaching second semester this year. The unit is titled Communication Technologies & Change. I am inheriting the unit and the previous iteration focused on ‘new media’ and the various affordances of online technologies. The brief I was given was to shift from a ‘media’ focus and address ‘communication’ more broadly. There is a relatively diverse range of students, some are studying ‘communication’ and others ’public relations’, ‘marketing’ and ‘journalism’. Some could come from very different areas of the faculty (design, media arts, writing, etc.). The uni is design to engage with the everyday use of comunication technologies and to guide students to critically reflect on the technologial assemblages of which they are part.

It has not been approved as yet and I am contemplating changing some of the readings and in particular adding some ‘easier’ readings (as some of them are pretty hard core, albeit fun). If anyone has any suggestions or criticisms please leave a comment or email me at glen (dot) fuller (at) canberra (dot) edu (dot) au. The two major assessment items will be an in-class presentation and a final research essay on a particular assemblage of communication technology.

Any suggestions of film clips I can show during lectures in any of the weeks would be greatly appreciated also!

 

Lecture topics

Week	Date	Topic
1	15/8/12	Definitions: Communication as Techné
2	22/8/12	Definitions: Technological Objects & Systems
3	29/8/12	Definitions: Change: Obsolescence & Progress
4	5/9/12	Assemblages: Audience & Media
5	12/9/12	Mediated Sociality & Community
6	19/9/12	Home & Away & Work
7	26/9/12	Commerce & the Economy
Mid Semester Break
9	10/10/12	The Apocalypse & Other Lessons from Science Fiction
10	17/10/12	Government & Media Policy
12	24/10/12	Information Technologies, Memory & Memorialisation
12	31/10/12	Geographies of Communication Technologies & Reality
13	7/11/12	Crisis & Technologies of Communication
14	14/11/12	Future, practices of anticipation

WEEK 1

Definitions: Communication as Techné

 Etymology of technology, ‘techné’ and ‘logos’. Introducing themes of unit: 1) Tactical and strategic approaches to communication technologies. 2) Introducing communication technologies as assemblages.

Required reading	Unit outlineWilliams, R. (1976). “Communication” Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society Glasgow: Fontana. Pages 62-63. Sterne, J. (2006). Communication as Techné. In G. J. Shpherd, J. S. John & T. Striphas (Eds.), Communication as…: Perspectives on Theory London: Sage. Pages 91-98
Recommended reading	Parry, Richard, (2008) “Episteme and Techne“, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/episteme-techne/
Tutorial	No tutorials

WEEK 2

Definitions: Technological Objects & Systems

Thinking about technology beyond the technical object. Brief survey of different approaches:

1. Actor-network theory and socio-technical networks, networked economy
2. Simondon, technics and collective individuation
3. Delanda and techno-historical assemblages
4. Parikka, media archaeology and rethinking media and communication assemblages

Required reading	Lury, C. (2009). “Brand as Assemblage.” Journal of Cultural Economy, 2(1-2), 67-82.
Recommended reading	Parikka, J. (2010). Introduction: Insects in the Age of Technology. Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology Minneapolis, London: University Of Minnesota Press. Pages ix-xxv [Particularly the ‘Assemblages’ section xxiv-xxvii]
Tutorial	Discussion: Introduction of unit. Details of assessments. Allocation of readings for the presentation assignment. Discussion of potential topics of the research essay assessment.

WEEK 3

Definitions: Change: Obsolescence & Progress

How to think about ‘change’? Think beyond individual objects to the broader networks and social assemblages of whom they are always part. Disruptive innovation, not a new ‘object’ but a different network of relations. Fetishisation of the ‘new’. Planned Obsolescence.

Required reading	Packard, V. (1960). “Progress Through Planned Obsolescence.” The Waste Makers. Brooklyn: Ig Publishing. Pages 65-78.Slack, J. D., & Wise, J. M. (2005). Progress. Culture + Technology: A Primer. New York: Peter Lang. Pages 9-25.
Tutorial	Discussion: When was the last time you ‘upgraded’ anything? Why? Is Packard’s critique still relevant? Do you take photos with your phone? Do you use Instagram or similar? How does the aestheticisation of ‘old’ technologies as ‘new’ change our sense of progress?

WEEK 4

Assemblages: Audience & Media

This week we think about the relation between technology, media and audiences in terms of assemblages. Further develop assemblage theory. Techno-historical assemblages of the media. Power of the audience, audience studies. Attention economy.

Required reading	Goggin, G. (2009). “Assembling media culture.” Journal of Cultural Economy, 2(1-2), 151-167.Crogan, P., & Kinsley, S. (2012). “Paying Attention: Towards a Critique of the Attention Economy.” Culture Machine, 13, 1-29. http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/463/482
Recommended reading	Bratich, J. Z. (2005). “Amassing the Multitude: Revisiting Early Audience Studies.” Communication Theory, 15(3), 242-265.
Tutorial	Discussion: What is your involvement in media assemblages? How does your participation relate to Crogan and Kinsley’s four ways of “thinking about how attention is commodified, quantified and trained” (3)?

WEEK 5

Mediated Sociality & Community

Community and communication. Scales of community, local, national, international. Collective intelligence

Required reading	Levy, P. (1999). “From the Molar to the Molecular: The Technology of Collective Intelligence” Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books. Pages 39-55.
Recommended reading	Shirky, C. (2010). “Means” Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. London: Penguin Books. [Chapter 2]
Tutorial	Discussion: What does Levy mean by ‘molecular’ and ‘molar’? How is the ‘national’ imagined in the contemporary era if it is in part a consequence of the communication technologies of modernity (telegraph, print newspapers, then radio etc)? Do you think the character of friendship has changed because of social media?

 WEEK 6

Home & Away & Work

Constitution of the ‘home’, production of domestic space. New composition of relations premised on the separation of public/private, work/home. Intervention of the telephone. The flexible workplace. 

Required reading	Gregg, M. (2011) “Selling the flexible workplace” Work’s Intimacy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Chapter 1. Pages 23-38.
Recommended reading	Yates, J., & Orlikowski, W. J. (1992). “Genres of Organizational Communication: A structurational approach to studying communication and media.” Academy of Management Review, 17(2), 299-326. [Examination of the history of the 'email' as genre of organizational communication.]
Tutorial	Discussion: Do you juggle various work responsibilities with other aspects of your life? Could you do this without contemporary communication technologies? Would you feel comfortable using your Facebook account for work purposes? What relation does Gregg describe between communication technologies and workplace intimacies?

 WEEK 7

Commerce and the Economy

 Transformations of economy, emergence of global market. Globalisation. Function of credit cards as technology of communication/identity. eBay, Steam and online commerce. Amazon.com and the algorithmic production of surplus value.

Required reading	Merskin, D. (1998). “The Show for Those Who Owe: Normalization of Credit on Lifetime’s Debt.” Journal of Communication Inquiry, 22(1), 10-26. [Particularly the section “A brief history of credit”]
Recommended reading	Roberts, J. M. (2012). “Poststructuralism Against Poststructuralism: Actor-Network Theory, Organizations and Economic Markets.” European Journal of Social Theory, 15(1), 35-53.
Tutorial	Discussion: Have you used your credit card online and felt anxious? Do you have a credit card debt? How important is reputation for online commerce? Have bought items directly from overseas?

WEEK 8

Mid-semester break

 WEEK 9

The Apocalypse & Other Lessons from Science Fiction

Apocalypse as ultimate ‘planned obsolescence’. Technological change of the apocalypse. ‘Industrial-military complex’. Internet as communication technology of the apocalypse. 

Required reading	Jameson, F. (1982). “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies, 9, 147-158.
Recommended reading	Grusin, R., 2004. “Premediation.” Criticism, 46(1) 17-39.Stockwell, S (2011) “Messages from the apocalypse: Security issues in American TV series.” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 25(2), 189-199
Tutorial	Discussion: What is your favourite representation of the apocalypse? What aspects of this apocalyptic setting are Utopian? Would a world of perfect communication be Utopian? Why or why not?

 WEEK 10

Government & Media Policy

Guest lecture. TBA

Required reading	Tapscott, D. & Williams, A. (2010). “The Rise of the citizen regulator.” Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World. London: Atlantic Books. [Chapter 15]
Tutorial	TBA [Check Moodle closer to the date.]

 WEEK 11

Information Technologies, Memory & Memorialisation

 From the ‘Kodak moment’ to the ‘Facebook moment’. Branded behaviours, branded memories. Have our memories become commodified? Databases and access.

Required reading	Stokes, P. (2011). Ghosts in the Machine: Do the Dead Live on in Facebook? Philosophy & Technology, 1-17.Munir, K. A., & Phillips, N. (2005). The Birth of the ‘Kodak Moment’: Institutional Entrepreneurship and the Adoption of New Technologies. Organization Studies, 26(11), 1665-1687.
Recommended reading	Geissler, C., (2010) “Pix or It Didn’t Happen: Social Networking, Digital Memory, and the Future of Biography.” In V. Chan, C. Ferguson, K. Fraser, C. Geissler, A.-M. Metten & S. Smith (eds.) The MPub Reader. Vancouver: CCSP Press, 135-141. [Also available at  http://tkbr.ccsp.sfu.ca/bookofmpub/pix-or-it-didnt-happen-social-networking-digital-memory-and-the-future-of-biography-by-cynara-geissler ]
Tutorial	Discussion: Are we suffering from societal ‘TMI’? What moments do you hope to remember and do you try to capture these moments using technology? Do you ‘share’ these moments?

WEEK 12

Geographies of Communication Technologies & Reality

 Maps, spatiality. Political economy of belonging. Borderspaces. Locative media. Augmented reality.

Required reading	Buliung, R.N. (2011) “Wired People in Wired Places: Stories about Machines and the Geography of Activity.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 101,1365-1381.Williams, R. (1976). “Communication” Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society Glasgow: Fontana. Pages 62-63.
Tutorial	Discussion: Do you use satnav or a ‘map app’ to help you find where you are going? What about planning for holidays, do you know exactly where you are going to go? When was the last time you were ‘lost’? What does Buliung mean by the ‘extinction of experience’?

WEEK 13

Crisis & Technologies of Communication

Social media and communication. Data visualisation. Queensland floods and twitter. Japanese tsunami and Google.

Required reading	Bruns, Axel, Burgess, Jean E., Crawford, Kate, & Shaw, Frances (2012) “#qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods.” [Research report] ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane QLD Australia. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/48241/1/floodsreport.pdf [Particularly pages 7-18]
Tutorial	Discussion: Have you been caught up in a crisis event? How have you communicated your wellbeing to friends and/or family? How have you found out about and then followed recent natural disasters? What communication channels do you use?

WEEK 14

Future, practices of anticipation

Techno-historical assemblages are not only ‘historical’ but co-present. What shall exceed us? What assemblages are not yet fully present but currently emerging? What comes ‘next’? ‘New’ iPhones. What are the new assemblages? Has the future become commodified?

Recommended reading	Jones, S.E., 2008. “Anticipating Spore” The Meaning of Video Games: Gaming and Textual Studies New York: Routledge. Chapter 6. Pages 150-173.
Recommended reading	Grusin, R., 2004. “Premediation.” Criticism, 46(1) 17-39.
Tutorial	Summary and Q&A. Final paper related questions and feedback

 

My colleague Jason Wilson has attacked the Finkelstein Independent Media Inquiry report in the context of the Fairfax restructure announced today. Jason writes:

The Independent Media Inquiry bent over backwards to demonstrate the peristence of media power in order to build a case for regulating it further. But the real story is that traditional media are in a death spiral. These have been major social institutions. Despite what many see as their poor performance in recent years, it’s not clear what exists to replace them in that role.

The Independent Media Inquiry investigated whether or not governmental regulation and/or support would be appropriate in the context of the shifting composition of an industry sector. All major media companies in Australia made submissions that suggested that government support would be unwarranted. The report references a number of submissions and introduces and then quotes from the Fairfax submission thus:

Notably none of the established newspapers felt there was a need for government support. The submission by Fairfax Media states:

No one can deny that the traditional media business models have been severely challenged by the growth of the Internet. That said Fairfax does not support the proposition that independent journalism needs assistance by way of Government subsidy or tax breaks as have been suggested by some submissions … Media organisations need to transform themselves to account for the changing needs of audiences as the digital and online platforms continue to evolve. Existing revenue streams need to grow and new revenue sources need to be found and sustained.

It seems that is precisely what Fairfax are doing at present.

Two other points are worth making in the context of the analysis by the Independent Media Inquiry Report. Firstly, the report analyses the democratic function of the news media (what Jason refers to in terms of them having been ‘major social institutions’) from the government’s perspective, not the perspective of individual journalists or companies. I do not agree with Jason that the Independent Media Inquiry was tasked or even should have been tasked with providing an industry with strategic solutions to their commercial problems. Chapter 12 of the report engages with the problem of ensuring industry-wide ‘journalistic capacity’ to produce ‘quality journalism’, which is slightly unconventional for a media analysis. Most media analyses fall into the political economy perspective or correlating ownership or the identity of news producers in general with a normative sense of ‘diversity’. ‘Diversity’ was mentioned in the terms of reference, but this was developed into ‘journalistic capacity’ in the report. Nor does the report explore even a single example of a specific news outlet or business model. Clearly, this would have been inappropriate. Imagine the furore unleashed by the culture warriors at The Australian if the report made forthright suggestions regarding how businesses should operate!?!

 

Is this a ‘desperate’ move by Fairfax?

Here is a brief extract from a discussion I had with Jason and Jonathon on Twitter.
 

Clearly, they both believe, as does Jonathon Green, that Fairfax’s move to be ‘desperate’. Is it?

 

The Long View

The second point to be made about the Independent Media Inquiry is regarding the absence of the kind of suggestions (as noted by Jason) and if they are not in the report, then where such information can be found. A fantastic starting point for anyone interested in how this may (or may not) play out is the Newspaper Next experiment from the the American Press Institute. Proper historical research is required to analyse the last two decades of of shifting business models, as a way to ward off the boosterism of an always future leaning opinion makers. Less ‘this is what you should do’ (or in the case of Fairfax the schadenfreude of the inverse boosterist ‘this is what you should have done 10 years ago’) and more ‘this is what has and has not worked in this context’. The chronic boosterism of ‘internet evangelists’ manifest in the rush to be ‘in front’ of every other voice in the marketplace of opinion means that existing experiments such as Newspaper Next are often forgotten.   

Two major reports were released as part of the experiment, and a third smaller report. One from 2006 announcing the project, another two years later reporting on those media companies following through with the Newspaper Next experiment and a third on using ‘Interactive Databases’ (I’ve uploaded the first two reports to Scribd, because it seems that the API has removed Newspaper Next from its site). I’ve got an academic article in the works that analyses both major reports in terms of the way they discuss ‘opportunity’; it is a curious example of thinking ‘opportunity’ as the necessary restructure of markets (by way of attempting to forge new stabilising social neworks that reproduce markets and therefore stability of revenue streams, etc).

The first report presents some of the conceptual background in thinking about the changes to the US newspaper industry based on notions of ‘disruptive innovation’ and the main points are capture in above diagram (page 19). Some rightly criticised the experiment and the report specifically for being ‘all talk’. Indeed, it does have a certain boosterist tone about it. There is some good ideas amongst all the enthusiasm however.

The second report presents 24 case studies of new products and seven examples of how newspaper companies organized and financed innovation. The most relevant example in the report is The Chicago Tribune. Unfortunately, even at this stage of the experiment it was clear that no newspapers would be willing to ’make the leap’. As Rick Edmonds at Poynter reported at the time:

However, many of the experiments have stuck too closely to traditional core competencies, making money, for instance, by reverse publishing online material into print, still the comfort zone for the ad sales force. The result: the pace of change is unprecedented but not quick enough; most projects are too small and too slow to develop revenue on the scale needed. So the report urges newspapers companies to “make the leap” beyond news or even news and information.

Then check out this post by Steve Buttry, one of those involved in the Newspaper Next experiment. He was also apparently behind the third report on using interactive databases as a new kind of journalistic product. Steve’s point is that none of the news companies that engaged him or others to make presentations wanted to impliment the Newspaper Next blueprint.

The results were pretty much the same as the response to N2: Executives praised the ideas generally, but lacked the vision, courage and/or freedom to make such dramatic changes in their declining companies. Either N2 or C3 could have led the newspaper industry to a more prosperous future if companies had truly followed them. Instead the business has followed a defensive course of slashing costs, throwing up paywalls and waiting for a miracle.

My point is a very simple one: there has been a huge amount of work carried out in other local, national and international markets on what has worked and what has not worked in attempts to restructure individual companies. It is clear that Fairfax has to undergo a transition to a new business model. It is far from clear what transition model works best.

Maybe I am the only person (at least in my Twitter stream) who thinks that amongst all the commentary about the ‘desperation’ of Fairfax that they actually did something right in holding off from undergoing this transition? Does anyone have any figures on how much money has been wasted at other media organisations on ‘restructures’? obviously some changes should have been made sooner (such as the ‘digital first’ strategy and the integrated newsroom). However, if they had attempted to lock themselves into a new business model even a few years ago would they have the information they have now about what works, what doesn’t and the various different contexts and range of outcomes in between? Business leaders are inherently conservative, they are not going to invest in a company restructure that requires a market restructure at the same time. Not unless they have the ‘killer app’ anyway, but there is no ‘iPod’ solution to the challenges faced by the news industry.

In this week’s first year lecture on research methods I am discussing the importance of ‘writing up’ one’s research as part of the process of doing research. Part of what I am discussing is the shift in thinking from scholarship as a linear process (for example, question and then an answer) to a process involving differentiating feedback (for example, multiple questions and answers and answers that help you ask better questions).

The classic error of first year students is to write up essays as they are doing the research and then hand in what is essentially a very early draft of their work. When this is represented in graphical form it looks like this:

You begin on the left and end up on the right. Each increment represents a moment where the student reads or thinks something new and writes it in their (draft) essay. This can be identified when assessing work as what is normally regarded as the ‘thesis statement’ is buried about three-quarters of the way into the essay. I’ve found it to be a common error for students who have not thought about the essay writing process as involving structure and I’ve found it in every university (7) at which I’ve taught or marked.

As I have discussed before on this blog, a better way to think about this process is a spiral with spokes instead of a ‘flat line’ time series. The spiral & spoke is a far better way to represent the way one’s ideas develop:

You begin in the middle of the spiral and gradually work your way to the outer point. Each of the ‘spokes’ represents an action of reading or thinking something. Each time the spoke cuts across the spiral it is at a different time (T1, T2, T3, …Tn). The point is that each spoke is not the ‘same’ thing each time it cuts across the spiral. Ideas develop as you read and think different things in between. So the series becomes something like Idea 1.0, Idea 1.1, Idea 1.2, …Idea 1.n and you get an appreciation of the way what you read or thought in the beginning develops over time. When writing up the research you write up the spokes.

This is great for a process involving small sets of starting information with only ‘interference’ or ‘reinforcing’ effects between the original set of information creating change. This is not how scholarship actually happens, however. Scholarship is essentially a process of innovation involving ‘interference’, ‘reinforcement’ and also ‘cascade’ and ‘originary’ effects. A ‘cascade’ effect being that joyous moment where the ‘red thread’ of one’s work is apparent. An ‘originary’ effect being that moment where the differential repetition of ideas (what Gabriel Tarde called ‘imitation’) leads to development of a new idea (or what Tarde called ‘innovation’).

Another way of representing this differentiating feedback that retains a similar mode of the spiral time series is by using a three dimensional conical spiral as the time series and then locating the various moments of thinking or reading (or experimenting, etc) so that the non-linear relationships between these various moments can also be represented with innovation trees.

The key to the above diagrammatic representation of the processes of research and differentiating feedback.

1. The original way of thinking about the process as a linear timeline. Start at the left and end on the right.

2. A three-dimensional version of the spiral. The researcher still begins in the middle and each reading, thought (or whatever) happens along the spiral, but now the relations of innovation can be appropriately mapped. When ‘new’ elements emerge from previous elements, a new colour is used. More complex versions of these relations would create new spirals emerging from specific element as new directions are taken. I imagine multiple galaxies of spirals.

3. The ‘micro’ time series of each specific point or ‘outcome’ (for a topic sentence in an essay for example), these were the ‘spokes’ in the original two dimensional representation.

Why is this important?

Humanities and social science scholars have traditionally been poorly equipped to think about the relations between the various elements or ‘actors’ in the composition of power relations that makes up a research project, cluster or ‘network’. When I think of ‘actor-networks’ (as in ‘actor-network theory’) I think of a version of this diagram and all the ‘trees’ that actually constitute the relations between the various elements. My childish MS Paint drawings above indicate one way I think it would be possible to graphically represent the non-linear network of relations between various actors as part of a temporal series.

On its own it is kind of cool, but imagine if you could map not only strictly research-based or intellectual endeavours and could include on the same conical spiral time line other factors, such as funding grants, social events, or even maybe (if anyone thinks it is, you know, at all relevant) teaching load and other administrative responsibilities. Rather than mapping the conditions of possible action, this would be a trace of the actual conditions of action in the relations between elements. It would be a very useful way to map the impact of non-output activities in terms of various clusters of ‘elements’ and the number of relations between them. For example, a relative barrier would occur while waiting for ethics protocol approval and so on.