event mechanics

Currently finishing off a paper titled ‘Towards an economy of know-how’ based on PhD work. Extending Negri and Hardt’s arguments regarding the subsumption of the social and the way the ‘general intellect’ is used as a resource from which to extract rent I explore how print magazines have lost their monopoly rentier position on know-how produced through the cyclical valorisation of products of know-how in cultures of enthusiasm.
Anyway, I found this footnote in my PhD. Yep!

With reference to an ‘Aristotelian logic’, Whitehead (1978: 61-82) critically summarises the ‘error’ of mistaking the potentiality of the extensive ‘time and space continuum’, which he agrees is very useful for everyday living, for the ‘reality’ of the ‘creative process’ of events. What Whitehead calls an ‘actual occasion’ (of a realisation in a spatiotemporal state of affairs) is a “limiting type of event”(80).

I am preparing the first lectures for the two units I am teaching this semester. One is an introductory media studies unit and the other is an advanced online journalism unit. In both units I am grappling with the concept of ‘permanent beta’ for the first lectures. ‘Permanent beta’ is a phrase that I picked up somewhere, I am not sure where. Tim ‘Web 2.0′ O’Reilly discussed the concept of ‘perpetual beta’ to account for ways users were being reconfigured as co-developers. Others have picked this up and talked about ‘perpetual beta’ as a design approach for releasing unperfected products into the wild. Essentially this changes the process of satisficing (making sacrifices while satisfying basic design outcomes) to incorporate an expectation of users that while a product will not be ‘perfect’, it will be ‘useful’ and therefore can be ‘used’. There is a documentary called Life in Permanent Beta that brings together a discussion of technological developments and the question of whether technologies can serve as the locus for an ‘authentic’ life.

I am thinking about ‘permanent beta’ in slightly different way and it is essentially due to being in an educational context. I am using ‘permanent beta’ to describe a situation for preparing students for a future that is only partially defined. In the past, as is the case for most of what I have prepared in the syllabi in both units, students were taught so as to be literate in a given discipline and/or prepared for a certain workplace. ‘Permanent beta’ indicates a situation ‘to come’, one which never actually arrives, and yet affects the current situation. Why doesn’t it arrive? Because there is another situation on the horizon ‘to come’. A Derridean ‘permanent beta’. (On Derrida’s concept of the future, see this.)

For example, Jay Rosen has noted that journalism schools used to prepare students for a certain production culture (broadcast television, radio or print), where the ‘production cycle was god’. He implies that current journalism schools fail if they do not also prepare students for making news useful (and the weird ill-defined workplace of online journalism). I am taking this a step further and experimenting with helping students develop an entrepreneurial disposition to embrace opportunities that may or may not exist yet. (Some previous writing on what I mean by ‘opportunity’ here, but the everyday meaning of the word is suitable.)

Concrete example: We shouldn’t teach journalism students how to use a CMS, but how a CMS is used in different ways. They should be familiar with a range of content management systems and how these different systems afford different ways of representing and producing news, engaging with the audience and so on. Why? They will eventually use a CMS that hasn’t been invented yet, so they need to develop skills for developing best practice to incorporate the ‘new’. Or, better, they will assist the media enterprise where they work (or, better, own (or, even better, have created)) in creating a CMS that features the specific production and publishing affordances that enables them to make the news as useful as possible for the audience represented by the area of interest they are servicing.

Future utility informs current practice all the time in the media industry. Especially in negative ways where I am aware of publishers who have ‘opted up’ of updating sites because they are anxious about constant changes. Rather than developing a production cycle that can incorporate change and then developing a structured and measured approach to changing the production cycle to produce content in its most useful way, they have narrowed their markets (audience and advertisers) until the bare essentials are left, all in the name of retaining existing business models and all the while profit and audiences are rapidly diminishing.

For the media studies unit I am grappling with the question of media literacy. Part of this has been an update from what William Merrin has described as the shift from Media Studies 1.0 to Media Studies 2.0. In his journal article on the subject he describes a disjunction between the ‘world’ of the media studies academic and the ‘world’ of the current crop of students. I am half a generation younger than Merrin (at least, in relation to media engagement habits) so luckily most of what he describes as belonging to his students’ world belongs to mine. But this is not good enough for me. Updating media studies is one thing, and retaining elements of the past broadcast-based media studies disciplinary model is important, but media studies in the age of permanent beta means preparing students to be media literate not in the ‘world’ they already exist in, but for a ‘world’ to come.

It means a big shift has to occur so students can appreciate change as a necessary element of navigating the complex media ecologies of their worlds. My solution has to go with an ‘issues’ based unit design. This does not mean ‘issues’ in a normative political sense. For example, in the second lecture I discuss stupidity. Stupidity is a problem; not too many people want to be stupid. In different ways ‘the media’ has often been blamed for making audiences stupid. Why? How? From critiques of mass-culture to anxieties around social network over-exposure, the ‘idiot’ has been subject to constant critique. But surely some advertisers and media producers want consumers to be stupid, so as to not think too much about what they are about to purchase or watch? So who wants to make us stupid? I run through a history of anxieties around the media and whether it can produce stupidity or not, and if so in what ways. I identify my own stupidities.

I have tried this once before, when teaching print journalism, and it failed miserably. I only focused on the negative side of this process. My failure began with observing that very few, if any, of the students in the lecture would get jobs as traditional journalists. I did not focus on, because I did not see how it was possible myself, how the students were going to be tasked wih the awesome opportunity and responsibility of rejuvenating journalism itself. Part of the reason for framing the journalism unit in particular like this (so students learn to appreciate media-based opportunity) is so students should feel empowered when they enter the job market. I did not want to hobble students with a burden of having a skill set that managers do not have, thus making the now-worker graduates forever be the little worker bee content producers. Or inherit a dystopic view of the industry in general. I want them to be able to see and harness opportunities when they emerge. This is a question of ethics. Yes, they will need to learn the ropes and pay their dues if they work in an established media enterprise. They should also feel empowered to pitch good ideas to management and help isolate and harness opportunities when they emerge for their own survival, if not for the survival of the media enterprise.

Following Axel Bruns tweeting of the QUT Industry Conversations: The future of journalism in Australia where Sally Young was making some good observations about the current state of the journalism industry. Sally examines political communication and the media industry. What sparked my interest in this was Axel’s tweet:

Of course, one response to this is to note, as Axel reports Sally as noting, that alternative spaces have emerged primarily online:

This got me thinking about power relations and the media and precisely what is the character of media power in this shifting media environment. I replied to Axel with:

In the past, media power was largely defined in terms of being the power to direct attention (by controlling media channels, hence the problem with media ownership) combined with the power to represent newsworthy events (people, activities, objects, etc.) with a particular ideological bias. Media power was largely collapsed into the politics of media representation. This was combatted on two fronts. Firstly by advocating for increased diversity in media ownership and secondly by advocating for an increased diversity of ‘media voices’ to give expression and self-representation to populations outside of the ideological representive frame. At stake in all this was the reproduction of a hegemonic social order, where ‘common sense’ itself was felt to be programmed by whichever interests held the most media power.

Something has changed however. The above still holds true, but only in limited circumstances as it no longer (if it ever did) defines the entire field of mediated representation. There is a different logic to media power in these ‘alternative spaces’ that Sally and many other people have noted, and that is what I started thinking about based on Sally’s reported comments.

In March 2010 she gave a paper as part of the Papers in Parliament program of the Senate on “Politics on the Media Today“. In it she presents an account of the decreasing audience share for ‘politics’ through traditional media channels (broadcast and print) and the apparent trend of increasing prevalence of ‘politics’ found on the internet. In response to a question at the lecture for the Senate paper, Sally notes that in the context of the coverage of politics that “the people who aren’t interested already, and they are harder to capture”.

Sally is indicating that those holding on to the traditonal models in the media industry are finding it hard to adapt to the new media environment. The new media industry is governed by communities of interests with their own horizons of community engagement determined by these interests. It seems apparent to me (and others!) that a new form of media power is derived from the capacity to capture participants in such a way that the emerging alternative spaces of expression and conversation overlap with the the traditional audience. ‘Owning the conversation’ is what is at stake. How does this happen?

To understand how the audience participates in a community requires following the relations that lead the audience to the community and then hold their interest. Google Adwords is a classic example in the new media economy of media power. Gunther Kress argues that for any given text in a media environment dominated by writing (such as print journalism), the reading path (entry point) is predetermined. You begin at the ‘start’, hence the importance in journalism of a catchy lead. In what he calls ‘multi-modal’ texts the reading path is determined by the criteria of relevance that a reader (as part of a community) brings to the text. For example, on a web page or a new magazine layout, the reader may engage with a flashy image first and then read some text and then flick through more images. There is no single point of entry.

In Kress’s description the community is assumed, but what if one is looking for a ‘community’? Seeding search results with a commercial slant means that the virtual marketplace of ideas or products (or both as cultural commodities) has an ‘entry point’ that is largely determined. #hastags on twitter serve a similar function, they delineate a common thread in the conversation. Paid #hastags direct the conversation to be anchored to particular commercial interests. Social media serves as a driver to media content. Part of the participatory media models that Henry Jenkins and others have written about is that the audience is now an integral part of the mode of distribution.

Then there is the actual ‘space’ of conversation, that is the designed space of the website or blog. In the conservative news space Alan Jones is a strong media channel for disseminating ideologically biased opinion, for example. While Andrew Bolt’s blog is just one of the spaces that ‘owns’ the conversation. Both are ideological in the traditional sense, but Bolt’s blog is organised around and services the community of interest that fuels his large comment threads.

An emergent form of media power — ‘emergent’ only to the extent that the media environment is constantly changing with different players, it isn’t ‘emergent’ in the sense that structurally it is already established — is to be able to capture a particular community of interest so that (for the traditional media industry) it overlaps with audiences. Hence, Sally Young’s concern that the audience for political coverage in traditional media is falling, yet she is optimistic that engagement with political reportage in ‘alternative spaces’ is increasing. This connects with some of my other thinking about MasterChef (!!!), media and politics that I’ll return to at a later point.

I am working on two papers that require a rigorous conceptualisation of the ‘nation’. One is hopefully going to be a group effort from some of my colleagues here and it is about an event space in Canberra. I am constructing a draft introduction so we are have a shared reference point. The other paper develops some of my PhD research and examines a particular episode in the history of Australian modified-car culture, the 1980s “V8′s ’til ’98″ media-led consumer campaign. In both cases, a concept of the ‘national’ is required that is in some ways similar.

There are a number of ways to think about the ‘national’ as a concept that can be used in these contexts. Often the ‘national’ is described as a function of identity, both collective and individual. At moments of crisis, such as war or civil unrest, the national is articulated in such a way as to produce a cohesiveness. It normally draws on discourses of the ‘nation’ circulated as an economy of signs and symbols that most members of a nation would instantly recognise. Much attention has been paid to understanding the power relations involved in this process and how the ‘imagined community’ of the nation is produced.
The process of producing the national does not only occur at moments of crisis or in better times during rituals of celebration and purification (such as national days or remembrance days) that sanctify the national imaginary through particular signs and symbols. Often this happens by excluding other signs and symbols or ‘purifying’ the representative frame through which the elements that constitute the ‘national’ are valorised and the ‘imaginary’ sanctified.

The way the national is articulated as part of everyday life is not part of a crisis or celebration. Michael Billig’s (1995) concept of “banal nationalism” is useful for understanding how the ‘national’ is articulated through the practices of everyday life. Billig argues that along with the more spectacular expression of national identity at specific times and places, nationalism is reinforced through a multitude of small and subtle ways that are so commonplace to be otherwise unremarkable. When introducing the concept, Billig remarks that “banal nationalism is not a flag which is being consciously waved with fervent passion; it is the flag hanging unnoticed on the public building” (8). I am using Billig’s concept of ‘banal nationalism’ in two different ways in the two papers.

In the “V8′s ’til ’98″ paper the historical example of the possible withdrawing of the automotive technology of the V8 engine from the consumer market produces an anxiety amongst automotive enthusiasts. A defence of the V8 is mobilised around broader anxieties relating to the globalisation of the Australian automotive industry. The ‘economic rationalisation’ of the Australian automotive industry was a policy goal of the Hawke Labor government and policies were introduced to increase the market fitness of the industry. It was known as the Button Plan after its chief architect John Button. ‘Economic rationalisation’ was the Australian version of a broader global process of neo-liberalisation in late capitalist societies.

The anxiety around the possible discontinuing of the V8 were expressed in the enthusiast media in terms of an influx of foreign-designed and foreign-manufactured automotive technologies. ‘Asian’ automotive technologies were explicitly identified as a threat and their introduction into the Australian market was discoursed as a conspiracy in some of the most flagrantly racist language I have come across in my archival research. At stake was not so much the technology in itself or the technology as a signifier of a particular identity, but the capacity of the technology to function as part of particular Australian socio-technical assemblage within the system of automobility. This socio-technical assemblage is of a particular automobilised subject of the masculine Australian driver combined with a particular automobile technology of a car powered by the ‘high-performance’ large capacity V8 engine that are used to perform upon (or, better, process) the particular space of the Australian road. The anxiety around the V8 was mobilised to defend the way automobilised Australian subjects could exist witin the dynamic system of flows and spaces of the Australian system of automobility. Other automotive technologies were dismissed in the enthusiast media on the grounds that they cannot ‘hack’ the ‘tough’ Australian conditions.

The experience of the system of automobility is part of everyday life. Members are subjectivised very early in their lives through governmental discourses that attempt to produce ‘safe’ road user subjects. For example, everyone within an automobilised society must learn how to cross the road. This is a particular competence that is designed to enable subjects to properly identify the dangers and associated risks of directly participating in the system of automobility. One consequence of this (that the road safety industry has never come to terms with) is that the space of the road is therefore potentialised in different ways depending on what Grossberg calls ‘mattering maps’ of the subjectivised individuals. The aim of governmental discourse is to produce anxiety that functions as self-surveillance for not only being aware of the dangers, but the primary risk of a subject developing a dangerously blasé attitude towards the risks. Different societies produce different systems of automobility. The cultural dimension of the system of automobility coupled with its banal everyday intimacy means that when a subject of one system of automobility is transported into another system of automobility he or she can experience the radical shock of an entirely different way of existing (within the system of automobility).

The “V8′s ’til ’98″ media-led consumer campaign functioned as a moral panic about whether or not automobilised Australian subjects would be able to perform a particular Australian (and masculine) form of processual production of and engagement with automobilised time-space. A properly processual conception of the subject is essential for appreciating the capacities for action afforded by linkages with socio-technical assemblages. I am attempting to isolate the subjective dimension of part of a process of what Whitehead calls ‘appetition’. It is a way of avoiding definitions of the ‘subject’ derived from structuralist concerns with identity. Brian Massumi’s work is similarly concerned with the processual dimension of experience. His description of ‘anticipation’ captures some sense of this subjective dimension of appetition:

Orders of substitution and superposition are orders of thought defined as the reality of an excess over the actual. This is clearest in the case of anticipation, which in a real and palpable way extends the actual moment beyond itself, superposing one moment upon the next, in a way that is not just thought but also bodily felt as a yearning, tending, or tropism. [...] But the definition also applies to substitution [...]. Substitutions are cases in a combinatoric (a system of “either-ors” sometimes conjoined as an “and”). Not all possible actions are present as perception to the same degree. All of the permutations composing the combinatoric are not actionably present to the same degree in every perception. (original italics, 2002: 91)

Massumi is describing the relation between possible actions and the future as expressed within perception. The ‘possible’ is produced through perception as a dynamic infrastructure for immanent future action. The banal nationalism experienced on the road as part of the system of automobility is not only produced through explicit signifiers of nationhood (in Australia, this is exemplified by the Southern Cross stickers on the rear window of vehicles), but in the way the experience itself is produced as a processual relation by the socio-technical assemblage of (nominally) car, driver and road.

To invert the focus of Meaghan Morris’s analysis of the automobilised drama of Mad Max (in her “White Panic” essay, which used to be at the Sense of Cinema site, but is no longer there?), the event produced is not of the masculine violence of the car crash as a metonymic event of colonisation and the ‘white panic’ of occupying ‘the road’ as an existential horizon of national purification, rather the event produced is of a kind of mastery of ‘the road’ through the magnification of power afforded by the V8 engine. This event still demands a masculine violence, but of domination and competition articulated through a mastery of the flows of time and space within the system of automobility. The event of the crash is an exception within the differential repetition of this other far more common and banal event, which is the event of ‘traffic’. The panic around the possible withdrawal of the V8 from the Australian automotive market is a panic born of the consequential disenfranchising of Australian automotive subjects from being able to experience the processual dimension the Australian system of automobility.

So I am working away on a few things at the moment. Firstly, I am giving a guest lecture in the winter semester version of the unit I am teaching in second semester. The topic for the lecture is on audiences. I thought I’d start with the Diesel ‘Be Stupid’ advertising campaign from 2010/2011. I’ll post some of the brief analysis work I do to introduce the concept of the audience later.

The very next day I am giving a brief demo to some visiting students about Communication Studies and what they would be doing if they came to UC. It is only 15 minutes so I am going to do a brief practice run of the 3D lecture I have planned for the same unit. I’ll basically introduce them to the concept of the ‘spectacle’. Even if they do not come here to study it is a good concept to know about.

I am also working on a few articles. One on street rodding in the 1970s where I outline the dispositif of the scene and use a modified Foucauldian historical method (‘eventalization’) to begin outling how specialist media modulates enthusiasm as a mode of control. I’ll post more about this today.

The reason why I am writing the above paper is that the other article I am working on derived from my PhD research (on Summernats and Street Machine magazine in the 1980s) tries to do too much at once. It will be far more useful to inroduce some of the concepts for the first paper and then develop them further in the second.

Besides that I am trying to finalise the unit outlines for the two units I am teaching. I am currently trying to sort out an assessment structure.