When is a document a document?

I read a story that delightfully illustrates how 'contingent', or perhaps more accurately, how 'convenient' the meaning of technology is. In Japan parties have started campaigning for the upcoming national election. There is a law that limits the overall number and distribution of election material such as posters and flyers during the campaigning period. A recent move by officials to apply this law to Internet campaigning has involved a rather unique interpretation of the definition of a "document". According to the interpretation, a "document" can include a single web page or email and each "download" of a "document" is seen to be equivalent to a single physical exchange of a file, such as handing someone a brochure. The article describes how those who defy the law and who go ahead and update their home pages or disseminate emails risk being stripped of the votes cast in Sunday's pol and jailed for two years or fined up to 500,000 yen ($6000). (SMH 9/9/05)

Campaigners immediately responded to this by putting a quarantine on their web sites. The article goes on to explain that, "The threat has caused the home pages of the main parties, usually dynamic, to be frozen in time, appearing the same as they were on August 30, the first official day of campaigning...While party platforms can be downloaded, there are no updates, interviews or transcripts, and no way for voters with questions to get a reply." (SMH 9/9/05)

There are a number of questions about the technical understandings that must come into play to equate a web page with a document and a download with handing someone a brochure. I will return to this point about the properties of technology later. What initially impressed me about this story is how it illustrates that the definition of a technology, in this case a "document", is directly connected to an interpretative operation. This operation defines not just what we understand the technology to be, but also what it does. Woolgar offers us the anti-essentialist perspective;

"The objective effects of technology are anything but self-evident. In each case the effect of technology necessitates some form of human interpretation; even if debate about such effects may be brought to (temporary) closure, and a consensus constructed around the alleged effects, this consensus is socially constituted, not the result of an autonomously and exogenously imposed truth." (p138)

The interpretative operation can also be seen to follow the stages of translation in actor-network theory as described by Woolgar in "The Machine at Work".

1. The nature of technology is problematised (what is the definition of a document?)
2. The meaning of a technology is translated to mean something else (a web page and an email are documents.)
3. The meaning is stabilised (in law and by the policies of authorities) and fourthly,
4. The new meaning is mobilised (through the threat of action by authorities and the response of campaigners to this threat).

So this case demonstrates that any understanding of technology, what it is and what it does, must be viewed firstly, as an interpretative operation that endows it with meaning and secondly, that the operation is a translation, or a strategic set of moves that involves a transfer of meaning (and power).

Although this account is pretty comprehensive, I am left feeling uneasy. It is not just the meaning of the object - the document - that is problematised and then re-interpreted but also the act of exchange itself - the download. Here we are to understand that downloading can be equated with handing someone a brochure. My initial reaction to this was that it was clearly the work of a bunch of lawyers who no nothing about IT. In both cases we are required to suspend certain technical properties that make the equivalence extremely difficult to maintain and to enforce. An anti-essentialist perspective would argue that the inherent technical properties are not inherent to the technology but have come to be known through a social consensus involving technicians and programmers etc.

But to my mind, downloading is really nothing like handing someone a brochure. Perhaps my IT background is clouding my reading but surely there has to be some acknowledgement of attributes that belong to the object at the time of the interpretative operation. Surely this bears greatly on the conditions of the interpretation and its success.

When I open my browser and visit a home page, I am downloading, or more accurately, my browser is loading the data that constitutes the web page through a series of requests and replies to the server hosting that page. The download is more correctly understood as a stream of queries and replies. It is not a single transaction of a single contained piece of information. Secondly, given this definition, each time I point my browser to that web page, another download occurs. And yet, this is not equivalent to me returning to the campaigner standing at a street corner and being handed another brochure because, unlike this scenario, re-loading a web page is not cumulative. I am left with no more data 'in my hand' so to speak after re-loading the page.

In the story about Japan, the interpretation seems to have accounted for this cumulative property by equating it with changes to the web page. And yet there still seems to be a mis-match of equivalence. What I can do with a bunch of brochures in my hand is completely different to what I can do with a re-loaded web page on my browser even with updated information. In this case, the mis-alignment of equivalence has resulted in a kind of slippage of meaning, rather than a complete substitution. While the ANT approach might read this as an effect of the incomplete enrolment of actors in the network, I am left unconvinced.

Social researchers respond to Katrina

While information that we receive from the media is invaluable during disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, and often the only source of news and information, it is at best anecdotal and fragmented. Some experiences gain enormous exposure, while others fade into the background or are not related to the public at all. Social researchers have an important role to play to gather information that the media can't or won't because of it's primary concern with 'breaking news'. Some researchers have responded by initiating research with small groups of Katrina survivors to understand the impact of the disaster and the issues that face many people, and to clarify some of the worst excesses of the media's accounts i.e. the prevalence of crime...

From: Wesley Shrum <shrum@lsu.edu>
Date: September 6, 2005 12:52:05 PM EDT
Subject: Katrina -- one week after

On Sept 5, one week after Katrina, a team of ten people conducted qualitative interviews in the parking lot with approximately 50 displaced persons at a central Baton Rouge location. Afterwards, we met for a couple of hours, to abstract a consensus view of what we had learned. It is important to keep in mind that we spoke with individuals with some mobility (own car, other’s car, bus) that had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina and we have not yet interviewed those living in collective shelters.

The vast majority are from the New Orleans metropolitan area (including Kenner, Metairie, Chalmette, but not the New Orleans North Shore or Plaquemines). The vast majority of displaced persons are staying
in private homes.

The further one goes away from hurricane areas, the more, the better, and the quicker is the assistance (people came back to Baton Rouge because they want to be closer to home, even in spite of reduced assistance).

Crime and fear of crime was universally unobserved or insignificant, both for early and late evacuees.

Blacks are more committed to returning home to New Orleans than whites, who express more reservations about returning (note, this does not take into account social class).

Displaced people have received assistance from (in order of importance), family, friends, and strangers. Churches have helped. Public (government) assistance was not just negligible—no member of the team recalled any instance of government assistance reported by this group of individuals (in the rare cases where help was requested, it was not provided).

Most people consider themselves to be very lucky, doing well, or doing reasonably well given the circumstances. They are not requesting assistance (beyond that they are receiving, and some of the most fortunate have their own means). But the minority of persons who are not doing well DESPERATELY NEED HELP.

The main concerns are financial, for a place to stay, and education for their children.

Put simply, depending on how long before they move back (if they do), people are worried that they will wear out their residential welcome.

Summarized by W. Shrum, 5 September 2005
http://worldsci.net World Summit event in Tunisia
http://worldsci.net/global Science & Development Project site
http://4sonline.net Society for Social Studies of Science
http://www.lsu.edu/sociology

Oh Sweden on my mind...

My trip to Sweden is coming up so fast. I have only one month before I fly to Stockholm. I've been liaising with the contacts over there to confirm accommodation and my research activities and everything is working out really well. I'll be staying in Stockholm for the time that I'm there and will commute to ACSIS by train. ACSIS is a national centre for interdisciplinary cultural research based at Campus Norrköping of Linköping University.

The Director of the centre has been very helpful with potential contacts to follow up while I'm there. There are lots of academics in Scandinavia that have done workplace and technology studies and an increasing number doing mobility studies.

Katrina People Finder

Another resource that has been set up to help people affected by Katrina. This is the blurb about it:

Donated money? Please donate a little time. Join the Katrina PeopleFinder Project. It's easy. All you need is an internet connection and the ability to copy data into a form.

http://192.122.183.218/wiki/index.php/Help_Needed#Katrina_PeopleFinder_Project

After Katrina many friends and family members have been separated and left with no clear way to find each other. Hundreds of internet web sites are gathering hundreds, and probably thousands, of entries about
missing persons or persons who want to let others know they're okay.

The problem is: the data on these sites has no particular form or structure. So it's almost impossible for people to search or match things up. Plus there are dozens of sites - making it hard for a person seeking lost loved ones to search them all.

The Katrina PeopleFinder Project NEEDS YOUR HELP to enter data about missing and found people from various online sources. We're requesting as little as an hour of your time. All you need to do is help read
unstructured posts about missing or found persons, and then add the relevant data to a database through a simple online form.

To get started please click here:

http://192.122.183.218/wiki/index.php/Help_Needed#Katrina_PeopleFinder_Project

Questions? Email katrina-people (at) activist-tech.org

Thanks!!!

The Katrina PeopleFinder Team

Site for students after Katrina

This site http://www.scup.org/pubs/sen_html/katrina_alert.html is providing up to date information for students affected by Katrina who may need assistance, including offers to be placed in alternative higher educational facilities while recovery operations are underway. It is being updated regularly according to an academic mailing list I subscribe to.

According to posts I've read, there have been dozens if not hundreds of great offers for students - the info just needs to get out to students...

http://www.scup.org/pubs/sen_html/katrina_alert.html

Creative Collective

A creative collective response to the disaster of Hurricane Katrina:

One web site, www.scipionus.com, is attempting combat the lack of information about what is happening in New Orleans by encouraging users to annotate a Google Map of New Orleans with information about specific locations.

Collectively, the community is creating a collaborative map Wikipedia. Anyone with something to add can enter a street address and leave a marker on the map at that location, providing a few lines of text about conditions at that spot.

"Never flooded, typical wind damage, passable street 8-31-05," reads one tag.

"Trey and April's We are OK ppl,"reports another.

Two dogs again

First up, my condolences to all those who have been affected by Hurricane Katrina. It's hard to imagine what it must be like to experience something like that. It is incredible too, to see the range of human responses to the disaster, the inventiveness and resilience, the loving acts of kindness and generosity and also the acts of complete disregard and selfishness. People never cease to amaze me.

You would think I'm doing my PhD on dogs by the many entries about dogs in this blog... No, but talk of dogs is such a therapeutic aside to the day to day practice of reading, writing and thinking something so 'serious' as a PhD that I really do enjoy just writing about dogs from time to time on the ol' blog. Excuse the self indulgences...

Well, today I have two dogs. My partners parents are away for the weekend and so their little foxy has come to visit. By my feet are two warm mounds of fur, one with short hair; white with black spots and the other with medium length coarse hair; white with ginger spots. They are curled up next to each other on the same bed which is next to the heater and are dozing lightly. Occasionally a dog with human walker or parent with squeaky pram (I almost wrote pram with squeakly parent!) walks past and both dogs wake instantaneously and simultaneously from their slumber and lunge for the front door in a frenzy of barks and flying fur.

On the PhD front, I happened upon a very exciting find yesterday. A book by Julian E. Orr called "Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job". Julian studied a group of Xerox Photocopier Technicians as they went about their work in the late eighties. He wrote up his findings in his dissertation (1990) and it was then published as a book (1996). Oh geez. I think he has written my PhD - a point both exhilirating and dreadful to discover. Exhilirating because every word I have read so far I recognise and have thought about as important to articulate and he has done it so elegantly. Dreadful because I also recognise how much work - thinking and hard research, has gone into the final opus and my thoughts and articulations seem so unformed in comparison and of course I have to come up with something fresh and different. Aargh.

The book is all about how the work of technicians is constructed and improvised in practice and largely through narratives of 'sensemaking' by triangulating with the machines and the customers. Their work practice is not, as you might expect much technical service work to be, the routine and rote following of instructions and procedures but as Orr writes,

"Technicians' practice is...a response to the fragility of available understandings of the problematic situations of service and to the fragility of control over their definition and resolution. Understanding is fragile in that accurate information about the state of the machine is only sometimes available, and the meaning of available information cannot always be found. Control is fragile both because the technicians come to work when the relationship between the customer and machine is already askew and because the technicians cannot keep the machines working and the customers satisfied; they can only restore that state after the fall. Work in such circumstances is resistant to rationalization, since the expertise vital to such contingent and extemporaneous practice cannot be easily codified." (Orr, 1996, p2)

He goes on to explain how the process of narrative gives form and definition to the problem which then enables diagnosis. The work involves making coherent that which has no sense (initially) and it is through talking about the problem as it perceived by them, the customer and what the machine is telling them, that the technician gains mastery over the machine. These narrative accounts also have another function. The circulation of such stories and information make up the discourse of the community of technicians. It is this discourse that makes up the body of knowledge of the community giving definition to the technicians job and a sense of identity through participation (p2-3).

I have a strong emotional response to his descriptions because they resonate so much with my own experience of being a computer technician and also in my role as trainer of computer technicians. I have not read enough of his book to identify what some of the experiential differences might exist between his group of photocopier repairers and say a group of computer support workers but I'm sure there will be some. For instance, I imagine one might be working with photocopiers as singular machines versus computers as part of a network, and another might be the remote aspect of much computer support work resulting from the integration of the telephone based help desk model into computer support and the capacity to provide remote support over networks. Oh well, read on...

describing a dog walk

We head out just on dusk. She pulls forward as I pull her back, my arm muscles straining. She dives for the gutter. "Off the street!" Trotting along, the sound of six feet padding the uneven pavement with our regular steps. Over roots and broken asphalt, the sky dimming and the stars brightening. "Don't eat that! We're not going that way." A sidelong glance then back to the ground. Too many smells, trails to follow. "Come on, that's enough." We turn the corner but one tree is too hard to resist, offering the special scents left by today's visitors. She halts to sniff and I stop. There are no steps. The traffic sounds louder, like the onset of monsoon showers, the cars roar past leaving a calm in their wake. Then the birds go off. I don't know all their names, some Indian minors, a magpie, a flock of lorakeets. We trot on past the primary school; the smell of Eucalypt from a pile of wood chips in the corner of the school yard. Breathe in deep. Look down. "Don't eat that little dog!" A cat turd hangs out one side of her mouth. "Drop it. Come on. Please..." We turn into our street. Her trot has slowed. It's dark and the neighbour's white cat announces our arrival with a snarly meauw. The gate is open and swings wide hitting the bricks. A hard sound. Unforgiving. I rescue the gate as it jumps back. Then it's closed, clink. Into place. We're home.

"Our community first..." Oh really?

Carmel Tebbut's Campaign Leaflet

Following NSW Premier Bob Carr's resignation there are a number of NSW bi-elections including one in the electorate of Marrickville. The labor candidate for Marrickville is Carmel Tebbutt who held the portfolio of Education and Training Minister under Premier Carr.

I urge all voters in the Marrickville electorate to consider Tebbutt's record on being "Caring and Committed" before giving your vote to her. As the Minister of Education and Training Minister, Carmel Tebbutt banned an education resource as part of a sex education program that promoted tolerance to gays and lesbians after "The Daily Telegraph" published a story of one parent complaining to the school about the program. Her reaction was to ban the material and claimed "it was inappropriate." Inappropriate to teach tolerance towards people who are not heterosexual Carmel?

Her reaction has drawn criticism from many including the NSW Teachers Federation, President of the Secondary Principals Council, AIDS Council of Australia and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Special Interest Group. More details about this story can be found in Adele Horin's piece in the Sydney Morning Herald and also on the NSW Teachers Federation web site.

The NSW Teachers Federation sent a letter over the action as did the President of the Secondary Principals Council, Chris Bonnor who said in his letter that:

"Teachers and especially PD teachers will see the response of the government as simply a disgraceful act of cowardice. Your reported response is even out of step with readers of the Daily Telegraph. When asked 'do you think this subject matter should be taught in schools?' 80 per cent responded 'yes'. Your response certainly does not align well with other government and DET initiatives for dealing with homophobia."

Tebbutt has made it very clear by her actions that her policies, ostensibly promoting a government that is "Caring & Committed", do not extend to promoting social tolerance to gays and lesbians. Far from reducing the level of homophobia in our society, her actions will reinforce it. How ironic and how disappointing, when Marrickville Council has one of the highest proportions of gays and lesbians than just about any electorate in Australia. So much for putting "our community first" Carmel...

Meeting with supervisor

Met up with my supervisor yesterday. It wasn't a brainstorm like our previous meetings but it did help me to get a few ideas on how to proceed with my PhD now that I've finished my Confirmation of Candidature. I've been feeling a bit adrift and unmotivated since completing the COC document and presenting it to the panel of academics. It's such a weird thing, doing a PhD. In some ways, you would think there would be very clear procedures to follow given how many have come before you and yet, while there are some guidelines to follow, it is still a very open and organic process that must be re-invented from scratch each time, shaped by the particular research and person undertaking it. It is one of the least prescribed activities I can think of, yet paradoxically replete with many antiquated conventions, making it wondruous, exasperating and a constant act of discovery.

I booked the ticket to Stockholm yesterday and my departure date is October 8th. I still have to sort out my accommodation and some other details. I've been thinking of some ideas for a paper to work on in Sweden but I want whatever I work on to be directly relevant to my PhD. My supervisor put forward a helpful suggestion to undertake an inquiry into the research methodology for my project to try to work through some of the issues that remain unresolved. I like this idea because it does have a wider application as well - studying the social dimensions of ICT use in organisations is still relatively new and many researchers working in this area have experimented with methodologies to try to address questions that are not so easily gathered through traditional means. It would be helpful to examine the approaches taken, why they have been taken and consider some of the issues that researchers have had in grappling with how you research people and technology in action.

The meaning of a ship

Two news stories have recently caught my interest. The first is the story of the Australian PM granting $1.3 million dollars to the search for an Australian warship sunk 64 years ago during WWII. The other story I heard on TV last night - the Tasmanian government is apparently planning to sink a ship off the East coast of Tasmania to lure scuba divers to the state in an effort to increase tourism. Curiously, today I can't find any references to this latter story on any of the news services. Anyway, I can't stop thinking about these reports announced 24 hours of each other.

What intrigues me about these stories has something to do with the absurd - in the case of the search for the sunken HMAS Sydney II, the absurdity of spending significant amounts of public money to benefit a small group of Australians in order that they can obtain "closure" about an incident that occurred over half a century ago while at the same time the government is drastically reducing funding to public services. Of course, this announcement by the Federal government was designed to convey a message to a much broader group of Australians - to make sense of war by summoning notions of meaningful sacrifice and the solving of a national mystery (literally bringing to light decisive evidence of who was to blame) to redress the growing public dis-ease about the senselessness of a war on terror (where there is no clear and decisive enemy.)

I think the absurdity might also have to do with the coincidence of these announcements (I'm just trying to work this all out so pardon the rambling thoughts). It is absurd to spend public money on the search for a sunken ship and then spend more money to sink another ship. Yet, would these events be absurd if they were not announced on the same day? I have got so used to the Federal government announcements appearing to have a coherent and unified front that the appearance of these two stories by different arms/heads of the government (State and Federal) appears as a rupture in the usual smooth orchestration of the media by the Federal government. The coincidence reveals an official image more akin to the Greek mythological figure of Hydra with its many heads competing in strange and contradictory ways. What is disturbing is how hard it is to to detect these disturbances in the rythmns of the daily news? Of course Hydra is frequently exposed by media commentators and bloggers but it is rare to experience Hydra first hand - to see two of its heads emerge from normally unruffelled waters. Would I be being overly conspiratorial to suspect the sudden disappearance of the story of Tasmania's plans to sink a ship, submerged like an old wreck, its meaning lost to the world?

Power tools

An interesting aside to an interesting discussion on a blog I visit brought up the question of power tools. It occurred to me that I have never explained the photo of me in my profile. Though difficult to detect, slung over my shoulder, is an ice pick and bag of crampons. This is me moments before ascending Fox glacier in the south island of New Zealand last December. Ice is a dazzling medium and it evokes for me a feeling I have trouble expressing in words but will give it a go...the mix of hardness and softness, of permanence and transience - its power to shift mountains, valleys and forests and its ephemerality like so many streams and rivulets after a heavy rain. The silence of ice from afar, surveying its form, hulking as it bears down on the world. The roar from up close, wet and cold against its weeping flesh, voices of its disintegration as it breaks off and runs into cracks, fissures and the black sticky mass of its captured debris. I love its ugly gritty frozen lasting crying fragile hard cold solitary mix of mountain sky earth body water flow wind dark light ness. It reminds me of so many things.

Last day of Master Class

The master class finished today at lunchtime. The last three days have been very stimulating and challenging. Although I felt a bit overwhelmed and a bit daunted on the first day, I warmed up and warmed to Michael Herzfeld over the duration of the Master Class. There were approximately 25-30 people who attended the class from many different Universities around Australia. Professor Herzfeld is the Head of Anthropology at Harvard University and there were a number of anthropologists attending and a distinct majority of the class were women, at around 88%.

At first I found some of the ideas quite difficult to follow. It was not the lack of anthropological background as the class and its content were interdisciplinary and most of the writers referred to in his talk were either a little bit familiar to me or I'd come across their ideas. As much as I enjoyed listening to Michael talk and was impressed by his encyclopedic knowledge of Greece and the rest of the world, I felt at times like I was getting lost in the back streets and side alleys drifting away from his point as he eloquently roamed through the history, politics and cultures of a vast number of countries. I felt a little frustrated that I couldn't immediately access and grasp the concepts. However, by the second day I felt their meaning and application slowly creeping up on me. By the end of the second day and particularly the third I started to get a hang of the model and the ideas and to consider potential applications of them to my own topic area. I also really enjoyed talking to the other students and since many of them are further along in their research process than myself, it was particularly valuable to hear about their experiences and their reflections.

This evening I was talking with my partner. A story she told me reminded me of an example that I think illustrates the concept of cultural intimacy and social poetics at work. I thought I'd articulate it in my blog to see how well it applies. When I worked in IT providing technical support, it was not uncommon for other techies and myself to laugh and joke about the stupidities of clients who called up for help. This joking was something that we were embarrassed about. On some level, we felt that it wasn't something we should do. I recall us debating this regularly. We were conscious of its effects. It's immediate effect was to release tension and this was certainly felt to be needed, particularly after experiencing a difficult and abusive call. But on reflection we identified how it reinforced the barrier between the public and the organisation and so we sparingly resorted to this practice.

Reflecting on this now in terms of cultural intimacy, I can see how, by calling the client 'stupid' and 'dumb', the client is metaphorically and literally put down and separated from the group. 'Put down', in the sense of disparaged but also in the very physical sense of setting the client apart from the organisation embodied in the act of putting the phone down and disconnecting. The jokes and laughter have a personal and a social function. They bring individual staff close to each other and unite them in the process of distancing the client and putting them in their place. The group gains solidarity through these acts. But the release of tension as expressed through jokes goes further than just reinforcing the 'us' and 'them' relationship between the staff and the client. The effect of the cultural intimacy amongst the techies defined by the shared customs used to release tension also normalises the behaviour of the client through a process of naming and classification. 'The dumb one', 'the crazy one' - each client falls into a category, and in the process they are classified and domesticated into a taxonomy that applies to everyone. We are all crazy and dumb at times.

The function of the release valve works to dynamically construct the inside and the outside but it also reproduces the social relation itself at an individual and at an organisational level, by normalising errant behaviour and incorporating it into the order of the group. I think, and could be way off here but I think this process describes social poetics in action.

"Cultural Intimacy"

Currently wading through what has accurately been described as a 'tome' of readings for a Master Class I'm attending next Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday on "Cultural Intimacy and Social Poetics: a new agenda for cultural research". I found out recently in an email that all students participating will be required to be 'rapporteurs'. What the hell is a rapporteur? I was intrigued by this word which resonated of French and possibly medieval origins.

The image that first came to mind was a cross between someone who goes to restaurants alot and a very fast moving and lethal ground-dwelling dinosaur of the Jurassic period. However, I discovered upon looking it up in dictionary.com that rapporteur has a rather more mundane meaning of being one who "is designated to give a report, as at a meeting." Definately no food or violent acts involved by the sounds of it, unless we are referring figuratively and a bit dramatically to the verbal assaults that can be delivered at meeting room tables. The rapporteur is someone who brings back as in portare "to carry", an account, in this case to the other meeting participants, although in our case it is being applied to mean that the rapporteur will suggest ways in which the readings and the discussion link with local interests as well as taking notes and outlining the main points and directions at the end of the session.

The whole thing is just making me feel very nervous I have to say and I'm a little concerned that if called upon, I may, as local rapporteur, become the rapporteur of my imagination delivering a belching, gutteral, stuttering and beastly display, rather than the professional, calm and academic performance that will be expected.

Confirmation of Candidature

I completed and passed my Confirmation of Candidature yesterday. It went pretty well and though the panel raised some concerns about the number and selection of research sites, I felt that they were voicing my own thoughts on this matter. They provided some very valuable suggestions. I'm glad I recorded the meeting on digital voice recorder. I was concentrating so much on the presentation, the questions from the panel and the proceedings in general that I would never have been able to take coherent notes as well.

This morning I slept in for the first time since starting my PHD. My dog was pretty happy about that and slept blissfully under the doona without stirring until I eventually rolled out of bed at about 10am.

I'm not feeling quite as exposed today as I did last night, a feeling I always get whenever I deliver a verbal presentation or do something personally challenging that involves a public performance. Fortunately, the panel was very supportive and encouraging and the proceedings, while formal, were not clinical.

I know I need to address some of the problem areas of my research proposal next but I think I might give myself a little breather today...go food shopping, clean up the house a bit, return an overdue library book, read the paper, admire the built-in wardrobes, that sort of thing.

I met up with two of the staff of my old business on Saturday night. It was so great to catch up with them and talk and feel that our lives are still connected but in a new and reinvigorated way. It was very meaningful to me.

Scholarship approved!

Well I'm pretty stoked. I found out the other day that I have been offered the International Scholarship to go to Sweden. Wow! I'm also pretty nervous and the wave of panic associated with my fear of flying hit me about 1.5 seconds after the wave of excitement upon finding out. I'm seriously considering attending one of those desensitising workshops at the airport. The only problem is they cost a bomb. Oh I so shouldn't use that word!

My proposed research for this Scholarship is an enquiry into innovations in mobile office technology by the two cellphone companies – Ericsson, of Sweden and Nokia, of Finland. The scholarship will provide me with an opportunity to conduct fieldwork for the final chapter of my PHD dissertation on mobile technologies and the ‘the office of the future’. It will also result in a series of papers and articles exploring the cultural, historical and geographical roots and context of these key mobile technology enterprises. The research will involve a visit to the headquarters of Ericsson and Nokia, which accommodate the R&D departments of both companies, to tour their facilities and conduct an interview with the design teams.

wardrobe

wardrobe
Originally uploaded by Juzza.

twilight

The sky is fading, the blue leeched out of it like an ancient pair of stone washed jeans. The light that's left clings to the roof tops. I sit at my desk looking out at the street through the narrow terrace windows with their horizontal bars. The ink of night seems to be seeping up from the earth, erasing all detail from the gum trees and houses...oh geez, that's enough...it's dark already.

Feeling much better. My cold is almost gone. Unfortunately I passed it on to my partner who came down with it quite severely and then just as she was recovering, an opportunistic stomache virus seemed to slip in and caught her unawares. She has been really sick the last few days but is back to work today.

Meanwhile I have had bursts of energy that I've spent on preparing and painting two walls, one in the study and one in the bedroom, prior to the installation of our built in wardrobes that are being installed tomorrow!!

I'm very excited about this. Yes, storage does make me happy. The days of living with piles of boxes in the corner of each room will be over. I do like things to be put away but I'm not really fussed about cleanliness. A bit of dirt here and there, that's OK, it doesn't bother me but I really don't like clutter and mess. Where I got this preference for things being in their place is not very hard to imagine. I have tempered my mum's love of all things neat, clean and tidy to just focus on the neat and tidy bit and have rebelled against the clean.

Yesterday I handed in my application for a Postgraduate Scholarship in Sweden to take place later this year. I was in two minds about whether to apply and decided that I would focus on the application as a process in itself and I'm glad I did this because it has clarified my ideas about my PHD thesis and made me reflect on how the stuff I'm learning and researching can be applied to other outcomes such as seminar and conference papers. However, I remain concerned I may not be able to afford eight weeks in Sweden and then another month in the UK when I could be in Australia conducting field work. Three years is such a short time to do a thesis. It only really makes sense if I can justify the trip based on its direct relevance to my PHD, in terms of material collected and research conducted. Well, I did it anyway, and who knows whether I will be successful or not. My philosophy is to make the most of every opportunity and experience because it is only three years and though it may very well result in a better thesis to spend the entire time with my head down reading and focusing on my research, I want to experience more than that during my PHD.

Talking about reading, at the moment I'm reading Kenneth Gergen's "The Saturated Self" and "Emotions in Social Life", an anthology of writings on the emerging field of sociology of emotions. I'm also dipping into "The Social Shaping of Technology" to reacquaint myself with some of the social constructivist approaches to technology. I need to finalise my confirmation of candidature document and have sort of drifted away from the headspace I was in when I wrote it. My supervisor is arranging the committee presentation date for the first week of August. Small wave of panic...

bad cold and rambling thoughts

Not quite so early at the desk this morning. It's 10.31 am.

I shouldn't really be here at all but in bed. My sore throat has evolved into a pretty bad cold and I have all the undesirable symptoms that go with it - running nose, headache, sore shoulders, sneezes, watering eyes. Oh how lovely.

It's a wet and cold day too and snowing in Kosciusko at last check. Sometimes, like today, you can guess that it's snowing because the temperature drops and there is a chill in the air that feels like it's come off the mountains and travelled down to the coast.

Stayed up a little later than I intended last night watching for any updates on the blasts in London. My partner's sister is in London and we were in contact with her via email to make sure she was OK.

It seems very surreal, from Sydney. I can imagine it must feel very unworldly for Londoners. I've checked the BBC web site and Sydney's ABC web site. The Internet seems to come into its own during incidents such as this. One Londoner put it, "the Internet has been my window into the world during this event". I've been thinking a bit about what is different about it. What is it about the Internet and its uses today that means that during an emergency incident, it takes on a more significant role than it ordinarily does, particularly in relation to other media? My thoughts on this are a kind of cold affected ramble through the myriad of ways of thinking about this topic.

Partly, from a production perspective, the ability to deliver information rapidly and without interruption are both critical functions of the media during an emergency event. The Internet seems to enable the collection, composition and delivery of information from distributed sites and additionally, requires less orchestration that other media forms. This means it doesn't rely on as many punctuated points in the production process. Punctuated points can be knocked out easily as a result of interrupted or partial network services, and this can effect the delivery of information anywhere along the production path. These characteristics of the Internet give it an advantage over other media forms during the coverage of an emergency incident.

The other difference is that the Internet facilitates the collection and delivery of multiple media forms without the same requirement for it to be 'packaged' or bundled to the same extent as other media forms.

Let's look at broadcast television. You do see quite a bit of improvisation - rough and ready camera footage, extra heads and torsos appearing in frame occasionally and people wandering in and out of conversations while they are being filmed. Increasingly too, you see the incorporation of other media into the live broadcast such as personal hand held videos (the coverage of 9/11 relied heavily on personal videos). You could even argue that these aspects operate as the signature of the 'live emergency event' and perhaps define it as a genre. Ultimately though, stories are still required to be assembled and delivered ('bundled') into the rather narrow parameters of what has become expected of this media form over its lifetime.

The Internet as a media form, on the other hand, does not have quite the same limitations. It facilitates the use of data from a much broader set of media forms such as text from sms, chat, images and sound from photos and video and the composition of this data in multiple mediums (web, chat, video, radio etc) and in multiple formats (news web site, blog). This means a media response can be formulated in a broader set of spatial and temporal configurations and it can be delivered more rapidly.

So while you could argue that during the broadcast of an emergency incident, television and radio operate under a changed set of conditions and with different expectations, and that this gives these media forms more latitude for impromptu improvisation, I argue (for the sake of this exercise at any rate), that the Internet is not as 'bundled' and furthermore, because it cannot be conceived as a single medium, its properties allow it to perform an extra ordinary role in the emergency event.

However, all of these characteristics really only makes a difference for the information producer. Access to the Internet can be just as disrupted as other telecommunication services, with ultimately the same result for the end user or consumer. One of the other aspects of the Internet as a media form during the emergency event, is that it can perform multiple purposes. It can act like a poster or billboard, as a news channel, commentary site, collection of personal experiences to name a few examples. These interventions into the emergency event support and create a different set of relationships between the information producer and information consumer than that of other media forms.

So to wind up this rather long winded ramble, perhaps the defining differences come down to two main factors;

- the Internet as a media form, must be understood not a single media that requires the conditioning and framing of information into a single broadcast stream, but as a multicast platform with multiple data streams.

- the Internet is, partly because of its multicast technical properties described above and partly because it is less bundled or 'packaged' can:

* deliver information more rapidly
* be less prone to interruption or disruption in the production and delivery of information
* perform mutiple purposes or roles

All of these contribute to the emergence of a different set of relationships between the information producer and consumer and gives the Internet an extra ordinary role in relation to other media during the emergency event.

nice day but sore throat

Crisp, cloudless morning...at my desk by 9.10am.

I sent off my Confirmation of Candidature (COC) document to my supervisor a few days ago. I know I could do more work on it but am now wondering if I should set it aside and start focusing on the next task at hand. I think that's the Ethics Application. Also, I think I have outgrown the format and structure of the COC in terms of developing my ideas. The thought of the thesis being the next structure to start working on is pretty frightening. I'm hoping that the presentation of the COC to the committee panel will give me some solid feedback on the research. I don't feel like I've quite got the research design sorted out. I still need to locate my research sites and I think the research questions may still be a bit vague and un-anchored somehow.

The cat is stretched out on top of my monitor. She seems to have put on a little bit of a winter tum which is sort of drooping over the top of the display at the moment and obscuring the menu on my desktop. The dog meanwhile is curled up in her bed next to the heater to my left.

My throat is really sore this morning and all my glands are up. I'm finding it hard to focus on my readings. I'm working through "Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality" edited by Steve Woolgar at the moment.

growling and brawling

The dogs are up to no good today. Must be the weather. It's been raining for about a week and everyone is feeling a bit cooped up and damp. The house has that sort of steaming clothes odour and the living room looks like a laundry, clothes hanging over every surface to dry. Really, we are not prepared for this sort of weather in Sydney. I've never had so many undie crisis in one week! It's rare to not be able to hang out your clothes to dry outside. Now I understand why people have dryers. How do people live like this? :-)

Wow, another downpour....impressive.

My blood pressure went up this morning. A bunch of council goons were hacking at the trees in the street. Not just grooming them but hacking off primary limbs (does that make sense? I'm no arborist!). Now I understand if they must trim the branches occasionally to keep them from growing into the electricity cables. However, these guys were butchering the trees. My heart beating madly and my head slightly throbbing (I always get a headache when I get cross), I went outside and as politely as I could asked them what the f*&^% they were doing. They told me they were responding to a complaint. A complaint? A complaint about low lying branches. A complaint about low lying branches? Since when has the council responded to a single complaint? I was flabbergasted and spent the next 30 minutes trying to get through to the Head Tree Manager at the local council to make my own complaint. I wondered if they might respond so enthusiastically to my complaint. I don't think so. Can't image big gang of goons coming down quite so keenly to stick the branches back on. I can't help thinking that there is an unwritten bias towards destruction in the council's policies. It is so much easier to come and cut down a bunch of trees than it is to develop a plan, for say, building a cable trench in the street so that all the trees can grow without fear of reprisal. OK, so I understand this is possibly not the most life and death issue. I can get very worked up about trees. My partner has suggested that I have querulant tendencies. Is that a good word or what? Do you like that word? A querulant is, you could say, a professional complainer. You know, the sad thing is, I could really see myself being a querulant - if I had the time!!

Almost finished my confirmation of candidature document. It's been a really interesting process writing it and I've had to do a lot of thinking about the project. I'm going to try and polish a couple of the sections today and then give my supervisor a revised draft tomorrow.

There is a master class that I've signed up for in August that focuses on strategies for approaching fieldwork. It's excellent timing since I hope to start the fieldwork later this year.

Amazing race

Sitting in the lounge with the powerbook on my lap, thanks to wireless. Cat is on the armchair, one dog on her bed in front of the gas heater and other dog on a pillow on the lounge. Been a bit quiet on the blog front lately. I think I may have got lost in the PHD forest at the base of Mt Fuji. My sister told me it is the deepest, most impenetrable and disorienting forest in Japan. Apparently the army runs orienteering training for their cadets there and many people have got lost. So anyway I felt like I was there and am just emerging from the woods. I've been working on my confirmation of candidature document and it requires formulating and refining my research area. It's been a challenging process particularly since I haven't studied for so long. Last time I wrote anything academic was over ten years ago. I love all the readings I'm doing though. I could easily just read for three years but I don't think that's recommended...

Two dogs

We're looking after another dog at the moment, a little black and white fox terrier. She's pretty cute. During the day while I'm studying, I have both dogs in the room with me. Most of the time they sleep in their beds by my desk but sometimes they get restless and rumble with each other and make a racket.

They've kept me company during this rather stucky blocked time I've been having with my PHD. It's been quite frustrating and has lasted for about two weeks. I'm trying to formulate my research questions and research statement and it just isn't happening. Well actually, I've written about 3 or 4 versions and am just churning over the same stuff.

Aside from the stuckness I'm currently experiencing, I have made some progress on other fronts. I'm a lot clearer about the areas of reading I'd like to cover. I've been overwhelmed by the amount of relevant material. Meanwhile I've met with my two other supervisors and both generated some really good discussions and feedback.

I went to Fisher Library yesterday and borrowed a few more books. One of them was written by another of my supervisors a number of years ago. It's still very relevant and is about computer culture and the irrational self. I particularly like the extrapolation of Don Ihde's typology of the human-technology relationship with the addition of the psychoanalytic categories. I came across Ihde's typology recently and have been thinking about them in terms of how they may fit into my own project. It occurred to me recently while browsing Rosalind Picard's "Affective Computing" that her conceptualisation of what a relationship can be in relation to computers and computational objects could benefit from a more nuanced approach to what types of relationships can be formed. She views them primarily in terms of an alterity relation.

IVF in Australia

The Australian Government based on a proposal by the Minister for Health, Tony Abbot, is considering capping the rebates on the number of IVF cycles for women over 42. This reform attempt has got me really bloody peeved and quite worked up. These are the concerns and observations I have about this proposal.

- There have been an increasing number of incursions by the government to regulate and control what women can and should be doing as "reproductive" members of society.
- This recent proposal is divisive and like many of the Federal government's reform policies creates discord within sections of the populace that would otherwise not have had disparate positions by producing an emotional and competitive discourse whereby an extremely narrow 'normative' body and lifestyle is justified against which all other modes of being and bodies are excluded.
- In addition to being about women's bodies, who and how these should be controlled, this is also an issue about Australia's health system, and about how we define what is an elective and non-elective treatment.

Highlighting some of the internal inconsistencies and ruptures of a piece in the Comments section of the Sydney Morning Herald on Friday April 29th reveals some of these issues at work. In her comment piece, Hilary Burden, addresses all women readers in her claim that "If you have trouble conceiving, don't be surprised, don't ask for handouts and don't think it's the end of the world". According to Burden, women are not only arrogant but also selfish and naive to assume that the government will cover the cost of repeated cycles of IVF once over 42. After dishing out on women, all women apparently, as there are no specific references to any actual quotes by women or women's groups on this issue, only a reference to something Emma Thompson once remarked, she ends by saying that no women should "be made to feel they are dependent on what they produce or don't produce with their bodies. In an overpopulated world, you don't have to have a baby to learn how to labour or live."

Hilary is having trouble making sense of all of this. It's "just weird maths", she states, that the Government gives "couples $3000 for having a baby on the one hand and then reduce their chances of having one on the other."

One of the reasons why Hilary is having trouble understanding this is because she is reacting from a position of being a woman who is struggling to be valued in her own right as a productive member of society without necessarily being a reproductive member of society. Unfortunately Hilary, by taking this stance, is colluding with the Federal government's policies, harming her own cause and those of other women who have a broader and more inclusive position that women who choose to work, women who choose to work and have children and women who choose to have children are all deserving of being valued and supported.

In fact, the inconsistency of the Government's stance on these two issues shows the consistency of their belief that underpins all their policies on women's re-productive and productive labour, the notion that only some bodies and only some modes of being in bodies are acceptable and normal and therefore should be supported by Government funding. For though the Australian government is trying to address what it sees as a growing problem of reduced birth rates, leading to an ageing work force, by encouraging reproduction, the social model for achieving this is not simply to make having children and bringing up children easier to all members of society but to reform the social conditions themselves, so that it is made easier only within certain very narrow parameters, i.e. by being young and by being legally infertile. What this excludes are the many choices and conditions under which either of these two parameters are not viable, such as working for the early part of one's life or due to a phsyiological condition which reduces the likelihood of being able to achieve pregnancy without assistance.

And so, finally to my ultimate concern, about Australia's health system. These parameters of eligibility are maintained by making IVF treatments financially inaccessible, and therefore unavailable, to those who fall outside of the narrow definition. Burden asks, "Why is it so bad to be given three attempts at having another child, and after that, you pay for it yourself. Raise the $10,000 amongst your kin..."

Because by supporting access of only those women who are under 42 and legally infertile, to a comprehensive IVF treatment plan, we are not just reducing the overall rates of successful pregnancy, we are reducing the social and life options of all women in Australian society, and impoverishing the diversity of our culture.

Reviewing blogging

A recent post to a mailing list I subscribe to has got me thinking about why I blog. I have journalled off and on for a number of years. Recently I migrated to a software program called MacJournal. This program has a number of features for journalling that I liked including being able to write up an entry in MacJournal and then post it to a blog or a number of blogs. I used this for a while and I found that it wasn't really doing it for me. There was a sense of being cut off within the program and by my computer. Paradoxically, I think this was associated with where I imagined the writing to reside within the space of my machine. It was hidden away, buried in the directory structure of my hard drive. My desire to reach out to an imagined audience was somehow thwarted by the isolation of the medium within which it was produced. It was a conceptual isolation, in fact. Since there is no reason why blogging directly into 'blogger' is any different. A post is just a button away, not matter which program I was using.

I started up my own blog initially with the intention of logging my PHD progress. This was really all I had in mind. Something happened to me not too long ago that was one of those life changing and life challenging experiences and partly because during that time I was so preoccupied with just getting through it, I didn't journal or log events. One of the reasons I wish I had logged this period was that it literally shifted my reality. Writing for me, in addition to feeling like I am reaching out to others, although mostly imagined others, is also an anchoring device. It is in the traces of thoughts and feelings and in the materiality of the word, that I can see parts of myself in relation to things, events and people and how things change. Oddly, sometimes I do not recognise myself at all but this too is an aspect of my relation to the world. So I started blogging to record my PHD progress and this is still my intention. But somehow my blogging practice has broadened somewhat. The daily asides are more the meat, the PHD progress an aside. Interesting...

Outrageous Breakfast Show

I recently attended the Body Modification Conference Mark II held at Macquarie University. On the second day of the conference, "The Today Show" did a piece on the conference. Karl Stefanovic, Tracy Grimshaw and co spent the next ten minutes laughing and spluttering about the "wacky" conference and its "freaky" subject matter. From memory there were a number of dismissive statements about the so called incomprehensible abstract titles, questions about the relevance to students today along the lines of "what are we teaching our children at University?", and outrage expressed that we could be wasting tax payers money on funding such an event. The presenters laughed nervously throughout. Pardoxically many of the questions raised in their guffawing outrage required a genuine and legitimate response. Why isn't there help available for people who go through life believing that they would be more themselves if they had one leg instead of two? Why is it that we live in a culture where even to mention the words "my smell" evokes horror and terror by its utterance alone? Their discomfort revealed a real anxiety, I believe, about their own inability to address any of these issues with the seriousness and consideration they deserve. On a deeper level, it revealed a cultural anxiety about the issues of body modification. So why is it not acceptable to have a forum for seriously discussing this topic?

Not only were the titles of the papers mentioned mis-quoted, the purpose of the conference was completely mis-understood and its content mis-represented. No member of the coordinating committee of the conference was consulted to comment or provide any information nor did any of the presenters attend the conference to find out what it was about.

In short, it was an exercise in ignorance and anti-intellectualism of the highest "Breakfast Show" order. As viewers, we were presented with the view that we should not take the topic of body modification seriously because we do not WANT to take this seriously. And we should attack anybody who does, because WE have decided that it is not knowledge worth knowing.

Later that day the participants of the conference gathered in one of the lecture theatres to discuss the piece as well as the editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian. I was there during the discussions and at the conference throughout.

What was discussed was the possibility of a response and it led to some really interesting debates about the status of education in Australia, the politics of education and the role of Humanities, the motives and tactics for an effective response were raised and discussed. Many believed that any response was a waste of time. But a strong contingent believed that it is not just necessary but crucial to engage with popular culture and take it seriously, particularly when it takes such an active stance of ignorance and an intention "not to know".

I want to say that the conference was one of the most enlightening and insightful intellectual experiences I have had. The breadth of perspectives and the level of discussion and quality of research was far greater than I had expected. We live in a culture, as Meredith Jones clearly and elegantly described in her presention, where "becoming is more desirable than being". We are presented with demonstrations of self-improvement from many quarters, and this "makeover" culture describes a broad set of current cultural concerns and desires. There are not many appropriate forums for discussing the immense effects and changes that go with these sweeping cultural changes. The conference was one of these. It was an appropriate and relevant forum for bringing together people from all over the world to present and stimulate discussion that will help us to understand and perceive this phenomema from a range of different perspectives and to engage in its complexity. The presenters and program makers of breakfast shows have a choice. They too, could offer a forum for discussing these issues and if it is expressed in a style that is relevant for its genre, then that's OK too. But there is no reason whatsoever to undermine other peoples efforts to understand because of their own ignorance and lack of desire to know or to simply to ask. No excuse at all.

Ode to old wheels

Stains on the passenger seat, faded over time
Indian dinner leaked from a plastic bag,
Traces of dog, white fur and finger nails,
Drivers seat depressed from repeated sittings
Small dents on the rubber bumper from touch parking
A scrape down the side from a poor reverse park
Globe blue, a colour from the nineties, no more
Citrus and Techno grey amongst todays colour schemes
My old car, dolphin of the road, sculpted by my presence and form
I parked her in a back alley in the end
Far from the shine and glare of her fashionable counterparts
I folded inside at the thought of leaving her there
Conveyor of memories and material from my past
Goodbye UDA 434.



Got myself a new set of wheels. I've been enjoying getting a feel for it, how it takes corners, finding the optimum revs to change gears to get the most accelaration but the smoothest changoever, becoming intimately familiar with handling the wipers and indicators, being able to swap CD's by touch (yeah - it doesn't have a six stack CD player unfortunately). Actually it's not really a particularly flash car as far as cars go and I certainly wouldn't call myself very knowledgeable about cars but I do love driving and learning to hear and feel the machine-body. And it's new. I've never had a new car. My last car I bought second hand in 1994 and it was two years old at the time. I loved that car. Dropping it off in the side lane behind the car show room where I was to pick up my new car, closing the creaking door for the last time, I really felt a pang of regret. How attached I had become to my old car. I felt like I was abandoning her in the back lot. So my initial encounter with my new car was a little mixed with sadness as well as excitement. I got the guys to take a shot of me with my old car and another one with my new. I felt they really understood. I asked them if they'd take care of my old car. They nodded and said "Of course".

This afternoon I was stuck in traffic on the highway I regularly drive down to get to Uni. I was on my way back from a special visit to the library in order to renew and then reborrow two books that were one day overdue. So there I was, music up loud, rain hitting the windscreen, the sweet smell of new car and dustless surfaces, my own personal bubble as Michael Bull would say. I turned to the side and to my amazement, saw my old car in the car lot of the place I purchased my new car. She'd had a makeover. New wheels, hubcaps and a polish. It was too quick to examine her new features in detail but my heart leapt at the thought that she would have a new lease of life and a new owner.

Zombie Pope

Where is Buffy when you need her? Doesn't she know that the undead is in St Peters Square? I mean can we be really sure that he is gone? Since he was almost gone for quite a few days. And all of these rituals involving teenagers and young twenty somethings worshipping his greatness strikes me as very hellmouth activity. Now that Sunnydale is a large whole of nothingness, perhaps the hellmouth has re-located to St Peters Square.

I'm seeing zombies everywhere at the moment and I guess that has something to do with watching Resident Evil II the other night and alot to do with the green and red pills I've been swapping between the last few days to facilitate continuous oxygenic intake and break up the mucous masses.

Drove out to Uni today to return the digital recorder after my first interview on Sunday. Someone at Uni needed it prior to going overseas so I hit the road clean. No green pills. I'm easily affected by these substances and it recommends on the packet not driving or using heavy machinery while affected. No shit! I wonder if that includes my computer. How heavy does machinery have to be before it's considered heavy machinery?

chai

That was a great idea - meeting up with a friend for chai this afternoon. My mind was spinning from reading about the writings of Levinas. Not even the texts of Levinas but an "Introduction to Levinas" was enough to get me wondering if existence itself may have been disappearing out of a slow leak in my skull. It was only when I came face to face with my friend that the sense of disorientation and dizziness passed into a feeling of familiarity and acceptance. I am very interested in following up Levinas' writings on The Face. What about technology? What is it in the face to face encounter with technology, specifically digital technology but really any technology, any object, anything that is conceived as part of this world, that gives knowledge about that object and yet still have a sense of our selves as separate from it? What does Levinas' face tell us about the interface? What is kept separate and how in the human-computer encounter? Is the separateness important and something to savour? How can it be understood? There is a foundational act to this questioning because it raises the issue of whether there is a relationship to discover and whether it can be called such a thing. And yet, I know on a deep level that it is there, formed in myself in my body, dreams and in my every day use. It is so thoroughly embedded that I feel its loss when it is not there, although it can hardly be called gone.

what's been up

Well it's been just over a week since my last post and my brain has recovered from its moment of excess stimuli. Unfortunately it was my back that decided to give me grief this week. Too much hunching at the desk with many an empty thought. Actually despite the back problems and being stranded in the rain with a flat car battery one day this week, I have achieved quite a bit on the PHD front. I seem to be slowly catching up on the summaries of readings done to date. This exercise involved me re-reading a journal article I had already read but made no notes about and I discovered on my second reading all sorts of interesting insights. My sister has suggested that I could spend the next three years re-reading the same article. Very funny sis but you know she does have a point.

I also drafted my first questionaire for a pilot interview I'm conducting with a friend next week. I emailed it off to my supervisor to have a look at and have re-thought big chunks of it since then. Oh well. It is a work in progress.

I finally got through Nardi and Day's "Information Ecologies". I put it aside for a while while reading other things. What I did find very inspiring about it was the 'systems approach' to the analysis of technology in use. Although I appreciate that the authors were extending this to an understanding of the system as an ecology which perhaps conceptually at least implies more room for local strategies and difference, the focus was on environments in which technology and people interacted and not just a single user operating on a piece of software.

Stimuli

I am feeling a little overwhelmed with intellectual stimuli. I must remind myself that I have been a very hands on kind of person for the last seven years. My brain muscles are sore...

Had another great brainstorm with my supervisor this morning. That is such a great word. Brainstorm. I thought surely somehow has registered the domain name but it doesn't appear to be being used although I haven't checked if it is available. Note to self. I do not need another domain name. My online etymology dictionary tells me that the word Brainstorm meaning "brilliant idea, mental excitement" was first used in 1849 and some of the other iterations include: brainsick (1483) meaning "mad, addled", braindead is dated back to 1976 (but doesn't seem to have a known source); brain teaser is from 1923, brainwashing has been imported from China and came into usage in 1950 and is a literal translation of Chinese xi nao.

But yeah braindead after brainstorm. Really love this PHD thing but geez it really is very brainfocused.

Writing workshop

The uni is offering a series of thesis writing workshops and I attended one today. It could be a good way to write and receive feedback but I have concerns about how the group will engage with each others material. I guess there is a danger that the feedback will be kind of pointless or worse, undermining but then again it could also be a stimulating environment that assists the writing process. I'll give it a go despite my qualms. It's an eight week course.

Almost time for a dog walk

I've been reading some more journal articles today and have consolidated some of the output I've generated to date. I have come up with a Reading Key and Area Key for the readings I'm doing to categorise them in terms of progress and topic. I'm hoping this will evolve into a file that documents the literature areas by priority which is one of my MOA's for this semester. I'm itching to start writing without really having a coherent picture of what it is I'm itching to write although plenty of wondrously vague images and ideas...

Going out to Uni today

Heading out to Uni today. There is a seminar series on that I am interested in attending on cultural diversity. I've been enjoying Postphenomenology but I think the essay "Image Technologies and Traditional Culture" was flawed and superficial. There is a vast amount of media theories that develop, interpret and critique these technologies in terms of machines that reconfigure the ways that a culture constructs space and time. Early semiotic readings combined with the psychoanalytic interpretations facilitate an understanding of how meaning is contstructed through the cinematic apparatus. Ihde does not refer to any of these insights or builds on them. The specific elements of the cinematic or televisual apparatus that Ihde chooses to foreground, that is, the irreal/real dialectic and the "effects" of cinematographic technologies including flattening, constructing space and time through techniques such as time reversals, flashbacks, special effects and discontinuities are mentioned but not contextualised or explicated in terms of how they create cultural meaning. Just as importantly, seeing the rise of fundamentalism as a reaction to the pluriculture that is becoming of a culture of image-mediation just doesn't gel, or at the very least, it doesn't help me to understand the cultural and historical specificity of the role of fundamentalism in the world today.

Islands on my mind

Been thinking about LOST and its significance as an allegory of cultural renewal and reinvention of the simulacrum, specifically, of America as television. What is LOST? Is it TV, as we may be tempted to believe by the title of the unofficial fan site on the web "LOST-TV"? Islands themselves and stories of island-making, by their liminality, can act as a stage for the re-working of meaning. What is lost in LOST is the past, which is slowly being reconstructed as the series progresses. What is lost is being able to communicate effectively through available technologies to the world, although here too we have the potential for technological salvation by the invention of a mysterious communication device by Sayid. What is lost is also how to get along with others, although it looks like this too may be rediscovered, episodically, as the survivors gain awareness of their situation; their hunger, thirst and isolation. What is lost is also material culture, though we have its wreckage and the remains of the plane's cargo which is rapidly diminishing. And here, in these diminished places, with the remains of the old, the series finds the space for its narrative of renewal and rediscovery. A quote from Dennings "Mr Bligh's Bad Language" echoes this idea of the meaning of island-making.

"Islands lie behind the screen of the sea. A screen as large as the Pacific Ocean thoroughly sifts the life that reaches an island. The few species of plants and animals that survive the sea, now without competition, play many variations on their own themes. All living things come to an island with only the capital of their minds, their instincts and their genes. In the case of human beings, they can also bring with them a select cargo of natural and cultural artefacts. Nothing is transported whole, however. The webs of significance are always darned...Island making sublimates a sense of alienation." (Mr Bligh's Bad Language by Greg Denning)

More to come on this, must stretch and rediscover my bodily parts such as toes and legs.

Study weekend

Some friends and I are away on a study weekend. A bit of postphenomenology before breakfast and a dog walk on the beach has set me up well for a relaxing day. We've driven about two hours north and are staying in a beach house by the sea next to a national park. My desires for the day - to read more of Don Ihde's series of essays on postphenomenolgy and to finish a research paper by Kim Dovey on "The Dwelling Experience: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture". And not to be forgotten, it's Mardi Gras today. We are planning an evening celebration up here in the beach house with the wildlife. It's the first year in a few years that I really feel like celebrating it. Happy Mardi Gras!

Lost in the Burbs

I got lost yesterday trying to find my way to an orientation for research students. It was one of those circular, maze like new suburbs on the fringes of the city. One minute I was driving past a long stretch of grassy hillocks and the next I was in a dense suburb of yellow and red brick kit homes built on a snaking main artery with lots of promising looking offshoots that turned out to be cul-de-sacs. I felt the panic rising when I realised that I had got myself completely disoriented and lost glimpse of the big grassy knoll with the building on the top of it that I'd been using as a landmark. I kept thinking of the new series of "LOST".

This new series has me gripped and has blitzed my long standing obsession with ER on at the same time. The combination of islands, an airplane crash, paranormal activities, psychic disturbances and the promise of self discovery is just too irresistable. I went in search for a new LOST desktop pattern and was disappointed to discover that there is one available for just about every character on the show except for Hurley. My favourite character! What's wrong with having a geek for wallpaper?

Had a second meeting with my supervisor later in the afternoon and have arranged some upcoming meetings and milestones. I've decided to meet my other two supervisors individually to seek their input and get a better sense of how their particular interests and approach can contribute to the process.

Capsule challenger

capsule challenger
Originally uploaded by Juzza.

Surely the combined mental force of an MA, PHD and Grad Dip will overcome the challenge of the rent-a-capsule.

Springy floorboards

What a strange noise. There is a guy crawling around under our house chocking up the piers where the ground has settled a bit. Well it is a 110 year old house built on a clay surface. We had gaps between the floorboards and the piers resulting in springy boards in certain sections of the house. The dog is going nuts trying to defend the house against the subterranean intruder.

Yesterday I blog swopped with a co-student. Possibly a bit premature. I'm still getting a hang of this thing. Not sure what I am doing with it yet. But sort of thrilling that it now features as one of the blogs of other PHD students around the place in his list of blogs. Thanks. Did I qualify that this is a really boring blog that contains the most banale asides of my life and very few insights?

Well as long as you know that...

I've been doing some productive work recently interspersed with periods of getting to know some other students, wrangling tradespeople and being a new Aunt. Current readings include a bunch of interesting journal articles including an organisational management type article on personal decoration of the work space, an ethnographic study of the making of Automatic Speech Recognition technologies and a cultural studies/sociological investigation into the affective dimensions of car driving.

Also have a new old game to explore and have been working on my summaries of readings to date. Talking to another student I am wondering whether I am approaching this a bit too formally. Each summary is taking forever and I think I'm treating it as if it was a review.