Keyword: Culture – Now Available Open Access

Yes, indeed, the crickets have taken over here at The Late Age of Print. I’m pretty active these days over on Twitter and Facebook, but longer-form, blogging—well, who can find enough time?

Anyway, here I am, happy to share some of the work that’s distracted me from blogging. Princeton University Press recently released Digital Keywords, edited by Ben Peters. The collection pays homage to Raymond Williams’ landmark volume Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976/1983), but asks: which terms would be most useful for understanding digital or computational cultures of the 21st century? I wrote the chapter on culture, which, following in the footsteps of Williams, one of my intellectual heroes, was one of the most challenging and rewarding pieces of scholarly writing I’ve ever taken on.

The good news is that a PDF of the chapter is now freely available over on Culture Digitally. Download and enjoy! You’ll find a bunch of other chapters from Digital Keywords there, too, all of which Princeton U. P. was kind enough to release Open Access. If you like what you see and decide you want to purchase the book (please do!), the Press is offering a discount of 25%. The coupon code, P06197, is good until December 31, 2016.

And since I seem to be in the business of just giving away research, check out my other two recent publications, both of which are freely available Open Access:

• “Algorithmic Culture,” published summer 2015 in European Journal of Cultural Studies
• “Recommended for You: The Netflix Prize and the Production of Algorithmic Culture,” co-authored with Blake Hallinan, published January 2016 in New Media and Society

Both are companion pieces, of sorts, to the “Culture” chapter appearing in Digital Keywords. Enjoy.

Call for Papers – Machine Communication

communication +1 invites submissions for its upcoming issue, “Machine Communication.”
Edited by David Gunkel and Zachary McDowell

With this special issue we hope to explore the boundaries of communication beyond the human subject and the restrictions of humanism by considering that which is radically other – the machine. We seek articles that interrogate the opportunities and challenges that emerge around, within, and from interactions and engagements with machines of all types and varieties. By examining the full range of human-machine interactions, machine-machine interactions, or other hitherto unanticipated configurations, we hope to assemble a collection of ground-breaking essays that push the boundaries of our discipline and probe the new social configurations of the 21st century. Topics may include but are not limited to:

1. Algorithmic Culture – Influence of machines on human or other non-machine culture
2. Automation – Drones, Robots, or other automated systems that exist in the world and take part in a variety of tasks
3. Artificial Intelligence – Either the possibilities of AGI (artificial general intelligence) or more specific smart systems
4. Big Data, Deep Learning, Neural Networks and other recent innovations in computer science
5. The Internet of Things
6. Cybernetics, Bioinformatics, Knowledge Representation, or various applications of Software Theory.

Please submit short proposals of no more than 500 words by December 13th, 2015 to communicationplusone@gmail.com.

Upon invitation, full text submissions will be due April 5th, 2013, with expected publication in September, 2016.

About the Journal

The aim of communication +1 is to promote new approaches to and open new horizons in the study of communication from an interdisciplinary perspective. We are particularly committed to promoting research that seeks to constitute new areas of inquiry and to explore new frontiers of theoretical activities linking the study of communication to both established and emerging research programs in the humanities, social sciences, and arts. Other than the commitment to rigorous scholarship, communication +1 sets no specific agenda. Its primary objective is to create is a space for thoughtful experiments and for communicating these experiments.

communication +1 is an open access journal supported by University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries and the Department of Communication

Editor in Chief: Briankle G. Chang, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Managing Editor: Zachary J. McDowell, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Advisory Board:
Kuan-Hsing Chen, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
Bernard Geoghegan, Humboldt-Universität, Germany
Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
David Gunkel, Northern Illinois University
Catherine Malabou, Kingston University, United Kingdom
Jussi Parikka, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
John Durham Peters, University of Iowa
Johnathan Sterne, McGill University
Ted Striphas, University of Colorado, Boulder
Greg Wise, Arizona State University

For more information or to participate in the communicationplusone.org project, please email communicationplusone@gmail.com

We’re Hiring!

I can’t say enough great things about my new professional home, the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado-Boulder (which, while we’re at it, is part of the newly-created College of Media, Communication, and Information). And I’m delighted to share this news: we’re hiring not one, not two, but three new faculty members to help take one of the very best programs in the country to the next level.

Here are the job descriptions:

1. Assistant Professor in Communication, Civic Engagement, and Race/Ethnicity
2. Assistant or Associate Professor in Communicating and Organizing
3. Assistant or Associate Professor in Discourse and Society

These are going to be highly sought-after positions, so put your best foot forward.

One Year Later…

Can it really have been over a year since I last posted on Late Age of Print? Evidently, yes, which is hard to believe, given how regular I was at posting during the first three or so years of this blog. It seems almost too glib to say this, but life has been almost unimaginably busy, especially over the last year.

I’m writing from my beautiful new surrounds in Boulder, Colorado. Much of what consumed my time over the last year was the reorganization—and eventual dissolution—of my previous department, Communication & Culture, at Indiana University. It was time for a change, and I’m delighted to have joined the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado-Boulder. It’s a place teeming with energy and good feeling, not to mention brilliant faculty and students who are already challenging me in new ways.

I’m also thrilled to be a part of the newly-minted College of Media, Communication, and Information, the institutional umbrella under which Advertising & PR, Communication, Critical Media Practices, Information Science, Intermedia Arts, Writing, & Performance, Journalism, and Media Studies are all gathered. This seems to me precisely the way in which Communication and Media ought to be organized in and for the 21st century. We’re headed by Dean Lori Bergen.

One important last bit of news: I’ve managed to secure Open Access rights to just about all of my published journal articles and have made them freely available through my page on Academia.edu. (I’m also working on making them available through SSRN.) Download and enjoy.

I have at least one more announcement—not about me—that will be coming in the next week or so, so you can anticipate waiting less than year between blog posts. 

 

Lawrence Grossberg Memorializes Stuart Hall

The last post over on my other blog (The Late Age of Print) was dedicated to Stuart Hall, likely the most significant international figure in the field of cultural studies, who died last week at the age of 82. Lawrence (Larry) Grossberg, my doctoral advisor, has penned a moving tribute to Hall, his mentor, with whom he worked at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1968-1969.  Here is an excerpt from the piece, which appeared this past Saturday on Truthout:

When I think of Stuart, I think of an expanding rich tapestry of relations, not of followers and acolytes, but of friends, students, colleagues, interlocutors, participants in various conversations, and anyone willing to listen, talk and engage. Stuart Hall was more than an intellectual, a public advocate for ideas, a champion of equality and justice, and an activist. He was also a teacher and a mentor to many people, in many different ways, at many different distances from his immediate presence. He talked with anyone and everyone, and treated them as if they had as much to teach him as he had to teach them.

Hall's work was as much about the interpersonal—his kindness, charisma, and generosity—in other words, as it was about the many influential writings and lectures he produced over the course of his career. I wish I'd had the chance to get to know Hall better.

I had the privilege of sharing a meal with him once, in 1996, during my second year of graduate school. He was extraordinarily gracious and, indeed, patient, as I barraged him with what must have been dilettantish questions.  Afterwards we shopped for books at a nearby used bookstore.  I still have the copy of Erving Goffman's Asylums that I happened to pick up that day; even now I  associate the book more with Hall than with its author.

 I also got to know Hall indirectly, through a study of the Birmingham Centre annual reports, which I conducted with my friend and colleague Mark Hayward.  Hall's imprint is all over those documents, and not only because he authored the bulk of them.  In their inventory of daily life at the Centre one can plainly see Hall's emphasis on the interpersonal—in the way the Centre's working groups were organized; in the spirit of sharing that so defined its (as well as his own) intellectual modus operandi, and that had more than a little to do with cultural studies' success; in the way Hall empowered students to collaborate in the production of a serious academic journal; and certainly more.

 Larry's tribute to Hall is also a call, too: for the American mainstream media to pay heed to such an influential figure, one whose passing has not received the attention it deserves; and for the American Left to embrace Hall's legacy, a legacy defined not only by his towering intellect but, equally important, by his luminescent being-in-the-world.

I'll Tumble for Ya

Because I know people inhabit multiple platforms online, I'm pleased to announce that I'm now on Tumblr.

Don't worry—I'm not shutting down this blog.  But if it wasn't obvious already, I've had difficulty  keeping up with Differences & Repetitions, a result, mainly, of my academic workload.  Since I love blogging but have less time to deliver substantive content, I figured Tumblr would be the perfect place to engage in some of the work I do here, albeit in shorter form.  You can still expect to see extended meditations on books, algorithmic culture, and other topics on this blog, at least from time to time.  But if you're looking for regular content, then my Tumblr's the place for you.

I'm excited about Tumblr because, as I'm learning, it seems to be as much (if not more) about curation as my own commentary.  I like the idea of being a little less "bloggy," as it were, and instead sharing a range of artifacts that say something about my disposition toward the world.  That's largely how I've been approaching Twitter over the last few years, as it turns out, which is something that my recent forays into Tumblr have helped me to see.  But sometimes I've felt constrained on Twitter because of the 140 character limit.  I appreciate how Tumblr gives me an opportunity to say a little more, absent the compulsion to be overblown.

I should mention that my Tumblr is all about you, too.  Many of the stories I've shared on Twitter and elsewhere have been sent to me by friends/colleagues/acquaintances, and I'd like to keep the tradition alive as I move into Tumblr.  And of course, you can expect credit where credit is due. Always.

...in Translation

Great news, y'all. A couple of weeks ago I received a copy of the Korean translation of my book, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture From Consumerism to Control! I'm thrilled, needless to say, and even a bit surprised. Last summer the publisher of the English language edition, Columbia University Press, let me know that the translation was in the works, but honestly I didn't expect it to surface for...oh, I don't know, a few years, I suppose. And yet, here it is, now. Can't you tell how giddy this makes me?

A big thanks to Columbia U.P., the Korean Publishing Association, and the translator for all of their dedication to the project.

The Billion Dollar Book

About a week ago Michael Eisen, who teaches evolutionary biology at UC Berkeley, blogged about a shocking discovery one of his postdocs had made in early April. The discovery happened not in his lab, but of all places on Amazon.com.

While searching the site for a copy of Peter Lawrence's book The Making of a Fly (1992), long out of print, the postdoc happened across two merchants selling secondhand editions for -- get this -- $1.7 million and $2.2 million respectively! A series of price escalations ensued as Eisen returned to the product page over following days and weeks until one seller's copy topped out at $23 million.

But that's not the worst of it. One of the comments Eisen received on his blog post pointed to a different secondhand book selling on Amazon for $900 million. It wasn't an original edition of the Gutenberg Bible from 1463, nor was it a one-of-a-kind art book, either. What screed was worth almost $1 billion? Why, a paperback copy of actress Lana Turner's autobiography, published in 1991, of course! (I suspect the price may change, so in the event that it does, here's a screen shot showing the price on Saturday, April 30th.)

Good scientist that he is, Eisen hypothesized that something wasn't right about the prices on the fly book. After all, they seemed to be adjusting themselves upward each time he returned to the site, and like two countries engaged in an arms race, they always seemed to do so in relationship to each other. Eisen crunched some numbers:

On the day we discovered the million dollar prices, the copy offered by bordeebook [one of the sellers] was1.270589 times the price of the copy offered by profnath [the other seller]. And now the bordeebook copy was 1.270589 times profnath again. So clearly at least one of the sellers was setting their price algorithmically in response to changes in the other’s price. I continued to watch carefully and the full pattern emerged. (emphasis added)

So the culprit behind the extraordinarily high prices wasn't a couple of greedy (or totally out of touch) booksellers. It was, instead, the automated systems -- the computer algorithms -- working behind the scenes in response to perceived market dynamics.

I've spent the last couple of blog posts talking about algorithmic culture, and I believe what we're seeing here -- algorithmic pricing -- may well be an extension of it.

It's a bizarre development. It's bizarre not because computers are involved in setting prices (though in this case they could have been doing a better job of it, clearly). It is bizarre because of the way in which algorithms are being used to disrupt and ultimately manipulate -- albeit not always successfully -- the informatics of markets.

Indeed, I'm becoming convinced that algorithms (at least as I've been talking about them) are a response to the decentralized forms of social interaction that grew up out of, and against, the centralized forms of culture, politics, and economics that were prevalent in the second and third quarters of 2oth century. Interestingly, the thinkers who conjured up the idea of decentralized societies often turned to markets -- and more specifically, to the price system -- in an attempt to understand how individuals distributed far and wide could effectively coordinate their affairs absent governmental and other types of intervention.

That makes me wonder: are the algorithms being used on Amazon and elsewhere an emergent form of "government," broadly understood? And if so, what does a billion dollar book say about the prospects for good government in an algorithmic age?

CFP -- Academic Labor

International Journal of Communication
Academic Labor & Administration in Communication Studies
Special Section Edited by Jonathan Sterne, McGill University

Academic labor today is characterized by a series of disconcerting trends: an increasingly casualized professoriate; universities that increasingly depend on  chronically undercompensated part-time and graduate student labor to support their course offerings; a top-down managerial style and erosion of faculty governance; increasing economic exploitation of staff and undergraduates; rising student debt; governments that attack public education; shrinking endowments (for the schools that had them) and heighted expectations for sponsored research; wooden research assessment exercises; and the acute uncertainty of the academic job market for recent PhD graduates.   Against these, there is a growing academic labor movement, with its own intellectual organs like Workplace and Edufactory and a wide range of activist manifestations, from labor unions to non-commercial alternative universities.  Academic journals have also fielded debate in this area, from Social Text’s foray into the Yale Strike to Topia’s announced special issue on the anniversary of Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins.

This special forum of the International Journal of Communication aims to make two contributions to the ongoing discussion of academic labor.

1.            To encourage university administrators – current and former – who are sympathetic to the academic labor movement and the new student activism to reflect on their experiences in administration and thereby provide useful knowledge for activists, organizers, and others.   Much of the existing literature on academic labor treats university administrations as a fairly monolithic “management,” yet university administrations are riddled with conflict, contradiction and constraint.    In most instances, administrators used to be faculty members, and in many they will be again, once their administrative terms are over.  A better understanding of the politics and conflicts of administration may be useful in the struggle for better conditions within universities as places to work and study.

2.            To encourage people in Communication Studies – at all levels in the field – to reflect directly on the state of academic labor in our field.  Much of the academic labor literature has come from fields with considerably worse job markets than Communication Studies, like English and History.   Yet Communication Studies does not conform to so well to models of those other fields, either academically or institutionally.  More importantly, it is possible that within professional organizations and within departments we can begin to address some of these issues.  But first, we need to confront them.

Submissions should be 500-4000 words in length and may come in any form of critical commentary piece, ranging from academic analysis of some aspect of the current crisis; to personal/political reflection; to recommendations for activism, policy, or best practices; or any other style of critical commentary.  We are particularly interested in pieces that not only identify problems but offer potential solutions or new perspectives.

Multimedia submissions are also welcome.

Although the section will be edited and reviewed, it will not be subject to blind peer review.

For the purposes of this forum, “Communication Studies” will be interpreted broadly to include all related fields and subfields, theoretical and applied.

We welcome commentary from any and all parts of the world, though submissions should be made in English.  Submissions by current or former administrators in fields outside Communication Studies are most welcome.

Send queries, proposals or essays to al@sterneworks.org.

Deadline for submissions: 1 June 2011

Decisions, and comments on accepted submissions will be returned by 1 July 2011

Expected date of publication will be September 2011.

All submissions must follow IJOC style.  Author guidelines for the IJOC are available at: http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/about/submissions#authorGuidelines.

Algorithmic Culture, Redux

Back in June I blogged about "Algorithmic Culture," or the sorting, classifying, and hierarchizing of people, places, objects, and ideas using computational processes. (Think Google search, Amazon's product recommendations, who gets featured in your Facebook news feed, etc.) Well, for the past several months I've been developing an essay on the theme, and it's finally done. I'll be debuting it at Vanderbilt University's "American Cultures in the Digital Age" conference on Friday, March 18th, which I'm keynoting along with Kelly Joyce (College of William & Mary), Cara Finnegan (University of Illinois), and Eszter Hargittai (Northwestern University). Needless to say, I'm thrilled to be joining such distinguished company at what promises to be, well, an event.


The piece I posted originally on algorithmic culture generated a surprising -- and exciting -- amount of response. In fact, nine months later, it's still receiving pingbacks, I'm pretty sure as a result of its having found its way onto one or more college syllabuses. So between that and the good results I'm seeing in the essay, I'm seriously considering developing the material on algorithmic culture into my next book. Originally after Late Age I'd planned on focusing on contemporary religious publishing, but increasingly I feel as if that will have to wait.

Drop by the conference if you're in or around the Nashville area on Friday, March 18th. I'm kicking things off starting at 9:30 a.m. And for those of you who can't make it there, here's the title slide from the PowerPoint presentation, along with a little taste of the talk's conclusion:

This latter definition—culture as authoritative principle—is, I believe, the definition that’s chiefly operative in and around algorithmic culture. Today, however, it isn’t culture per se that is a “principle of authority” but increasingly the algorithms to which are delegated the task of driving out entropy, or in Matthew Arnold’s language, “anarchy.” You might even say that culture is fast becoming—in domains ranging from retail to rental, search to social networking, and well beyond—the positive remainder of specific information processing tasks, especially as they relate to the informatics of crowds. And in this sense algorithms have significantly taken on what, at least since Arnold, has been one of culture’s chief responsibilities, namely, the task of “reassembling the social,” as Bruno Latour puts it—here, though, by discovering statistical correlations that would appear to unite an otherwise disparate and dispersed crowd of people.

I expect to post a complete draft of the piece on "Algorithmic Culture" to my project site once I've tightened it up a bit. Hopefully it will generate even more comments, questions, and provocations than the blog post that inspired the work initially.

In the meantime, I'd welcome any feedback you may have about the short excerpt appearing above, or on the talk if you're going to be in Nashville this week.

Cultural Studies in the Future Tense

My mentor and dear friend Lawrence Grossberg recently published a great new book with Duke University Press, Cultural Studies in the Future Tense. I'll be reviewing it here in the next few weeks or months, but for now I wanted to link to a podcast from The Critical Lede.  The hosts Ben Myers and Desiree Rowe interview Larry about the book and how through intellectual work we might begin re-imagining political life in the United States and abroad.



Having listened to the interview, I should mention that it's not only compelling for what Larry has to say about his new book, but also as a succinct introduction to cultural studies.  He says, in a nutshell, that we should imagine taking ten jigsaw puzzles, dumping all the pieces out into a bucket, mixing the up, and then throwing out the pictures.  Then figure out how to reassemble them.  That's how hard it is -- or should be -- to do cultural studies.

Amen.  Enjoy the interview.

Now in Paperback

Whew!  Since launching D&R more than five years ago, not a month has gone by in which I've not blogged here.  Well, it almost happened this month.  Apologies for all the quiet around here as I've settled back into teaching and even deeper into fatherhood.  I'm glad I made it in under the wire.

I have some good news to share with all of you.  My book, The Late Age of Print, is now available in paperback! Yes folks, that's right. If you've been holding off buying the book because it was available only in hardback (and, ahem, free digital download), now's your chance to pick up a copy all your own.


I'd be remiss not to mention that the paperback contains a new preface, written by me. It offers something like a theory of the relationship of printed and electronic books, constructed around a distinction the Canadian media historian Harold Innis once drew between "time binding" and "space binding" technologies. It also tries to walk the fine line between simply celebrating or bemoaning these different types of books, which is one of the recurrent themes you'll find in Late Age. Here's a little taste from the preface:

For Sven Birkerts, printed words possess “weight, grandeur,” while their electronic counterparts suffer because of their supposed “weightlessness.” Could it be, though, that the turgidity of printed words, and hence the paper vessels containing them, quietly persuade us to settle for less authoritative, definitive, and elegant books than we deserve? Grandeur, perhaps. But if history teaches us anything, it teaches us that complacency follows all too easily in the wake of humankind’s most majestic accomplishments.

And another:

The challenge, it seems to me, is to find ways to ensure that we continue living in an expanding culture, which is to say, one that strikes a suitable balance between time- and space-binding technologies. This would be a culture in which neither printed nor electronic books exclusively ruled the day. Instead, it would be one in which the “p” and the “e” mingled promiscuously

The paperback is available from my publisher, Columbia University Press, as well as most major booksellers including IndieBound, Powells, Amazon.com, and Barnes & Noble.

If I get some time in the coming months I may try to redesign the book's companion blog. The look seems a little stale to me after two years, plus it would be nice to reboot The Late Age of Print website on or near the occasion on the paperback's release. If there are things you like or dislike about that site or would like to see added, shoot me an email or leave a comment. Since my goal isn't just to make The Late Age of Print blog look better but to make it more reader-friendly, I'd appreciate your input.

Speaking of input, I'd also love to hear from those of you who've read the new preface to the paperback edition or, for that mater, from any of you who've read and want to discuss Late Age.

More anon...

We Are All Salespeople Now

On December 9th, the website Patently Apple, which monitor's the computer maker's patent applications, came across a filing for an intriguing new application sharing feature.  In a nutshell, it would allow iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and Mac apps (coming in 2011) to be downloaded not only from Apple's proprietary servers, but also directly from devices belonging to one's peers.  Here's a graphic from Patently Apple outlining how the proposed feature would work:

The idea behind the peer-to-peer sharing function goes something like this.  Someone you know shows you an app.  You decide you like it, so you establish a wireless connection to your friend's device and presto! The app is yours, without ever having to log on to Apple.  At some point down the line, one or the other of the mobile devices would report the transaction back to Apple, which would in turn arrange for the appropriate billing.

It's difficult to draw meaningful comparisons between the analog and digital realms, but let me take a crack at it anyway.  Imagine for a moment that a friend of yours is reading a book.  You give it a quick inspection and determine that it looks interesting to you.  Instead of trudging to the library or bookstore, or ordering it online, your friend just happens to have another copy she'd be happy to sell to you directly.  And so on and so on, for every friend of hers who is also interested in the book.  (Somehow, the proceeds from each sale find their way back to the distributor.)

If Apple follows through on this patent application -- and there's no guaranteeing that it will -- then it could fundamentally alter how we understand and go about transacting for digital goods.  In addition to a fixed, centralized point of point-of-sale, there would now be millions of decentralized, mobile points-of-sale.  Buttressed by a sufficiently robust incentive system (say, a free 99¢ app after 10 paid shares, or something to that effect), you can only imagine how many apps would end up getting sold between friends.  We are all salespeople now.

In some ways, Apple's proposed peer-to-peer app selling system isn't anything new.  People have long discovered new products through interactions with friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances.  It's not a coincidence that these types of communications are the basis upon which viral marketing is built.  What is different, however, is the way in which Apple could conceivably close the gap between word of mouth advertising and a completed, commercial transaction.  Ideally, the two moments would become virtually indistinguishable from one another.

The other odd bit here, which no one seems to be commenting on, is this: under the proposed system, people would be paying Apple hundreds, even thousands of dollars for its hardware, which would in turn allow them to buy into the company's mobile app sales force.  That's right -- you get to pay for the privilege of working for Apple Computer! This is assuming that the meager incentives you receive for selling are, on balance, incommensurate with the high cost of the hardware.  If it wasn't abundantly clear by now, Apple truly has a bullpen full of evil geniuses in its employ.

Get ready to go to work.

Debate on the Future of Higher Ed

Culture Machine, probably the most innovative open access cultural studies journal around, is hosting a debate on the future of higher education.  It's very Important stuff.  Check it out!

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The Culture Machine debate on the future of higher education in the UK and internationally, and on the position of the arts, humanities and social sciences within the university, continues.

Six new contributions have just been added to the Culture Machine InterZone section:

• ‘The Death of the University, English Style’ by Nick Couldry and Angela McRobbie, both at Goldsmiths, University of London

• ‘Cut the Shock Doctrine: Radicalize Common Sense’ by Paul Bowman, Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, Cardiff University

• ‘Amidst the Culture of Efficiency’ by Sunil Manghani, Critical and Cultural Theory , York St John University

• ‘On the “Death” of the University’ by Jason Rovito, Communication and Culture, York and Ryerson Universities

• 'Education, Education, Education' by Ewa Sidorenko, Education, University of Greenwich

• ‘Diversity and Choice’ by Leon Wainwright, History of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University

To read the pieces, visit the Culture Machine InterZone: http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/view/12

More contributions to follow.

If you still want to join the debate, email your all contribution to Gary Hall at <gary@garyhall.info>, remembering to include your full name and academic affiliation (if any). If, for institutional or other reasons, you would prefer to have your piece published anonymously, we would be happy to accommodate this.

All contributions will be reviewed by the Editorial Board on a rolling basis, with those accepted for publication being made immediately available on the Culture Machine site.

*************************************
Culture Machine is part of Open Humanities Press
http://www.openhumanitiespress.org

For more information, visit the Culture Machine site at:
http://www.culturemachine.net

"Harry Potter Grows Up": The Meaning Behind a Cliché

For those of you who aren't familiar with The Late Age of Print, the final chapter of the book focuses on the extraordinary literary sensation that is Harry Potter. So, needless to say, Harry Potter has been on my mind quite a bit lately, especially with today's release of the first installment of the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

I don't have much to say about the latest film, honestly, not having yet seen it -- although I intend to, as I've seen the previous six movies and have read/enjoyed all seven books. Instead, what I've been thinking about lately is the age of Harry Potter, or rather that of his fans.

I teach an undergraduate course at the 300 or Junior level called "The Cultures of Books and Reading"; during one week, we focus on the many-headed Harry Potter phenomenon. When I first launched the book class, back in 2006, I was excited to realize that my students were basically Harry's contemporaries. Those among them who were eleven years old -- Harry's age -- when the series launched in 1997 were twenty in 2006, which is the typical age of most college Juniors.

But now it's four years later, and those twenty year-olds are turning twenty-four. Yes, that's right, twenty-four -- practically a quarter century. Graduate school age. Marrying age. Getting established in one's career age. Even baby-having age. I'm feeling old just writing about them! Indeed, it's not just that Harry Potter and the actors who portray him and his friends on screen have grown up. The whole fan culture surrounding Harry Potter has grown up, too, to the point where, as with Star Wars fans, we might even start thinking about a whole new generation of Potter enthusiasts.

This is what the release of the first installment of the film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows really means. It marks the beginning of the end of the film adaptations, yet it also marks the beginning of the beginning of the next generation of Potter fandom. What role, if any, will the books, films, toys, games, candy, costumes, etc. play in their lives? And what new meanings will the Harry Potter franchise take on once the torch gets passed, or rather shared?

The Future of the Humanities

This video made the rounds last week on Facebook.  I'm sharing it here for those of you who may have missed it (or who want to watch it again).  It offers a tragicomic glimpse into the cynicism that pervades the academic humanities these days -- a result of poor job prospects for many, limited funding, and diminishing respect within and beyond higher education.  It's biting, but for exactly the reasons I wish it were not.

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Critical Lede on "The Abuses of Literacy"

My favorite podcast, The Critical Lede, just reviewed my recent piece appearing in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, "The Abuses of Literacy: Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read." Check out the broadcast here -- and thanks to the show's great hosts, Benjamin Myers and Desiree Rowe of the University of South Carolina Upstate.

E-Books: No Friends of Free Expression

I've just published a short essay called "E-books -- No Friends of Free Expression" in the National Communication Association's online magazine, Communication Currents. It was commissioned in anticipation of National Freedom of Speech Week, which will be recognized from October 18th to 24th, 2010. Here's a short excerpt from the piece, in case you're interested:

It may seem odd to suggest that reading has something to do with freedom of expression. It’s one thing to read a book, after all, but a different matter to write one. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that reading is an expressive activity in its own right, resulting in notes, dog-eared pages, highlights, and other forms of communicative fallout. Even more to the point, as Georgetown Law Professor Julie E. Cohen observes, “Freedom of speech is an empty guarantee unless one has something—anything—to say…[T]he content of one’s speech is shaped by one’s response to all prior speech, both oral and written, to which one has been exposed.” Reading is an integral part of the circuitry of free expression, because it forms a basis upon which our future communications are built. Anything that impinges upon our ability to read freely is liable to short-circuit this connection.

I then go on to explore the surveillance activities that are quite common among commercially available e-readers; I also question how the erosion of private reading may affect not only what we choose to read but also what we may then choose to say.

The Comm Currents piece is actually a precis of a much longer essay of mine just out in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7(3) (September 2010), pp. 297 - 317, as part of a special issue on rights. The title is "The Abuses of Literacy: Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read." Here's the abstract:

This paper focuses on the Amazon Kindle e-reader's two-way communications capabilities on the one hand and on its parent company's recent forays into data services on the other. I argue that however convenient a means Kindle may be for acquiring e-books and other types of digital content, the device nevertheless disposes reading to serve a host of inconvenient—indeed, illiberal—ends. Consequently, the technology underscores the growing importance of a new and fundamental right to counterbalance the illiberal tendencies that it embodies—a “right to read,” which would complement the existing right to free expression.

Keywords: Kindle; Amazon.com; Digital Rights; Reading; Privacy

Feel free to email me if you'd like a copy of "The Abuses of Literacy." I'd be happy to share one with you.

The title of the journal article, incidentally, pays homage to Richard Hoggart's famous book The Uses of Literacy, which is widely recognized as one of the founding texts of the field of cultural studies. It's less well known that he also published a follow-up piece many years later called "The Abuses of Literacy," which, as it turns out, he'd intended to be the title of Uses before the publisher insisted on a change.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the work. Feedback is always welcome and appreciated.

Ambivalently Scribd

Back in March I announced on my other blog that The Late Age of Print was available on the document sharing site, Scribd. I was excited to see it there for many reasons, chief among them the Creative Commons license I'd negotiated with my publisher, Columbia University Press, which provides for the free circulation and transformation of the electronic edition of Late Age. The book's presence on Scribd was, for me, evidence of the CC license really working. I was also excited by Scribd's mobile features, which meant, at least in theory, that the e-book version of Late Age might enjoy some uptake on one or more of the popular e-reading systems I often write about here.

Lately, though, I'm beginning to feel less comfortable with the book's presence there. Scribd has grown and transformed considerably since March, adding all sorts of features to make the site more sticky -- things like commenting, social networking, an improved interface, and more. These I like, but there's one new feature I'm not feeling: ads by Google. Here's a screenshot from today, showing what The Late Age of Print looks like on Scribd.

Note the ad in the bottom-right portion of the screen for a book called, Aim High! 101 Tips for Teens, available on Amazon.com. (Clearly, somebody at Google/Scribd needs to work on their cross-promotions.) You can subscribe to an ad-free version of Scribd for $2.99/month or $29.99/year.

Now, I'm not one of those people who believes that all advertising is evil. Some advertising I find quite helpful. Moreover, on feature-rich sites like Scribd (and in newspapers and magazines, on TV, etc.), it's what subsidizes the cost of my own and others' "free" experience.

Here's the problem, though. The Creative Commons license under which the e-edition of Late Age was issued says this:

This PDF is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or by mail from Creative Commons, 171 Second St., Suite 300, San Francisco, CA 94105 U.S.A.

“Noncommercial” as defined in this license specifically excludes any sale of this work or any portion thereof for money, even if the sale does not result in a profit by the seller or if the sale is by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit or NGO.

I'm pretty sure the presence of advertising on Scribd violates the terms of the license, albeit in an indirect way. It's not like Late Age is being sold there for money. However, it does provide a context or occasion for the selling of audience attention to advertisers, as well as the selling of an ad-free experience to potential readers. Either way, it would seem as though the book has become a prompt for commercial transactions.

As of today, the site has recorded close to 2,000 "reads" of Late Age (whatever that means), which would indicate that Scribd has managed to reach a small yet significant group of people by piggybacking on my book.

Honestly, I'm not sure what to do about this.

In software terms I've always considered the e-edition of Late Age to be more like shareware than freeware. That is, my publisher and I are comfortable with some folks free-riding provided that others -- hopefully many others -- go on to purchase the printed edition of the book. The e-edition is not, in other words, a total freebie. Columbia has invested significant time, money, and energy in producing the book, and if nothing else the Press deserves to recoup its investment. Me? I'm more interested in seeing the arguments and ideas spread, but not at the cost of Columbia losing money on the project.

In any case, the situation with advertising on Scribd raises all sorts of vexing questions about what counts as a "commercial" or "non-commercial" use of a book in the late age of print. This became clear to me after finishing Chris Kelty's Two Bits: The Cultural Politics of Free Software (Duke U.P., 2008). Kelty discusses how changes in technology, law, and structures of power and authority have created a host of issues for people in and beyond the world of software to work through: can free software still be free if it's built on top of commercial applications, even in part? can collectively-produced software be copyrighted, and if so, by whom? should a single person profit from the sale of software that others have helped to create? and so on.

Analogously, can the use of an e-book to lure eyeballs, and thus ad dollars, be considered "non-commercial?" What about using the volume to market an ad-free experience? More broadly, how do you define the scope of "non-commercial" once book content begins to migrate across diverse digital platforms? I don't have good answers to any of these questions, although to the first two I intuitively want to say, "no." Then again, I'm pretty sure we're dealing with an issue that's never presented itself in quite this way before, at least in the book world. Consequently, I'll refrain from making any snap-judgments.

As I've said here before, though, I recently ported The Differences and Repetitions Wiki from Wikidot to its own independent site after Wikidot became inundated with advertising. In general I'm not a fan of my work being used to sell lots of other, unrelated stuff, especially when there are more traditionally non-commercial options available for getting the work out.

Digital & Social Media Job Posting

My department at Indiana University, Communication and Culture, is looking for a top-notch person to fill an opening in digital/social media, at the level of assistant professor.  Check out the job announcement, below, and please circulate it widely.

I'm not a member of the search committee, by the way, so if you have questions it's best to contact the committee chair--my colleague, Professor Barbara Klinger.

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Indiana University

Department of Communication and Culture

Digital and Social Media

The Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Digital and Social Media to begin Fall 2011.

We seek a humanities-trained Ph.D. whose primary area of research expertise and training is in digital media studies focused specifically on the social dimensions and potentials of digital media. This applicant will be expected to interact productively with colleagues in one or more of the department’s three areas: Rhetoric and Public Culture; Film and Media Studies; and Performance and Ethnographic Studies. The applicant must have a well-developed research program and teaching experience in digital and social media. She or he will be responsible for developing an introductory lecture course and advanced undergraduate courses, as well as for actively shaping and teaching graduate offerings in this field of study.

We particularly encourage applicants whose research involves specialization in areas such as:

• Social networking


• New technologies of political advocacy


• Ethnographies of new media


• Convergence and participatory cultures


• Digital video


• Games and gaming

Candidates are expected to have a strong research agenda and a commitment to excellence in teaching. Preference will be given to those who have their Ph.D. in hand by the date of appointment. Applicants should send a letter of application, curriculum vitae, writing sample, and three letters of recommendation to: Professor Barbara Klinger, Chair, Digital/Social Media Search, Department of Communication and Culture, 800 E. 3^rd Street, Indiana University, Bloomington IN 47405. Review of applications will begin December 1, 2010 and continue until the position is filled.

Indiana University is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer. The university actively encourages applications and nominations of women, minorities, applicants with disabilities, and members of other underrepresented groups.