New to the blog roll...

...Kim Christen's Long Road and David Novak's None Unchanged. Kim does great work on (among other topics) Aboriginal cultures and intellectual property rights. David is an up-and-coming communication researcher at Clemson, whom I met when he was a graduate student at Ohio University.

Be sure to check out their sites! Oh--and David and I use the same blog template, so don't be confused by all the (forgive me) difference and repetition.

More thoughts on Amazon's Kindle

This one comes to me somewhat circuitously, from my José Afonso Furtado Twitter feed. José is amazing. He Twitters about book news every day, practically all day, and I'm beginning to wonder when the man sleeps. His feed is like a stock market ticker, only for book mavens.

So apparently, Amazon.com's electronic reading device, Kindle, which I blogged about back in November, caused something of a stir at this year's BookExpo America. The event, which wrapped up this past weekend in New York City, is the major annual book industry trade gathering in the United States.

At the Expo, publishers expressed concern with the price of Amazon's Kindle editions. In almost all cases, they're lower than those of the corresponding bound, physical volumes, and in many instances, Amazon has been selling the e-editions at a loss.

This pricing strategy is consistent with the company's prevailing business model, which has tended to forgo short- to medium-term profit in favor of building longterm customer loyalty. With Kindle, Amazon's reasoning seems to be: a major economic incentive is the only way to encourage sufficient numbers of people to switch over to electronic books and thus to make the technology viable on a mass scale.

This scares the heck out of publishers, many of whom, as today's New York Times notes, want to charge the same amount of money for e- and p-books. (That's what I'm calling paper-based editions these days.) Their reasoning seems to go something like this: the book industry's hurting (isn't it always?), and the only way to increase profit is to eliminate as many fixed capital costs as possible.

What's intriguing to me about this latest ebook kerfuffle is the book industry's apparent short-sightedness. It seems to be assuming that there's an absolute price threshold below which it cannot sell enough books to maintain profitability. To put it differently, the industry seems disinclined toward Chris Anderson's notion of the long tail, which stresses sustained, aggregate sales of digital goods over the long term.

The BEA controversy therefore makes me wonder how much the book industry's professed economic woes, and indeed broader laments about the "decline of reading," have to do with publishers' unwillingness to get more creative with their pricing. It seems intuitive to raise prices to increase profits; this has been the book industry's fallback position for decades. But Amazon seems to be saying the opposite: lower your prices, and you'll gain readers and increase sales. Could there be a more apt illustration of 20th vs. 21st century business models?

With that said, I still have serious misgivings about Kindle, which I expressed back in November. I'm also planning to say more about Kindle here in the coming months and at this October's American Studies Association conference. Stay tuned.

Something to ponder - comparative music edition

As I was eating breakfast and listening to the radio this morning, the DJ played back-to-back songs by Billy Joel and Elton John. There was something about them that struck me as similar. Hence...

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Something to ponder, #2: Is Billy Joel America's Elton John?

Journal publishing in cultural studies

Quite some time ago, I drafted a short conference paper called, "Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Scholarly Journal Publishing." I've presented versions of it at the annual cultural studies conference we hold here at Indiana University and at the "Cultural Studies Now" conference in London (both in 2007). I'll be presenting still another, more refined version of the paper at "Crossroads in Cultural Studies" this July in Kingston, Jamaica.

Since I'm done revising my book, I'm able to return to "Acknowledged Goods" and to begin developing it in earnest. To that end, I've placed a snippet of the paper-in-progress on the Differences and Repetitions Wiki, which you can access by clicking here. I'd appreciate any comments you may have. You can leave feedback right on the site or email suggestions to me directly (striphas@indiana.edu).

Currently, there are only two paragraphs and a couple of tables, so the material shouldn't take you too long to read. The information about journal publishers and their subscription prices may surprise and even alarm you (or, maybe not, if you've been following the open access debates). I'll be adding more to the document in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

Something to ponder - premiere edition

I've decided to add a new and probably periodic feature to D&R--a series of posts called, "something to ponder." In it, I'll pose a question I believe is worth thinking about. These posts won't contain much in the way of reflection on my part; that'll be up to you, dear readers, either on your own, or, if you're inclined to think out loud, in the blog comments.

Enjoy--and ponder away!

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Something to ponder, #1: Why is it that the United States Federal Reserve has decided to cut interest rates, which presumably will drive more people into debt, as a way of mitigating the current credit crisis?

Why did I join Facebook?

It was bound to happen sooner or later, I suppose.

By "it," I mean signing up for Facebook. I'd held out for quite some time, my resolve bolstered by an informal straw poll I conducted this past January, in which my friends (not the Facebook variety) and interlocutors on D&R told me that I wasn't missing much by avoiding the popular social networking site.

LIARS!!!!!!!!!! Apparently just about everyone I know, or have ever known, was already on Facebook, which makes me about the last person on earth to join. I suppose it's worth narrating how I ended up there.

To put it as straightforwardly as possible, Twitter is the gateway drug for Facebook. Over the last year or so I'd incorporated various RSS news feeds onto my academic website, Bookworm, since I thought it might be nice to have some elements that updated constantly. I was never really satisfied with them, though, and so about a month or two ago, I made the fateful decision to join Twitter and place a badge on the site. I figured it might be a nice way to add real-time information about my research projects, conference presentations, publications, and so forth. And then something unexpected happened. People started following my Twitter feed, and eventually, I, theirs. It was riveting. One of my followers even proposed a picnic "Tweetup" to all his followers. Suddenly, I realized that virtual connections might indeed translate into "real world" ones.

I also blame Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point. I just started reading it in earnest the other night and became enthralled with his portrait of "connectors." These are people who know people--lots of people. Connectors are able to move in and across many different social circles, because they tend to maintain what Gladwell calls "weak ties." For them, connection is far more important than depth in a relationship, which allows them to stay in touch with a sprawling array of people. That sounded pretty Facebook to me.

So after much gnashing of teeth, I bit the bullet last night and signed up for Facebook. At 7:30 p.m., I registered. At 9:30 p.m., I had 17 friends. This morning, I have 28 and counting. I'm still not sure what to make of it all, honestly, but I'm intrigued to see how things develop. It's been nice reconnecting with old friends, though I fear for Facebook becoming a major time-suck. This was confirmed not only by the two hours I spent online last night, but also by some of the comments my friends had left on my Facebook wall. They said things to the effect of, "welcome to the black hole" and "sucker!"

I'll admit, I'm pretty awkward on Facebook right now. I can barely tell my profile page from my home page, and I have no idea what a zombie war is or why you'd want to fight one. I'm anxiously anticipating my colleague Ilana Gershon's book, therefore, which will provide a road map (among other things) to interpersonal dynamics on Facebook. For now, though, I'm really just fumbling through. Please bear with me.

More open access

Here's some more good news about open access publishing in the humanities, and it comes at a very interesting time for me. Now that my book, The Late Age of Print, is more or less finished, I'm about to return to the "Cultural Studies and Journal Publishing" essay I've been pecking at for some time now and presenting bits of at conferences.

It's remarkable just how far things have come in a year, especially in the humanities, which has lagged way, way behind the sciences, medicine, and technical fields in terms of making its journal publishing apparatus more open and less corporate. Still, I wonder: does OA journal publishing need to remain so resolutely hierarchical? That's a question I'll be pondering, probably in the conclusion to my essay. I'll be posting the piece to the Differences & Repetitions Wiki for feedback once it's a bit farther along.

Anyway, here's the OA announcement. Congratulations to all those involved on launching the Open Humanities Press initiative, and thank you for your vision.

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LAUNCH OF OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS – Open Access expands to humanities disciplines with a bold new publishing initiative in critical and cultural theory.

Brussels, Belgium – On May 12, 2008, the Open Humanities Press (OHP) will launch with 7 of the leading Open Access journals in critical and cultural theory. A non-profit, international grass-roots initiative, OHP marks a watershed in the growing embrace of Open Access in the humanities.

“OHP is a bold and timely venture” said J. Hillis Miller, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, a long-time supporter of the Open Access movement and OHP board member. “It is designed to make peer-reviewed scholarly and critical works in a number of humanistic disciplines and cross-disciplines available free online. Initially primarily concerned with journals, OHP may ultimately also include book-length writings. This project is an admirable response to the current crisis in scholarly publishing and to the rapid shift from print media to electronic media. This shift, and OHP’s response to it, are facets of what has been called ‘critical climate change.’”

“The future of scholarly publishing lies in Open Access” agreed Jonathan Culler, Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University and fellow member of OHP’s editorial advisory board. “Scholars in the future should give careful consideration to the where they publish, since their goal should be to make the products of their research as widely available as possible, to people throughout the world. Open Humanities Press is a most welcome initiative that will help us move in this direction.”

OHP will give new confidence to humanities academics who wish to make their work freely accessible but have concerns about the academic standards of online publishing. In addition to being peer-reviewed, all OHP journals undergo rigorous vetting by an editorial board of leading humanities scholars.

OHP’s board includes Alain Badiou, Chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, Donna Haraway, Professor of the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Director of the International Center for Writing and Translation, UC Irvine, Gayatri Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, Columbia University, Peter Suber, Open Access Project Director for Public Knowledge and Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and Stephen Greenblatt, Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University, who has been leading the public debate on the crisis of academic publishing in the humanities.

“Open-access publishing in serious, peer-reviewed online scholarly journals is one of the keys to solving a financial crisis that has afflicted university libraries everywhere and has had a chilling effect on virtually every academic discipline” said Greenblatt.“Making scholarly work available without charge on the internet has offered hope for the natural sciences and now offers hope in the humanities.”

With initial offerings in continental philosophy, cultural studies, new media, film and literary criticism, OHP serves researchers and students as the Open Access gateway for editorially-vetted scholarly literature in the humanities. The first journals to become part of OHP are Cosmos and History, Culture Machine, Fibreculture, Film-Philosophy, International Journal of Zizek Studies, Parrhesia, and Vectors.

“But it’s not simply a matter of what Open Access can do for the humanities” added Gary Hall, Professor of Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University, co-editor of Culture Machine and one of the co-founders of OHP. “It is also a case of what can the humanities do for Open Access. Researchers, editors and publishers in the humanities have developed very different professional cultures and intellectual practices to the STMs [Science, Technology, and Medicine] who have dominated the discussion around Open Access to date. OHP is ideally positioned to explore some of the exciting new challenges and perspectives in scholarly communication that are being opened up for Open Access as it is increasingly adopted within the humanities.”

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Open Humanities Press is an international Open Access publishing collective specializing in critical and cultural theory. OHP was formed by academics to overcome the current crisis in scholarly publishing that threatens intellectual freedom and academic rigor worldwide. OHP journals are academically certified by OHP’s independent board of international scholars. All OHP publications are peer-reviewed, published under open access licenses, and freely and immediately available online at www.openhumanitiespress.org.

Rockefeller UP goes CC

From today's Inside Higher Ed:

Rockefeller University Press on Friday announced a shift in copyright policy for the three journals it publishes. The new policy allows authors to re-use their work in any way under a Creative Commons license, so that authors who wish to effectively make their work open and free may do so. The press publishes The Journal of Cell Biology, The Journal of Experimental Medicine and The Journal of General Physiology.

It's only a news brief, but you can find it here. Way to go, RUP, and thanks for supporting open access to ideas! Let the trend continue!

Thoughts on Tuesday's primary

Well, I really blew it on Super Tuesday. In a post on February 5th, 2008, I wrote:

Today, one of my students asked me where he could vote in Indiana's Super Tuesday primary. He was despondent when I told him that Indiana doesn't vote until May--about a week before Guam, and long after the Presidential nominations probably will be sewn up.

Who would have predicted back then that the primary season would still be going strong (for Democrats, anyway) come May? I hadn't, clearly, and I pretty much had resigned myself to having essentially no say in who the Democratic nominee will be. I'm thrilled, therefore, about this Tuesday's Indiana primary. I hear it's the first time in 40 years that the state will play a meaningful role in the Presidential nominating process. It'll truly be an historic day.

It's interesting to have experienced two significant Presidential primaries now--one at the front end of the process, the other, at the back end. In 1992, I was living in New Hampshire, home of the nation's first primary. The Democratic field was wide-open, and the state was abuzz with a dozen or so candidates. The late Paul Tsongas was the front-runner at the time, and I saw him deliver a speech at the UNH Memorial Union Building. The smallish room, where I often heard local bands play, was drab and poorly lit. Tsongas looked fine, but he was neither especially well-appointed nor particularly well-groomed. There was a decent turnout for the event, which was simple and straight-forward: he showed up, we clapped, he spoke, we clapped again, and we all went our separate ways. I vaguely recall that Tsongas seemed to have lacked energy. I'm sure there must have been some media presence, but no doubt the reporters were spread thin, given the size of the field that year.

Fast-forward to 2008. Last Wednesday, I attended a rally for Barack Obama at Indiana University's Assembly Hall. This is the IU basketball stadium. If you know anything about basketball in the state of Indiana, you should have some sense of the size of the event. The venue wasn't exactly filled to capacity, but it was close. Pretty much the only empty seats were in the nosebleed section. The floor was so densely packed that EMTs carted off three or four Obama supporters who, needing fresh air and a reprieve from the heat, had fainted. (In a particularly kind-hearted gesture, Obama tossed his own water bottle into the crowd, to help keep others from passing out.) The whole event was carefully choreographed, all the way down to the homemade looking signs that Obama's campaign staff had provided to the group selected to sit behind him on stage. There were also a capella groups, who entertained us during the two-and-a-half hour lead up to the event, and inflatable beach balls, which the audience knocked around as though were were at an arena rock concert. Oh--and did I mention that among the throng of reporters, there even was a correspondent from The Daily Show? He stood out because of the glittery blue cape he wore over his suit jacket.

As for Obama, he didn't look like someone who's been campaigning for 18 months, that's for sure. He showed up in his shirt-sleeves, and though his appearance may have seemed somewhat relaxed, it nonetheless didn't appear too casual. That is, to me he still read, "politician," and commanded just that sort of attention. His speech may have begun at 9:00 p.m., yet he seemed as fresh and as energetic as if he'd begun speaking at 9:00 a.m. The rally concluded not only with resounding applause, big smiles, and lots of audience glad-handing, but also with Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising" blaring over the stadium PA.

It would be easy enough to wax cynical about how spectacular last week's Obama event was, compared to the Tsongas rally I attended 16 years ago. But what, after all, would be the point of that? Indeed, what's remarkable to me is how much more audience minded Presidential campaigns have become over the last two decades. Sure, a lot of it may be gimmicky, but I'm nonetheless stuck by how invested people seem to be in this particular Presidential election. To put it simply, I don't recall people being as interested in a Presidential nomination--or politics writ large--in my entire adult life. This is a welcome breakthrough indeed.

Surely this resurgent interest in politics has everything to do with the many serious issues facing not only the United States but also the world today. But those issues can easily seem abstract absent certain techniques to get folks riled up about them. Though I've not had the good fortune of attending a Clinton rally, that's surely what I saw at Obama's.

Tuesday's your day, Indiana, the last you may have in a looooooong time. Make it count, an keep the momentum going!

Peer-reviewer personae

Josh Gunn over at The Rosewater Chronicles has an excellent post about the various critical personae one might encounter in the process of double-blind academic peer-review. He classifies them (us?) as "gushers," "assassins," "turf pissers," and "empaths." My favorite characterization (although probably my least favorite type of reviewer) has to be the "naysayer," whom Josh describes like this:

The Naysayer: Nothing of quality or interest has ever been published in the field, and your essay is no exception. Communication Studies is a sub-par and parasite field, and your essay continues this horrible, alien existence. The Naysayer wanted to be a philosopher or studied comparative literature, but reluctantly took a position in Communication Studies out of necessity. S/he is bitter about being in Comm, and will take it out on you—especially if you take up concepts from high theory or philosophy.

I'm sure anyone who's been through the gauntlet of double-blind peer review has encountered at least one cranky naysayer in her or his lifetime, and probably one or more of the other characters as well. I only wish there were more gushers and empaths out there. Too often, I find, academic peer-review seems as much about hazing as it does about ideas and execution--and I say that as someone who's enjoyed reasonably good success at getting published.

Anyway, be sure to check out Josh's post and the lively discussion that follows. Great stuff.

Your name in binary code

THEODORE STRIPHAS = 01010100 01101000 01100101 01101111 01100100 01101111 01110010 01100101 00100000 01010011 01110100 01110010 01101001 01110000 01101000 01100001 01110011.

Binarize (is that a word?) your name here.

Latest issue of Collapse

Collapse is one of the most intriguing scholarly journals available. It's independently published, which means, on the positive side, that it's not part of the corporate journal-industrial complex. I really admire that. On the flip side, though, independence has resulted in Collapse's flying somewhat under the radar of readers and scholarly groups for whom the journal is less well known than it should be.

Now in it's fourth issue, Collapse consistently has published cutting-edge theoretical work within and beyond the orbit of post-structuralist philosophy. I've blogged about Collapse before, when the editors published an issue featuring what's probably Gilles Deleuze's first known scholarly work. The original contributions from contemporary authors are consistently provocative as well.

If I had to find an analogue, I'd say, think Semiotext(e) from the 1970s, when the journal helped to introduce English-language readers to the likes of Deleuze, Guattari, Kristeva, Baudrillard, Irigaray, Negri, and many others. Or, better yet, just think. Because that's exactly what Collapse will always make you do.

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FROM THE EDITORS OF COLLAPSE
We are delighted to announce that Collapse Volume IV will be published May 2008 and is now available for advance purchase online.

Contributors to this volume include: Kristen Alvanson, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Michel Houellebecq, Oleg Kulik, Thomas Ligotti, Quentin Meillassoux, China Miéville, Reza Negarestani, Benjamin Noys, Rafani, Steven Shearer, George Sieg, Eugene Thacker, Keith Tilford, Todosch, James Trafford.

Collapse IV features a series of investigations by philosophers, writers and artists into Concept Horror. Contributors address the existential, aesthetic, theological and political dimensions of horror, interrogate its peculiar affinity with philosophical thought, and uncover the horrors that may lie in wait for those who pursue rational thought beyond the bounds of the reasonable. This unique volume continues Collapse’s pursuit of indisciplinary miscegenation, the wide-ranging contributions interacting to produce common themes and suggestive connections. In the process a rich and compelling case emerges for the intimate bond between horror and philosophical thought.

George Sieg's Infinite Regress into Self-Referential Horror demonstrates the simultaneously cognitive, existential and political nature of Horror, through a conceptual investigation of the primacy of victimhood for the affect of horror, tracing its origins to the Zoroastrian concept of Druj.

In The Shadow of a Puppet-Dance, James Trafford tracks weird fiction writer Thomas Ligotti's anticipation of the radical thesis of neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger's book Being No-One: namely, that 'nobody ever was or had a self'.

In Thomas Ligotti's own contribution to the volume, Thinking Horror, he takes up the work of obscure Norwegian philosopher Peter Zapffe, among others, to take an unflinching journey into the depths of pessimistic thought. As a counterpoint to Ligotti's deflation of human hubris, Oleg Kulik, the internationally-acclaimed Ukrainian contemporary artist known for his disturbing investigations into the borders between life and death, human and animal, contributes his photographic series Memento Mori: Dead Monkeys.

Eugene Thacker's Nine Disputations on Theology and Horror gives a detailed and penetrating account of the 'teratological noosphere', discussing the way in which a certain horror has perenially accompanied the concept of 'life', from Aristotle to Lovecraft.

Novelist Michel Houellebecq is well-known for his evocation of the horror that dwells within the banalities of contemporary life. His poems, of which a selection are translated into English here for the first time, distil his powerful vision into translucid moments of dread.

Jake and Dinos Chapman, the notorious Brothers Grim of the British artworld contribute a set of drawings created exclusively for Collapse. The cartoon-horror of I Can See continues their investigations into the connection between laughter and horror through the programmatic impoverishment of the aesthetic.

In the third of a 'trilogy' of essays published in Collapse, Spectral Dilemma, Quentin Meillassoux reveals some of the ethical consequences of his deduction of the 'necessity of contingency', through an examination of the problem of 'infinite mourning' for the dead.

Kristen Alvanson's photographs, at once repellent and fascinating, of preserved specimens of deformed and mutated animals and humans, are accompanied by a text which discusses Paré's sixteenth-century treatise which makes of taxonomy itself something monstrous, as demonstrated in Alvanson's diagrammatic presentation of the Arbor Deformia.

German artist Todosch's meticulous sketches seem to depict varieties of heterogenous slime in the process either of disintegration or coagulation, making them a perfect companion to Iain Hamilton Grant's Being and Slime. This untimely excavation of the work of nineteenth century naturephilosopher Lorenz Oken - according to whom the generation of the universe from a 'primal zero' corresponds to its coagulation from a 'primaeval mucus' - puts an entirely new slant on Badiou's notion of 'founding on the void'.

Benjamin Noys meditates on Lovecraft and the real, revealing that the most abyssal of Horrors is Horror Temporis.

In Thinking with Nigredo, Reza Negarestani shows how Aristotle and Plotinus both unlock and dissimulate the ontological mechanism expressed by an unspeakable form of Etruscan torture.

Canadian artist Steven Shearer contributes a new series of his Poems - striking graphical pieces created through a manipulation of the nihilistic and extreme titles and lyrics of death-metal bands.

China Miéville, better known for his bestselling weird fiction novels, writes on M.R.James and the Quantum Vampire, interrogating the dyad of the weird and the hauntological, and introducing us to a new fearsome creature from his arsenal ... behold the Skulltopus!

Czech art collective Rafani present their cycle Czech Forest, an adaptation of folk-tale imagery which presents a very modern tale of warcrime and revenge from the end of WWII.

Graham Harman returns to Collapse with On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl. In a polemical defence of 'weird realism', Harman demonstrates that philosophical thought has more in common with weird and horror fiction than it might like to admit. Singular Agitations and a Common Vertigo, Keith Tilford's series of images - deftly disintegrated objects with more than a hint of 'pulp' - anticipate and shadow Harman's invocation of the weird inner life of objects.

Collapse Volume IV // Ed. R. Mackay // May 2008 // 390pp // Limited Edition 1000 copies // ISBN 978-0-9553087-3-4 // £9.99

Buy or Subscribe at: http://blog.urbanomic.com/urbanomic/archives/2007/08/buysubscribe.html

The big announcement, at long last

I've been hinting for weeks (maybe longer) that I had a B-I-G announcement forthcoming about my book, The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture From Consumerism to Control. At long last, here it is: the book will be published in 2009 by Columbia University Press!

I'm thrilled, needless to say, because Columbia's such an esteemed press and has published so many books I love: from Rachel Bowlby's Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping to Gary Cross' An All Consuming Century, and from David Henkin's City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's What Is Philosophy? and beyond.

What's also thrilling is that Columbia has agreed to make available, for free, a Creative Commons licensed PDF of The Late Age of Print. It will be released on the internet, concurrent with the publication of the print edition of the book. This is the first time Columbia is producing a book this way, and given my own proclivities toward intellectual property (not to mention the arguments I make in the book), I couldn't be happier to be the test case. What's more, I'm pleased to see another major university press taking a strongly affirmative stance toward open access to ideas.

Many of you who read this blog will find yourselves thanked in the book's acknowledgments. For now, though, a big, blanket "thank you" to all who've supported me throughout the process of researching, writing, revising, and finalizing The Late Age of Print. It's funny--for someone who writes about book publishing, I feel like I learned as much about the book business by trying to get The Late Age of Print published as I did by actually writing it!

The Society of the Spectacle©

Sorry for all the quiet. The last couple of weeks have been hectic, to put it mildly, with me finalizing my book manuscript and delivering a keynote address at a wonderful conference organized by the graduate students in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley. And this week, my old mentor and very dear friend, John Erni, is headed here to Indiana to deliver a talk on "The New Sovereignties." Good things are happening, but unfortunately, Differences & Repetitions has suffered as a result. So thanks, readers, for sticking around.

I'm writing to share a story from this week's Chronicle of Higher Education. It talks about how Alex Galloway, an Associate Professor at NYU and someone I knew from grad school, has run into copyright trouble with, of all things, the estate of Marxist Guy Debord! Here's a taste of the article:

Guy Debord, the Marxist and French philosopher who died in 1994, may be rolling over in his grave.

A lawyer representing his widow has threatened Alexander R. Galloway, an associate professor of culture and communication at New York University, with legal action. Mr. Galloway said the lawyer sent him a letter demanding that he cease and desist from distributing his online war game, claiming it infringes on the copyright of the Debord estate. The philosopher had created a similar war game.

But copyrights and intellectual property were anathema to Debord, said Mr. Galloway. The Situationist International movement that Debord founded in 1957 is a mix of anarchism and Marxism. Its followers scrawled, "Abolish copyright" on building walls during the May 1968 student uprisings in Paris.

I know capitalism's supposedly rife with contradication, but this is getting ridiculous. (And here I'm reminded of Deleuze and Guattari's claim, "Nobody's ever died from a contradiction.") Indeed, to me, Alex's game is clearly a transformative use of Debord's concept and therefore well within the bounds of fair use.

Isn't it depressing when Marxists, or at least the spouses thereof, don't see things the same way? And isn't it even more depressing when the work of great Marxists comes to be seen not as a source of critical heuristics but rather as a lucrative revenue stream? Perhaps I'm naive, but I thought Debord's ideas and creative work were supposed to give us some distance from the excesses of the "society of the spectacle" and not, as it were, to become them.

Anyway, you can read the full story here. This is a very interesting case to me, since it would seeem to hold not insignificant implications for the matter of academic freedom, above and beyond any copyright considerations that may be at stake.

"Light's out" for Google?

Google often celebrates holidays and other major events by changing the look of its home page. At Thanksgiving, for example, you're likely to find pilgrims gallivanting, or perhaps an unfortunate turkey or two running for their lives. Valentine's Day usually means hearts and all that mushy stuff, St. Patrick's Day brings shamrocks and leprechauns...you get the drill. Well, today, Google's usually white background has been turned black in an effort to raise awareness for Earth Hour--an event designed to curb global energy consumption and raise awareness about global climate change.

Let me say that I'm behind the Earth Hour event. It's a fantastic idea, and I'd love to see its principles institutionalized. (It does make me wonder, though, about the prospects of Earth Day, which is a different event celebrated every April, getting downsized to a mere hour--but that's a topic for another post.)

However welcome Google's promotion of Earth Hour may be, I still find it strange for two reasons. First, I read a fascinating article by Ginger Strand called "Keyword: Evil--Google's Addiction to Cheap Electricity," which was published in the March 2008 issue of Harper's. There, she notes how Google's new server farm, to be built in The Dalles, Oregon, will consume about as much power in a given day as the entire city of Tacoma, Washington. Second, though I'm grateful to Google for plugging Earth Hour, the company gives no indication that it's planning on unplugging anything itself. It offers this statement instead:

Given our company's commitment to environmental awareness and energy efficiency, we strongly support the Earth Hour campaign, and have darkened our homepage today to help spread awareness of what we hope will be a highly successful global event.

Much as I respect Google--one of the most heavily-trafficked websites on the internet and host of Differences & Repetitions via Blogger--and its decision to promote Earth Hour, I'm sad to say its doing so seems more like carefully calculated corporate greenwashing than it does a genuine effort to cultivate environmentally sustainable practices. To point out the obvious: turning a computer screen black is not turning it off.

In addition to extinguishing all our lights for an hour, how much more of an impact could we make if we unplugged everything--lamps, toasters, computers, even Google itself (yes, YouTube too)--for an hour?

Print is dead

I've just added a new site to the blog roll: Jeff Gomez's Print is Dead. I discovered it by accident while doing some research on "the late age of print," which is a phrase Jay David Bolter coined and, as many of you know, is the title of my forthcoming book. I've only read a few of Jeff's posts thus far, and while we may come at some of the issues confronting today's book industry from different perspectives, it's clear he's got a lot of smart things to say. I love the title of his blog, too, which comes from a line Egon (Harold Ramis' character) delivers in the movie, Ghostbusters.

Speaking of The Late Age of Print (the book), I have a big, big, BIG announcement coming up very soon. Stay tuned--or whatever one does to keep one's attention on a blog. Would it be more apt to say, "ready your feed readers?" That doesn't exactly roll off the tongue now, does it?

Getting the Constitution through security

This is the first in what I hope will be a periodic series of guest-posts.... --t

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by DUSTIN HOWES

I am one of many millions of Americans who, like Dick Cheney, have a defibrillator/pacemaker implanted in their chest. The neat little device not only miraculously regulates your heartbeat and, if necessary, shocks you out of arrhythmia (mine has never fired, but others have told me it feels like getting kicked in the chest by a horse), it also manages to throw off the usual rhythms of airport security. Since it’s metal, the defibrillator sets off the detector, but you can’t very well remove it and put it in the gray tray. Not unless you want to all get all “priest from the Temple of Doom” on their asses.

The required alternative is to go through a pat down. Now that I’ve had perhaps a hundred of these, I could probably run the training session: 1. Check the passenger’s boarding pass. 2. Tell her or him to stand on the mat with the two footprints. 3. Tell her or him to spread their arms. 4. Ask them if they would prefer a “private screening.” 5. Inform them when you will be “touching sensitive areas” and that you will “be using the back of my hand.” And so on.

I find airport security, and particularly the post-9/11 version of airport security, extremely troubling and pointless. So I decided a few months ago to get some t-shirts made with the Fourth Amendment printed on the front and back. For a while, I didn’t feel like I was up to wearing them. What if I got stopped? (Sometimes I said to myself, “This trip is too important to wear it.”) What if people asked questions and I was tired and didn’t feel like talking? I have been traveling a lot and not enjoying it very much.

Anyway, I finally got up the nerve to wear the shirt a couple weeks ago. I found it strange that I was so nervous and self-conscious about wearing the Constitution. Yes, the shirts are not very fashionable and rather wordy. They demand a lot from the public. But more than that, I felt like I was doing something wrong – like I was getting the Constitution through security.

All in all, the trip from Baltimore to Baton Rouge and back again was pretty uneventful. Some passengers commented on the shirt – the completely drunk woman who sat next to me on one of my flights read it out loud and said: “OK! OK!” Other comments from passengers and people working the food places at the airport were mostly positive. When I went through security the first time, a TSA guy running the checkpoint, who from his accent seemed to be a first generation immigrant, tried making conversation: “Hmm … De Fourdth Ah-mednt-ment.” Out of nowhere and to my own surprise I said, “Yeah. This tells you why all of this is illegal.” He didn’t seem to care much. But as I spread my arms in the little fishbowl area among the scanners, his underling did give me an especially brisk pat down.

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Dustin Howes is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at St. Mary's College of Maryland and will join the Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University in the Fall. His first book, Toward a Credible Pacifism: Violence and the Possibilities of Politics, is forthcoming with SUNY Press. He has published in International Studies Quarterly, has an article forthcoming in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and wrote the lead essay in the interdisciplinary volume, Ruminations on Violence (2008, Waveland Press).

CFP: Accidents in Film and Media

CALL FOR PAPERS, special issue of the Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture

Greg Siegel, Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara: gsiegel@filmandmedia.ucsb.edu

"Accidents in Film and Media"

In The Accident of Art (2005), Paul Virilio proposes that "as soon as there is invention, there is accident," and that the accident "reveals something important that we would not otherwise be able to perceive." Writing of one momentous invention, Mary Ann Doane identifies cinema's driving impulse as a "curious merger of contingency and structure," suggesting that the moving image participates in the taming of the unpredictable while simultaneously reinforcing its power.

Taking these provocations and paradoxes as points of departure, this special issue of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture seeks original essays that examine the "something important" revealed by accidents, contingency, and the unexpected specific to media as technologies, expressive forms, and apparatuses of social power. What sorts of histories emerge when we treat media technologies as potential time bombs? media "texts" as veritable train wrecks? and ephemeral traces and transmissions as traumatic scars? How do forces of chance and contingency impact regimes of representation and mediated modes of perception? What political forms do the accidental and the unexpected inspire, imagine, or actualize? How do they intersect or unsettle questions of control, security, risk, wager, preemption, etc.?

In an age marked by increasingly intensified calculation, precision, and the capacity for global destruction, what is the status of chance and contingency? How do contemporary concepts such as viral media, "democratization," and ubiquity coexist with the digital promise of total numeric control of recorded images and sounds? What is the place of medium specificity and convergence in these discussions, and how have technological alterations (e.g., film-historical developments such as sound, color, and digital recording media) affected the relationship of media (as archives, repetitions, reproductions) to the unexpected? Moreover, how might notions of the accidental, the contingent, and the unexpected also inform the methodologies one uses to think about and interpret systems of representation and media?

The editors encourage submissions that inspect the unexpected in film and media (from print culture to digital media) from a breadth of disciplinary and methodological perspectives and invite work that focuses on diverse geographical locales and historical moments. Articles should be about 7,500-8,000 words in length, notes included, and formatted according to the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition. The submission deadline is 30 June 2008. Please email all queries and submissions using the subject header "Accidents" to:

discourse@cinemail.usc.edu.

For more information on Discourse see:

http://www.usc.edu/org/discourse/.

Issue Editors:
René Thoreau Bruckner, Critical Studies, Univ. of Southern California
James Leo Cahill, Critical Studies, Univ. of Southern California
Greg Siegel, Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara

All those trees!

An interesting post I thought I'd pass along from the Environmental News Network....

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PLANT A TREE FOR EVERY BOOK YOU READ

Want to get a new book but worry about its environmental impact? Worry a little bit less. With the help of Eco-Libris, you can plant a tree for every book you buy or read.

Says Raz Godelnik, an Eco-Libris co-founder, the company works with readers, publishers, writers, bookstores, and others in the book industry to balance out the paper used for any book by planting trees. About 20 million trees are cut down annually for virgin paper to be used for the production of books sold in the U.S. alone. Eco-Libris raises awareness about the environmental impacts of using paper for the production of books and provides book lovers with a simple way to do something about it: plant a tree for every book they read. Ten dollars will cover tree planting for ten books.

To date, Eco-Libris has balanced out over 24,000 books, resulting in the planting of more than 31,500 new trees! Kedzie Press is collaborating with Eco-Libris in a "Million Tree-A-Thon" initiative to plant one million trees for one million books by the end of 2009.

The Eco-Libris program is being offered by some local bookstores; otherwise, it's easy to participate on-line.

Thumbs up, Eco-Libris.

You can read my interview with Eco-Libris here.

Goodbye, tenure-track faculty

I'm not sure what to make of this:

Every other year, data released by the Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics provide a snapshot of the growth of part-time positions in the professoriate. This year — an off-year for that data — the federal statistics provide evidence for another shift, in which the majority of full-time professional employees in higher education are in administrative rather than faculty job.

So I guess we tenure track faculty are now a minority in the academy. Could it be that we're also an endangered species? It's certainly odd to think about universities as places not abounding in professors (at least, as the term has tended to be understood).

I wonder: is this the university's version of the widening gap between the rich and the poor, or between the administrative class and an increasingly "casualized" workforce (for whom there is nothing casual about their labors)? Are tenure tack faculty getting "compressed" out of existence, given how cuts in state education budgets, combined with increasingly high administrative salaries, would seem to demand a more "flexible" workforce at the bottom? For any economists out there who may be reading, please chime in anytime....

For more on the global distribution of wealth, see my previous entry, below. And for the complete story about the changing shape of university employment, check out today's Inside Higher Ed.

Poor little rich guy

I was just finishing up some research on Oprah Winfrey for my book when I came across this startling little nugget from Forbes.com: Microsoft maven Bill Gates no longer is the richest person in the world. He's ceded the throne to über-investor Warren Buffett, after 13 gilded years at the top. Actually, he's slipped to number three, one notch below telecommunications mogul Carlos Slim Helú.

Before you go shedding any tears over Mr. Gates' fall from grace (or from the top of the Forbes list, at any rate), be sure to keep this tidbit in mind: the guy's still worth $58 billion, which is $2 billion more than he was worth this time last year. He's clearly not hurting.

And for those of you keeping track of the concentration of wealth, here's some depressing news. According to Forbes.com, there are 1,125 billionaires on the planet whose "total net worth...is $4.4 trillion, up $900 billion from last year." Yes, that's right--at a time when real wages are falling for the rest of us, the wealthiest people in the world got about 25% richer. So why not put that in your pipe and smoke it? They sure do.

On the death of William F. Buckley, Jr.

I don't usually make a habit of devoting blog space to conservative figures, much less to one the New York Times recently called "the architect of modern conservatism." I believe conservative policies on the whole have been extremely detrimental for the nation and the world. As such, I tend to reject them, along with their underlying philosophies.

I didn't always, though, and I owe my political turn around in part to William F. Buckley, Jr., who passed away late Tuesday night.

I grew up in a Republican household--a very Republican household. My father was quite active in the New York Republican party at both the local and state levels. I recall accompanying him to a smoky Republican party headquarters one cold November night in the early 1980s, where we cheered the victories of "our" candidates. The community in which I was raised also was staunchly Republican. It was something of an enclave in this regard, since New York State on the whole tended to be more Democratic, at least, at the time.

Most of my friends' parents were Republicans, and most of my friends knew nothing else but. Consequently, we considered ourselves to be junior members of the Republican party, the inheritors of the GOP. We campaigned for aid to the Central American Contra insurgency during our mock-government conventions. We thought Ollie North, with his perfect posture, crisp uniform, and sad eyes, had been wronged by the liberal establishment. We celebrated the Reagan-Bush landslide of 1984, and in 1988, some championed the cause of the next Republican administration by affixing Bush-Quayle signs to their lockers at school.

We all knew a few, simple things. Democrats or, worse yet, Progressives, obviously were Communist loving softies who wanted to tax the nation into bankruptcy. They also wanted give all sorts of breaks to groups who clearly didn't deserve them. At least, that's what we all believed, swept up as we were in the rising tide of the Reagan Revolution.

My father passed away in 1986, and thereafter, my maternal grandfather became more of a presence in my everyday life. He, too, was an arch conservative. (His father had been a federal court judge, however, whom Franklin Roosevelt had appointed to the bench.) When I headed off to college, in 1991, my grandfather worried. He was a prodigious reader of conservative publications and was well aware of the culture wars taking place around that time on college campuses. He also knew U.S. colleges were "bastions of liberalism," and so he wanted to do what he could to shield me from almost certain ideological indoctrination by the left-wing thought police.

His solution was to subscribe me to the conservative news magazine William F. Buckley had founded in 1955, the National Review. Every two weeks a new issue arrived at my dorm room. I recall thumbing through most of them, more or less interested. Some I read quite intently. One contained a fascinating book excerpt that asked what would have happened had the U.S. not entered the Second World War. Another issue contained a story in which the author argued that the South African anti-Apartheid movement really was a Communist front, and that it should be resisted by the United States at all cost.

It was with the latter article that I began to recognize something was wrong. Why in the world would anyone advocate sustaining Apartheid? This was racism--bald, state-sanctioned racism. How could "godlessness" or "collectivism" be worse than that type of injustice? And how could someone associated with the "party of Lincoln" maintain such a position? Despite my questions, I continued to hold fast to my Republican ideals and passed off the article as one bad apple amid an otherwise okay bunch.

I proceeded to take a political science class during the second semester of my first year at college. The professor was an avowed conservative who had been educated at Georgetown. We read What I Saw at the Revolution, a political memoir penned by Peggy Noonan, Reagan's most famous speech writer. The Professor liked my work and even told me that it reminded her of the kind of thinking she used to encounter at Georgetown. I was proud of that compliment, and even prouder when I earned an A in her class. At the end of the school year, I happily reported to my grandfather that colleges--at least, the one I was attending--maybe weren't great bastions of liberalism after all.

And then it happened. In 1991, Rodney King, an African American man, had been beaten by a group of police officers in Los Angeles, following a traffic stop. The acquittal of all but one of the policemen by a mostly white jury, in April 1992, prompted a wave of riots in L.A. All, clearly, was not well with race relations in this country. I'd seen the infamous videotape of the beating many times. Though I knew there was some room for interpretation--the NR had told me so--it was crystal clear to me that the officers had well exceeded the amount of force necessary to subdue Mr. King. And they were all white.

What horrified me beyond the verdict and the violence, though, was a mailing I received during the summer of 1992: a solicitation of support for the Sargeant Stacey Koon legal defense fund. Koon was one of the ringleaders of the beating, and here I was being asked to help him out. I wondered for a moment why I had received this mailing, when it dawned on me: Koon and his buddies must have gotten my name and address from the National Review.

That was the turning point. I knew then conservatism wasn't for me. There was no going back. And I have William F. Buckley, Jr. to thank for this, my political awakening. Surely it wasn't the one he would have endorsed, much less have expected, but for this reason, he'll never be the "architect of modern conservatism" for me. If anything, he and his magazine helped demolish my conservatism and pave the way for my progressive education.

So thank you, Mr. Buckley, and godspeed.

Trademark troubles on the campaign trail

From today's Inside Higher Ed:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has of late been pushing charges that Barack Obama plagiarized some phrases in his campaign speeches.

But what about one of Clinton’s favorite phrases: “Solutions for America"? It’s the name for many of her campaign events. Today will feature “Solutions for America” rallies by the campaign in Ohio, and the phrase has appeared as backdrop for many campaign rallies. It turns out, however, that an organization other than the Clinton campaign has the rights to the phrase.

“Solutions for America” is the registered trademark of a University of Richmond program with the Pew Charitable Trusts to help local communities work on a series of social problems. The emphases of the program — promoting child health, reviving neighborhoods, creating jobs — have considerable overlap with Clinton campaign themes.

This one's a bit vexing, honestly, as I can see the potential for overlap and, hence, for "confusion in the marketplace"--a primary rubric by which trademark infringement is supposed to be assessed. Here's the rub, though: aren't we talking about two categorically different things here? Isn't Clinton's use of "Solutions for America" a slogan for a political campaign--something that shouldn't, in theory, exist in the marketplace per se? Now, I understand there's a tremendous marketing dimension to Presidential campaigns, but isn't the end of all that supposed to be about elected leadership and public service, not buying and selling? Or has politics become so commercial that we cannot but conflate the two anymore?

Anyway, you can read the complete article here.

Obsessed with Wikipedia

You may not know this, but I'm obsessed with Wikipedia. Truly, I am. A confession: I love to read it. Another confession: I've even done some editing. I still don't let my students refer to it in their papers, though I may be coming around on that. It's a remarkable resource, at least, for what it is.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who's rapt with Wikipedia. I just discovered Jim Brown's excellent blog, Clinamen, which I've added to my blog roll. I don't know Jim personally, but what I do know is that he's a graduate student in Rhetoric and New Media Studies at the University of Texas - Austin. Clinamen is his attempt to work publicly through issues he's addressing in his dissertation, which focuses on Wikipedia. I haven't been following his blog long enough to know exactly what he's up to, but as far as I can tell, it's all about history, agency, collective writing practices, and the politics of knowledge production. Now that sounds like a dissertation to me.

Anyway, be sure to check out Clinamen. It's really interesting stuff.

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P.S. For all you Deleuzians out there who are trying to put a finger on the word "clinamen," GD mentions it in his writings on Lucretius in Difference and Repetition, The Logic of Sense, and elsewhere. In a nutshell, it refers to the swerving of atomic particles--an apt metaphor for Wikipedia indeed!

Lessig for Congress?

Lawrence Lessig is thinking about running for the United States Congressional seat left open after the passing of Representative Tom Lantos. Please do what you can to encourage him to run. He's one of the smartest and most principled people around, and he's clearly a natural leader. We'd miss him in academe, but Congress may need him even more than we do.

You can read a full story about Lessig's possible Congressional bid here, via the New York Times.

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P.S. Feb. 26, 2008: He's not running, unfortunately. More here....

Call for papers: The politics of journal publishing

...with gratitude to Amy Pason at the University of Minnesota for sharing this with me. Thanks, Amy!

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The Political Economy of Academic Journal Publishing

Call for Papers & Proposal for a Special Issue of Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, to be edited by Craig Prichard & Steffen Böhm.

'Publish or perish', that famous diktat, is without doubt the central, pervasive and unassailable logic governing most academic work in the current period. The central figure, the one around which this decree currently revolves, is, of course, the academic journal article. While the book and perhaps the lecture remain important in some locations, the journal article has become the core currency and the very measure by which academic jobs, careers, reputations and identities are made and traded.

Yet despite all the hours congealed into 'the article', and the years spent perfecting the craft of writing for journal publications, many of us know very little about the industry that surrounds our work and to which we contribute so much. Of course, we may recall certain events: Some will have noted the sale, for nearly US$1 billion, of Blackwell's 875-strong journal collection to US company Wiley in late 2006. Others will be aware that they can now, if they so wish, purchase their already published papers as individual downloads on Amazon.com. There will be some for whom internet-based open access journals (such as ephemera) or online repositories are now the natural home of their written academic work. There may be others whom have confronted the crisis that surrounds journal subscription pricing and are seeing the demise of library journal collections in their university libraries. And there may be a few among us who recognize those journals and publishers that feature in Ted Bergstrom's hall of shame for the most expensive journals currently published (http://www.journalprices.com ). But for all those that recognize such events and processes there are many more for whom such events have 'taken a while to get our attention', as Ron Kirby, the University of California mathematician who led the editorial revolt against Reed Elsevier's pricing strategy at the journal Topography, said recently.

This special issue is an invitation to begin to change that. It is a call for contributions that directly and critically explore the dynamics, problems, tensions, and issues that surround the political economy of academic journal publishing. Part of this is an invitation to explore alternative ways of organizing the production of academic work, particularly the theory, politics and organization of open access publishing, which is, perhaps, the most promising initiative to challenge corporate forms of journal publishing today. This exploration of alternatives is an acknowledgment that the writer and academic author could be regarded, at various moments, as agent, challenger and also victim of hegemonic regimes. We invite inter-disciplinary contributions from around the world and particularly welcome submissions from countries of the Global South, which have seen particular growth of open access publishing initiatives.

Possible topics include (this is not an exhaustive list):

• Political economy of open access publishing
• Academic publishing and the knowledge society
• How to organize an open access journal?
• Political economy of corporate and university press publishing
• The place of journal publishing in the overall apparatus of academic publishing
• Historical perspectives of academic journal publishing
• The hegemony of UK/US publishing & referencing and its global economy
• Issues of censorship in the process of publishing
• Issues of inclusion/exclusion in journal publishing
• Academic publishing in the Global South
• Desires and identities connected to journal publishing
• The public sphere and journal publishing: Who do we really reach?
• The role of journal publishing in the setup and maintenance of professions and disciplines
• Cases of open access publishing
• The organisation of open access repositories
• Case histories of open access repositories
• Copyright vs Copyleft
• Publishing and language: the hegemony of English
• Intellectual property and the impact on academic publishing
• What is a journal's 'impact' and how to measure it?
• The specific role of ephemera: theory & politics in organization in the world of journal publishing and potential 'alternative impact factor measurements'
• Academic evaluation and performance measurement systems (such as the RAE in the UK)
• Publishing outside academia

Full papers should be submitted to the special issue editors via email by 1 November 2008. Papers should be between 5000 and 9000 words; multimedia work is welcome. All submissions should follow Ephemera's submission guidelines:

http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/submit.htm.

All relevant submissions will undergo a double blind review process. The special issue is scheduled to be published in late 2009.

Special issue editors:

Craig Prichard
Tari Whakahaere Kaipakihi,
Te Kunenga Ki Purehuroa
Pouaka Motuhake 11-222
Papaioea, Aotearoa
Department of Management 214
Massey University, Private Bag 11-222
Palmerston North, New Zealand
Phone: +64 (0) 6 356-9099 ext. 2244
Email: c.prichard@massey.ac.nz

Steffen Böhm
School of Accounting, Finance and Management
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester CO4 3SQ UK
Phone: +44 (0) 1206 87 3843
Email: steffen@essex.ac.uk

Update on Harvard's open-access decision

From today's Inside Higher Ed:

Harvard University’s arts and sciences faculty approved a plan on Tuesday that will post finished academic papers online free, unless scholars specifically decide to opt out of the open-access program. While other institutions have similar repositories for their faculty’s work, Harvard’s is unique for making online publication the default option.

You can read the full story here. Way to go, Harvard faculty!

I'm waiting on pins and needles

It seems as though talk about open-access journal publishing is all the rage these days, and with good reason. Preserving the integrity of scholarly communication and its ability to circulate are both pressing issues--the latter, especially, given the emergence of digitally rights managed academic journal content and other types of strictures.  These are changing times indeed.

Apropos, I was heartened to discover this article in today's New York Times.  Apparently, the faculty of Harvard University is voting today to decide whether or not to move toward a system that more fully embraces open-access.  Here's an excerpt:

Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

[...]

“In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,” said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. “It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.”

Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased — including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have them.

What's exciting (or maybe nerve-wracking) to me is the degree to which Harvard is such a trend-setter.  How the faculty there goes, others are likely to follow.  So, for those of you at Harvard who may be voting today, please support the cause of open-access.  And for those of you who may know folks at Harvard, please tell them to lend their support.

If you need convincing about the merits of open-access, or if you want to learn all there is to learn about the issue, be sure to check out Peter Suber's excellent website.  He also has some extended commentary there about today's vote at Harvard and its implications.  And if you want to read the complete story from the Times, you can access it here.

Lessig for Obama on Super Tuesday (and me, too)

Today, one of my students asked me where he could vote in Indiana's Super Tuesday primary. He was despondent when I told him that Indiana doesn't vote until May--about a week before Guam, and long after the Presidential nominations probably will be sewn up. So for those of you whose votes actually count (and, heck, for those of you who are just interested in the U.S. Presidential elections), check out the Lawrence Lessig video I've embedded here. He makes a clear, reasoned case for why Democrats should support Barack Obama. What I like most is the language of "moral courage" Lessig introduces, as well as how Lessig connects his endorsement to his recent work on ending corruption in politics.

Consider yourself fortunate if you're able to vote today; please make sure to do so. I wish I were in your shoes.

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P.S. On the day after Super Tuesday, nobody seems to know exactly how many convention delegates belong to either Clinton or Obama. The consensus seems to be that each has around 800. Maybe the Indiana contest will end up mattering after all!

And...we're back!

After trolling through a bunch of Blogger discussion groups, at long last, I've finally discovered how to fix the strange header error that had been plaguing me here at D&R. That's the same error that compelled me to change the design of this blog for the last week or so. Anyway, I'm glad to be back to the look I've come to know and love for D&R, and I hope you are, too.

While I'm pretty sure everything's fixed now, I'm not all that confident in my html abilities. So if perchance you find that certain aspects of D&R aren't displaying properly in your web browser, please drop me a line.

One last thing: I still find it disconcerting that I have no idea how, exactly, my template spontaneously(?) changed. What's the saying? Deus ex machina...

Now that's what I call...democracy?

From today's New York Times:

Republican candidates were traveling to California for a debate Wednesday evening at the Reagan Presidential Library. While most of the attention in Florida was on the Republicans, Democratic voters gave Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton a victory in a virtually uncontested race. The Democratic Party had stripped the state of its delegates as a punishment for moving its primary earlier in the year, and the leading candidates refrained from campaigning there.

To be clear, I'm not a fan of all the primary-upping shenanigans. This sort of calendar game produces its own set of undesirable political effects. Nonetheless, it seem to me that stripping states of their convention delegates is an awfully undemocratic response for a society that so champions, and persistently wages war in the name of, democracy. And I gather this response isn't confined to Florida. It happened in Michigan, too, which similarly moved its primary forward. Between uncounted ballots, malfunctioning voting machines, so-called superdelegates, and an increasingly shady primary system, I'm genuinely worried about what's happening to democracy in these United States.

Spaghetti/regret/updates

I recently left a comment on Sivacracy responding to a post about Malcolm Gladwell's bestselling book, The Tipping Point. My remark was pretty snarky, admittedly. I said this: "Isn't The Tipping Point a readerly, if watered-down, version of Everett Rogers' The Diffusion of Innovations--a book that's been out for decades?" I still stand behind the spirit of comment, at least, insofar as I believe Rogers said essentially what Gladwell is now often credited with saying (and Gabriel Tarde before Rogers....You can see where this is going.). By the same token, I regret having too quickly dismissed Gladwell's work and contributions.

Perhaps what impresses me most about Gladwell's writing is his ability to make the history of the idea of communication engaging to popular audiences. Take his piece on "The Spin Myth," for instance, in which he tells fascinating stories about the role the late public relations doyen, Edward L. Bernays, played in shaping perceptions about media influence. Then there's the video I've embedded above, in which Gladwell shares a series of parables about the food industry's discovery of diversity-in-taste (spaghetti sauce is the operative example). This is no small matter. What Glaldwell is addressing are the epistemological assumptions individuals and groups bring to bear when making judgments about right and wrong, good and bad, tasty and displeasing, and more. He is also offering some intriguing commentary on personal influence and group dynamics, two longstanding issues in communication theory.

All that to say, having taught about the intellectual history of communication, I can appreciate the work that must go in to making his stories and lectures as captivating as they are. And while I wish his work were more critically inclined, I can't really hold that against him. After all, who am I to criticize an apple for being an apple, and not an orange?

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In other news, after weighing the decision, I've decided not to join Facebook after all. I still may sign up one day, but as I said earlier, it's hard enough for me to keep the lights on here at D&R. Another online commitment (to whatever extent Facebook is a commitment) would just be too much right now. I'm not sure if anyone had designs on friending me, but if you were, sorry to let you down.

Also, in case you're wondering, I'm going to leave the design of D&R as it is for the foreseeable future. Ron tells me it's a bit busy, and I agree. But until I can get the issue with my old design template resolved, I don't want to change the site again. I worry that folks might come looking for D&R and think they've stumbled on some other blog.

Attn. grad students: How to get published

The following essay, which has been posted to the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), is perfect for graduate students and anyone else trying to break into the world of academic presentation and publishing. It discusses all the ins and outs of getting book reviews, conference papers, and articles accepted, but in a way that's neither pedantic nor condescending. It's a must read, at least, as far as I'm concerned. You can download the pre-print by clicking on the link below. Enjoy!

Publishing Advice for Graduate Students
THOM BROOKS
University of Newcastle upon Tyne (UK)
Newcastle Law School

Graduate students often lack concrete advice on publishing. This essay is an attempt to fill this important gap. Advice is given on how to publish everything from book reviews to articles, replies to book chapters, and how to secure both edited book contracts and authored monograph contracts, along with plenty of helpful tips and advice on the publishing world (and how it works) along the way in what is meant to be a comprehensive, concrete guide to publishing that should be of tremendous value to graduate students working in any area of the humanities and social sciences.

A quick shout-out to Siva Vaidhyanathan over at Sivacracy for alerting me to the paper.

A new look for D&R...for the moment

Just a quick note to let y'all know that I've changed the look of D&R--temporarily, for now. There seems to be some sort of issue with the template I've been using. You may have noticed that the header wasn't displaying properly, which made it difficult to read the title and description. Until I can figure out what's wrong, I'm going to stick with the new look. And because I'm not opposed to change, I'd be curious to hear which you like better--the old template (pictured above-left), or the new one.

A new business model for videogames?

From today's New York Times:

Ever since John Riccitiello took over last year as chief executive of Electronic Arts, the video game industry bellwether, he has promised to revitalize the company with new games and new ways of reaching consumers. Now, that may be happening.

In a major departure from its traditional business model, E.A. plans to announce Monday that it is developing a new installment in its hit Battlefield series that will be distributed on the Internet as a free download. Rather than being sold at retail, the game is meant to generate revenue through advertising and small in-game transactions that allow players to spend a few dollars on new outfits, weapons and other virtual gear.

I know this sounds a lot like the business model for Second Life and other such games, yet in some ways, it seems to me something of a departure as well. For those of you who may know more about gaming than I, is this "buy to get ahead" ethic something common? To me it's always a sad day when more skills-oriented competition is complicated by economics. Invariably these situations produce what economists call a "race to the bottom," in which those who think they want to succeed must spend and spend and spend simply to keep up.

You can read the full article here.

Midwest Winter Workshop

Wow, what a weekend it's been! This Saturday, a great group of graduate students in my department hosted the third-annual Midwest Winter Workshop (a.k.a., MW3--you know something's significant when it warrants an acronym). The event brought together faculty and grads from some of the most stellar communication programs across the region. This year the participants hailed from the University of Illinois, Indiana University, the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin. In years past, the event attracted folks from as far away as Pittsburgh and North Carolina.

The MW3 began with three back-to-back plenary addresses on Saturday morning, which focused on the theme of publics. The featured speakers were U of I's Cara Finnegan, who made the case for better historicization of "visual culture"; UMN's Ron Greene, who stressed the analytic importance of the category "communicative labor" in discussions of public activism; and IU's Phaedra Pezzullo, who explored the rhetorical processes through which deadly environmental hazards in and beyond the workplace have been rendered normal or everyday, and hence not worth publicizing. Needless to say, all three talks sparked lively discussion that lasted throughout the day.

Lunch was followed by the first round of break-out sessions, in which groups of 20 or so gathered to talk about specific themes. I had the good fortune of landing in the "Media and Counterculture" group, where I was joined by U of I's James Hay and Spencer Schaffner, U of W's Rob Howard, and by a talented group of grad students from across the six participant institutions. I talked about The Century of the Self, one of my favorite documentaries (and something I've posted about previously), as well as some books I've been reading that have provoked me to begin digging deeper into the intellectual-historical roots of oppositionalist discourses in cultural studies. (If you're interested, the books are Rachel Bowlby's Carried Away, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter's A Nation of Rebels, Preston Shires' Hippies of the Religious Right, Joseph Turow's Niche Envy, and Fred Turner's absolutely brilliant tome, From Counterculture to Cyberculture.) As a whole, the group tried to get at what it means to be "counter" and whether or not the term is politically serviceable in contemporary times.

Thereafter, even smaller groups convened to workshop graduate student writing and research. These break-outs, which were student-led, gave each participant the opportunity to receive feedback on his or her work from a cohort of grad students, in dialog with two faculty members. Personally, I enjoyed not only learning about Erik Johnson (NU), Michael Lahey (IU), Kim Singletary (NU), and Jeff. St. Onge's (IU) work, but also learning, through it, more about the kinds of questions their respective graduate programs are focusing on right now. We covered everything from Google Street View and the racial politics of high fashion to audience labor and emergent constraints on political activism in the United States. Whew!

Practically every faculty member I spoke to during the weekend commented on how much she or he enjoyed every aspect of the MW3. Especially welcome was the opportunity to interact with incredibly bright students from outside of one's home institution. I also heard several colleagues mention how much they appreciated the opportunity to get to know fellow faculty in a smaller, more personable setting than your usual large-scale academic conference. I couldn't agree more.

The MW3 was real gem, and that was due to all the students who made it happen. They're a remarkable bunch who deserve heaps of praise. And here I feel compelled to single out the IU Department of Communication and Culture's own Jeff Motter. He helped conceive of the first MW3 three years ago, when it was hosted at U of I, and both this year and last, he shouldered a major share of the responsibility in organizing the event here at IU. Kudos, Jeff, and thank you for such a memorable weekend.

Saturday night's Presidential debate

It was enlightening to watch the ABC News/Facebook/WMUR Presidential debates this past Saturday night, for many reasons. I was aware of Obama and Huckabee's having won the Iowa caucuses, but honestly, I hadn't kept up much in terms of who-stands-for-what. The Indiana primary (where I live) doesn't occur until May, which is about two months after the Democratic and Republican nominees will have all but been determined. (The states with primaries later than ours are Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon, South Dakota, and West Virginia.) I lived in New Hampshire many years ago, home of the nation's first primary, and was I born in New York, a state teeming with electoral votes. It's strange now living somewhere that barely registers in Presidential elections, other than as a place that can be counted on to go red literally within minutes of the polls closing.

Two things struck me most about the debates themselves. First, I appreciated seeing former Libertarian Ron Paul mix it up with the Republicans. His presence there changed the whole tenor of things, try as the other candidates might to stay "on message" and stick to their don't-let-them-seem-rehearsed sound bites. Though I have no intention of voting Republican, it was still refreshing to hear someone, finally, talking about the implications of the massive devaluation of the dollar that's occurred under Bush 43's watch. My only regret was that ABC News excluded Dennis Kucinich from the Democratic half of the debate. No doubt his presence there would have broadened the scope of the conversation and made it much more interesting.

Second, I was flabbergasted, as was the studio audience at New Hampshire's St. Anselm College, by a comment made by the debate moderator, ABC News' Charlie Gibson. He premised a question to the Democratic candidates about tax cuts by saying, "If you take a family of two professors here at Saint Anselm, they’re going to be in the $200,000 category that you’re talking about lifting the taxes on." Huh? Did I miss something here? Since when did it become routine for professors to make $100,000 per year or more? Apropos, there's a story in today's Inside Higher Education that talks about the public's misperception of the nature of, and compensation for, academic labor by full-time faculty. No wonder folks still can't manage to shake the myth of the ivory tower. Heck--most of what's in my office is made of plastic.

Should I join Facebook?

I'm undecided on the issue, personally, which is why I'm asking all of you to weigh in. On the one hand, it's enough for me simply to maintain this blog, let alone to contribute to Sivacracy (oh--and earn a living). On the other hand, a recent peek at a friend's Facebook page showed me that, well, essentially everyone I know in the universe belongs. No one's directly pressured me to join, yet I feel compelled to be a part of something so many people seem to be engaging in. (Yes, I succumb fairly easily to peer pressure.)

In other news, I've made a few minor changes to add further interactivity to D&R. Each post now contains a footer with email, Digg, and subscription links. I've also changed my site syndication, which is now handled through FeedBurner.

Happy 2008, everyone, and let me know what you think about Facebook.

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P.S. For more on this thread, see my post from May 2008, "Why Did I Join Facebook?"