Happy holidays

I'd like to wish all of my readers happy holidays and to thank everyone for your many contributions in 2008. This will be my last post until the new year, so I'll see you again in January. Until then (and after), peace.

New to the blog roll

New to the blog roll is Catherine Grant's Film Studies for Free. Catherine is "a full-time researcher and writer on film and culture, affiliated with the School of Film and Media at the University of Sussex [England] as a Visiting Research Fellow." What's great about her site, beyond all the Film Studies resources and smart commentary she provides, is her steadfast commitment to open access. The tag line of Film Studies for Free reads, "commentary on and links to online open-access film studies resources of note." Catherine is one of a growing contingent of humanities scholars who have recognized that scholarship is only as good as its instruments of production, exchange, and propagation.

Her latest post is about Daniel Frampton's book Filmosophy (Columbia University Press, 2007), which I blogged about back in March 2007. There I expressed concern about a disclaimer that accompanied the book's advertising. It indicated that the term "filmosophy" was a registered trademark of Valentin Stoilov. At the time I wondered how the literal ownership of ideas would affect the production of scholarly knowledge and critique. Catherine's blog shows us a better way in its embodiment of the principles of open access.

Enjoy.

Going commercial

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Above you'll find a promo video for a Columbia University Press book called American Pests. Tomorrow I'm shooting one of these promos for my book, The Late Age of Print. I'm excited to do it, but at the same time I'm feeling a little daunted. I've done my best to avoid video blogging and indeed entering into the video age more generally. I guess it's all finally catching up with me.

What's intriguing about the prospect of shooting a video for my book--beyond whatever potential there may be for getting the latter noticed--is what the promo tells us about the changing nature of book authorship. Never did I imagine having to become a multimedia personality when I began work on The Late Age of Print. I certainly wasn't trained for that in graduate school!

I suppose I was operating under what is, today, an increasingly antiquated understanding of authors and their work. That is, I had erroneously assumed that authors still could get away only with writing words and perhaps making an occasional public (i.e., "live") presentation of their work. I should have known better, given the arguments and subject matter of The Late Age of Print. If university presses are on to making videos, moreover, then you can be pretty sure the era in which authors were strictly writers has just about come to an end. Video killed the radio star twenty five years ago. Today, video has just about finished off the reclusive book writer, too.

I'll let you know how the shoot turns out, and once the promo is finished I'll post it here. It will also be available on the Columbia University Press "channel" on YouTube.

Kindle paper v. 2.0 now live

Back in October I presented a paper called "Kindle: The New Book Mobile or, the Labor of Reading in an Age of Ubiquitous Bookselling" at the American Studies Association convention in Albuquerque, NM. Before the conference I had posted a working draft of the Kindle piece on the Differences & Repetitions Wiki site, where I received amazing feedback.

Anyway, I've been pecking away at the paper some more and have posted the beta version to D&R^W. This one isn't an outline, in contrast to the previous iteration. Version 2.0 also contains a more substantive conclusion, which incorporates some of the feedback I received on the initial draft.

I'm not looking to crowdsource feedback on the new version of the Kindle paper per se, although as always comments are indeed welcome and can be left right on the worksite. I've also included a new feature on all D&R^W pages allowing you to share material easily on Facebook, del.icio.us, Furl, MySpace, and elsewhere.

"...not a democracy"

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There was a telling moment in last night's Inside the Actors Studio interview with Daniel Radcliffe, who plays Harry Potter in the film adaptation of the bestselling book series. About midway through the video sequence embedded above, host James Lipton asks Radcliffe how he felt about the various romantic pairings author J. K. Rowling had crafted for her characters. Lipton then admits that he once believed Harry and Hermione Granger would eventually end up together, whereupon the studio audience applauds. "Vox populi," Lipton observes.

Radcliffe's response? "The Harry Potter series is not a democracy." Truer words haven't been spoken.

Houston, we have a cover

At long last my book, The Late Age of Print, has a cover. I absolutely love it.


The cover is designed around an image by the photographer Cara Barer, whose work my friend Rachel turned me on to. (Thanks, Rachel.) I like how it captures both the beauty and grunginess of printed books--their persistence and decay--in our time. This is one of the key themes or tensions that I explore throughout The Late Age of Print. I'm thrilled with how the designers at Columbia University Press have managed to capture and convey it with such simplicity.

The other bit of good news is that The Late Age of Print is now listing on Amazon.com, with a release date set for sometime in March 2009. You cannot yet pre-order it, unfortunately, since the book hasn't been priced. You can sign up to be notified by email when it becomes available, though.

I just received the final page proofs yesterday, incidentally, and the book is being indexed as we speak. What a joy to watch the text's transformation into an artifact! Stay tuned for more.

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P.S. A quick update to say that The Late Age of Print is now available for pre-order on Amazon.com. It costs $27.50 in hardback, which, given the price of academic books these days, is a pretty good deal. Kudos to Columbia University Press for keeping the price down.

Books and the business of business models

My friend Dustin Howes alerted me to this recent Q&A with author Seth Godin, who talks about the future of the book biz. Here's an excerpt:

Q: What's the most important lesson the book publishing industry can learn from the music industry?

A: The market doesn't care a whit about maintaining your industry. The lesson from Napster and iTunes is that there's even MORE music than there was before. What got hurt was Tower and the guys in the suits and the unlimited budgets for groupies and drugs. The music will keep coming. Same thing is true with books. So you can decide to hassle your readers (oh, I mean your customers) and you can decide that a book on a Kindle SHOULD cost $15 because it replaces a $15 book, and if you do, we (the readers) will just walk away. Or, you could say, "if books on the Kindle were $1, perhaps we could create a vast audience of people who buy books like candy, all the time, and read more and don't pirate stuff cause it's convenient and cheap..." I'm a pessimist that the book industry will learn from music. How are you betting?

I'm so pleased to hear someone else saying to the book industry, "lower your prices to generate interest and increase sales." This was my basic argument when I blogged last June about the Amazon e-reader, Kindle, and the possibilities it opened up for the book biz to rethink its pricing strategies.

The rest of Godin's Q&A is definitely worth checking out. He has lots of interesting material there on "content" versus "book" publishing (the latter he refers to as "the life and death of trees"), as well as on the importance of publishers servicing, rather than simply making money from, their markets.

Here's hoping his thoughts don't fall on deaf ears.

Transversal on translation

You may not know this, but one of my ongoing side projects revolves around the idea and practice of translation. I've written about it in a short chapter in the volume I co-edited called Communication as...: Perspectives on Theory. (Surprise, surprise--my contribution is called, "Communication as Translation.") I've also presented some other work on the subject here and there at various conferences.


Anyway, I was pleased to receive an email announcement this morning alerting me to the latest issue of the journal Transversal (pictured above), whose theme is, "Talks on Translation." Definitely check it out.

Like Traces (Hong Kong University Press), which is easily one of the most thought-provoking book series in cultural studies today, Transversal publishes all of its articles in multiple languages simultaneously. The result is a remarkably multilingual and heterodox forum for intellectual exchange about culture, politics, and the politics of culture.

In contrast to most books and journals in cultural studies and beyond, these publications don't merely pay lip service to principles of difference, decentering, and globalization. Instead, they embody them. They do so by compelling authors, editors, and readers to engage a diverse global intellectual community, with all the difficulties and opportunities that entails.

Remarkable stuff.

Thank you, America, for...

• voting in record numbers.
• recognizing that your vote does make a difference.
• showing us that red can indeed become blue.
• understanding what "change" really means.
• knowing when enough's enough.
• lifting the veil of tyranny.
• celebrating last night in the streets.
• bringing out your best selves when you were baited to bring out your worst.
• choosing someone unashamed to utter the word "peace" in public.
• showing that Presidents need not only be named John, Bill, James, or George.
• determining before bedtime who would be the next President of the United States.
• electing Barack Obama!

From the bottom of my heart, America, thank you. Now help this list grow by adding to it in the comments, posting it to social networking sites, and circulating it via email.

"Acknowledged Goods" now live

Last May I posted a short snippet of a paper I was working on to the Differences & Repetitions Wiki. It was called "Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing." The title summarizes the principal focus of the piece. Essentially I wanted to ask: why hasn't the field of cultural studies given its instruments of scholarly communication--journals especially--more critical scrutiny?

I was encouraged by the many comments and questions I received in response to the two pairs of paragraphs and tables that I had posted online. I kept plugging away at "Acknowledged Goods" into the summer and finished a draft sometime in late June. I've been meaning to post the completed piece to D&R^W, but unfortunately other responsibilities have gotten in the way.

Until now, that is. I've finally managed to get "Acknowledged Goods" properly formatted for the wiki, so at long last you can read the whole essay by clicking here. Since this is a longer and much more nuanced version of the work I posted back in May, I'm still very interested in hearing your feedback. Indeed, "Acknowledged Goods" remains a work in progress, so your comments, questions, and concerns will only help as I keep tweaking the piece.

I hope that you enjoy "Acknowledged Goods" and, more important, that it spurs you to action. Academic journal publishing is at a critical crossroads right now, and cultural studies ought to weigh in on its present and future directions.

The DMCA 10, years on

If you can believe it, today is the 10th anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. This is the sweeping piece of legislation that, among its many provisions, criminalized the hacking of digital rights management technologies. In the process, it also criminalized activities that were once perfectly legal and commonplace, such as making personal dupes of copyrighted materials you already owned. So thanks for rolling back our hard-fought fair use rights, technology and entertainment lobbies! It's been a great decade.

P.S. If you're searching for a more sympathetic account of the DMCA, you might want to check out this blog post.

Kindle + Oprah = game changer?

Leave it to Oprah Winfrey. She's already changed what people read. Now she's out to change how they read by giving Amazon.com's e-reading device, Kindle, her coveted endorsement.

Oprah's official announcement came today on The Oprah Winfrey Show, although for several days now Amazon has been teasing the big news on its home page.

Amazon has been excruciatingly tight-lipped about who's been buying Kindle and how many units it's managed to sell. The consensus among technology commentators seems to be this: since its debut last November, Kindle has found its way mostly into the hands of older, gadget-savvy early adopters who don't mind dropping $350 on a stand alone mobile e-reading device.

Given how few people I've actually seen with a Kindle, I'd venture to say this is a rather small cadre indeed. Significantly, all but one of the Kindle users I've observed over the last year has been male.

In other words, Winfrey's endorsement could prove to be a real game changer. She has enormous reach among women between the ages of 18 and 54. That, combined with the Oprah Book Club, makes her an extraordinarily influential figure with exactly the population that purchases the most books in the United States.

The real challenge, it seems to me, will be for Winfrey to persuade her audience to part with a large chunk of cash during a major economic downturn. Amazon's decision to offer a $50 "Oprah Winfrey" rebate--about 15% off of Kindle's retail price--will be a major incentive in this regard. (By the way, the rebate also happens to be a smart way for Amazon to move its existing stock of Kindles to make way for generation 2.0.)

The other challenge will be for Winfrey to convince her audience that what makes a book a book are its words and images, and not its physical form. That could prove to be an even harder sell in the long run. As Jeff Gomez has observed in his book Print is Dead, it's hard for many people to shake the image of books as things made of paper, ink, and glue, which they're supposed "to hug...in bay windows on autumn days, basking in the warm glow of a fireplace with a cup of chamomile by their side."

The genius of Kindle is to marry e-reading with on-the-go book distribution. Its downfall thus far (beyond the concerns I've raised about its interface and matters of privacy) has been Amazon's apparent inability to connect the device with less gadget-inclined book readers. And in this regard, Oprah's endorsement of Kindle can only help bring e-reading to within eyeshot of the mainstream.

A momentous day in history

Happy birthday, photocopier! You're 70 years old today. For more on the happy occasion, you can check out this story in Wired magazine:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/10/dayintech_1022

Differences and repetitions indeed!

CFP on "free labor"

CALL FOR PAPERS:

"FREE...AS IN LABOR"

Popular Culture Association/

American Culture Association National Conference

April 8-11, 2009

New Orleans, LA, USA

The Communication and Digital Culture Area of the Popular Culture Association is soliciting proposals for panels and individual papers that explore online participatory culture and the problematic concept of "free labor" in a network society.

Corporations are increasingly counting upon the activity of a "participatory consumer" to provide the content for sites that directly or indirectly generate revenue. Twenty five years ago, GNU operating system activist Richard Stallman famously distinguished the "free" in free software as "free as in free speech, not as in free beer." What kind of "free" is the labor of a participatory culture? How does the appropriation of this work by major corporations complicate our understanding of "free labor"?

Possible topics include:

• Wikipedia and the Academy
• Gift Economies Online
• Free/Libre Open Source Software
• Intellectual Property
• Warez Subcultures
• "Immaterial" Labor
• Convergence & Consumer/Producers
• DIY Media
• Marx & the Digital Economy
• Fan Culture Appropriation

Submit a 250 word maximum proposal (hard copy or electronic) to:

Mark Nunes, Chair
Department of English, Technical Communication, and Media Arts
Southern Polytechnic State University
Marietta, GA 30060-2896
mnunes@spsu.edu

Deadline for Submissions: November 30, 2008

Note: Communication and Digital Culture is a themed area. Submissions off-theme should be submitted to:

• Internet Culture Area Chair, Montana Miller, montanm@bgnet.bgsu.edu
• Game Studies Area Co-Chairs, digitalgames.pcaaca@gmail.com

Thank you, wise crowd (plus some news)

First, let me acknowledge all of the good folks who've written in to provide feedback on my paper about Amazon's Kindle e-reading device and what I'm calling "the labor of reading." Your contributions (i.e., your labor!) certainly will help to sharpen my presentation, which I'll be delivering later this week at the American Studies convention in Albuquerque, NM. Thank you, wise crowd!

I'm also writing to share a bit of good news: the piece got a mention on the Los Angeles Times blog, Jacket Copy. You can read the complete article by clicking here. I'm just thrilled, needless to say. Who would have thought this little old conference paper would get national media attention?

Once the dust has settled from my trip, I'll be sure to post the final, definitive version of the Kindle paper to the D&R Wiki. Thanks again for now, and let me know what you think about the article on the Times blog.

Calling on the wisdom of crowds

I just finished what's admittedly a pretty drafty draft of the paper I'll be presenting at next week's American Studies Association (ASA) convention in Albuquerque, NM. The piece is called "Kindle: The New Book Mobile or, The Labor of Reading in an Age of Ubiquitous Bookselling." It's my first academic meditation on Amazon.com's Kindle e-reading device, which was released last year to much fanfare among technophiles...and equally as much dread among bibliophiles.

You may recall that I've blogged three times about Kindle here on D&R--last November, June, and August. Now I'm asking for your help. I've posted the working draft of my ASA/Kindle paper to the Differences & Repetitions Wiki, which you can find by clicking here. I feel as though the argument is proceeding more or less in the right direction, but at the same time your feedback would help me to tighten up the paper overall.

The Kindle page on D&R^W is set up to accept comments only rather actual changes to the text--this in contrast to my paper on Deleuze and communication from last year, which was (and remains!) a more open and collaborative authorial undertaking. In any case, I'd value any input you may have. Anonymous comments are welcome, too.

Trapped!

Adam Curtis is my favorite documentary filmmaker--and one of my favorite filmmakers, period. I was introduced to his work a few years ago by my good friends Elaine Vautier and Timothy Roscoe. My thinking hasn't been the same since.

Last December I blogged about his 2002 feature, The Century of the Self. This weekend I had the good fortune of discovering his most recent production, The Trap, which aired on the BBC in 2007 but of course never made its way to the United States. I've embedded some video, below, for those of you who'd like a peek at the first 10 minutes or so. You can watch the entire documentary in delicious snack-size portions on YouTube.

If I had to describe Curtis' work as a whole, I'd say he's an intellectual historian who happens to work in the documentary genre (which is to take nothing away from his skills as a documentarian). He has an uncanny knack for bringing complex ideas and systems of thought to life.

In The Trap, for example, Curtis demonstrates how game theory, anti-psychiatry, existentialism, Isaiah Berlin's "two concepts of freedom," and more converged and connected with one another to produce the highly circumscribed notion of "freedom" prevalent in the West today.

What Curtis' work also then shows is just how much ideas can and do matter. This is at once encouraging and frightening.

Many critics have suggested that anti-intellectualism now runs rampant in the United States and elsewhere. In an age of punditry, game shows like Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?, Vice-Presidential debates in which "avoiding nuance" is a clarion call, etc., they claim that people no longer possess a tolerance for complex, long-form ideas.

Curtis' work blows that bit of doxa wide-open. His productions chronicle how, time and again, government officials, corporate CEOs, policy makers, management consultants, and others not only listen to and are guided by "esoteric" theories, but also how they find ways to translate those ideas into everyday practices and products.

And this, I suppose, is the rub: you can never know how bodies of thought--even well-intentioned ones--will get taken up and deployed, let alone by whom.

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U of I failed to do its homework

Courtesy of Gil Rodman, here's a link to the landmark United States Supreme Court case, Tinker v. Des Moines (1969). It demonstrates quite clearly that the University of Illinois' decision to bar faculty and staff from engaging in campaign speech on campus--including displaying buttons on their shirts and bumper stickers on their cars--is a violation of Constitutional principles. I've excerpted one of the more relevant passages below for those of you who'd prefer the Cliff's Notes version.

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TINKER v. DES MOINES SCHOOL DIST., 393 U.S. 503 (1969)

...As we have discussed, the record does not demonstrate any facts which might reasonably have led school authorities to forecast substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities, and no disturbances or disorders on the school premises in fact occurred. These petitioners merely went about their ordained rounds in school. Their deviation consisted only in wearing on their sleeve a band of black cloth, not more than two inches wide. They wore it to exhibit their disapproval of the Vietnam hostilities and their advocacy of a truce, to make their views known, and, by their example, to influence others to adopt them. They neither interrupted school activities nor sought to intrude in the school affairs or the lives of others. They caused discussion outside of the classrooms, but no interference with work and no disorder. In the circumstances, our Constitution does not permit officials of the State to deny their form of expression.

NCA on the U of I

It's always a pleasure to begin the week on a positive note. Case in point: I learned today that the National Communication Association (NCA), the United States' largest professional organization representing communication researchers and teachers, issued the following statement condemning the University of Illinois' policy against campaign speech.

I'm very proud of and impressed by NCA for taking this stand. As a professional organization, it's rarely a trend-setter in the vein of, say, the Modern Language Association.

Here is a link to the statement on the NCA website, which contains additional links to the organization's stance on free expression, as well as to information about the U of I controversy. I've also appended the statement below for those of you who are more scroll-inclined.

For now, well done, NCA. Well done.

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NCA Statement Regarding Campus Speech Codes
The National Communication Association believes that freedom of speech and assembly must hold a central position among American’s Constitutional principles, and we express our determined support for the right of peaceful expression.

As such, NCA opposes the University of Illinois’s decision to ban staff members from vocalizing their political affiliation or support for particular political candidates. By not allowing faculty and staff to display buttons, pins, or bumper stickers or attend political rallies of any kind, the University of Illinois is sending the message that faculty should not engage in discussions of a political and/or controversial nature. Not only does this suggestion limit their right to free expression, it seeks to suppress their ability to think and act critically in response to significant contemporary concerns. College campuses are places for faculty and staff to actively express their views and opinions on a variety of topics, including politics.

There is a risk to a free society when responsible advocacy is treated as a danger to be suppressed. Much good and little harm can ensue if we err on the side of freedom, whereas much harm and little good may follow if we err on the side of suppression.

By restricting individual forms of political expression, the University of Illinois system is depriving its faculty of an open and honest academic environment, one wherein learning occurs both inside and outside of the classroom.

What's up with the University of Illinois?

From yesterday's Inside Higher Ed:

Sporting an Obama or McCain button? Driving a car with one of the campaigns’ bumper stickers? You might need to be careful on University of Illinois campuses.

The university system’s ethics office sent a notice to all employees, including faculty members, telling them that they could not wear political buttons on campus or feature bumper stickers on cars parked in campus lots unless the messages on those buttons and stickers were strictly nonpartisan. In addition, professors were told that they could not attend political rallies on campuses if those rallies express support for a candidate or political party.

Whoa. Talk about chilling--and, as far as I can tell, a pretty poorly conceived policy. Evidently it's not a problem if a U of I employee wears apparel to work emblazoned with a "Nike" logo, despite the company's well-documented exploitation of laborers in developing countries. How is that not a political endorsement, albeit of a somewhat indirect kind? And were I a professor not at Indiana but at Illinois, what if I wanted to teach students about rhetorics of political expression and propaganda using campaign stickers and bumper stickers? Would that be an acceptable use of these materials? And would I need to bring them onto campus appropriately shrouded so as not to suggest any partisanship?

Sigh. You get the point. The complete story is available here.