Tag Archives: academia

Progress Report: We Have a Spike in the System

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Don't look in the closet

Just updated the videos on how peer-to-peer networks work to Youtube videos. Now they are available in glorious HD, with surround sound, 4D vision and an immersive simulator technology that makes you feel like you really are there…. in a diagram of a network architecture. Well the HD is cool I suppose.

Also having not checked my stats for the site in a while I was pleasantly surprised to see I reached a new daily peak of visits this week. I have no idea why there was such a spike as apparently all visitors reached the site entirely on their own (without an outside link or google search). Ego me wants to presume my website was cited in some high class lecture and then all the students simultaneously loaded it up on their iPads as in this fantasy the University is horrendously well funded.

However realist me also knows that not all visits to a website are human, and it may just have been a case of the spiders; a phrase which gives me the jibblies.

I have my Viva in precisely seven days, which is rather terrifying. A viva is essentially a time when you, after slaving for three years over a tome of 100,000 words, are questioned on it relentlessly by two very clever people. It’s the academic equivalent of the realising-you’re-naked-in-the-classroom nightmare; they may as well be picking holes in your soul.

Finally in other news I’m currently knocking out book proposals to a variety of publishers to see if I can’t get my history of digital distribution published. Responses so far have been positive so you never know I might be shamelessly hawking my book on here in a years time, we can only hope.

Article Update: Embargo!

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I got an update on the progress of open-accessing my article and it is both good and bad all at the same time. The wonderful White Rose Foundation has now begun hosting my paper for people outside of academia to access. However, as much as they want to free it to the world, Taylor and Francis, the publishers of the journal have placed an 18 month embargo on making articles open access.

She's a sexy sassy MEP

That means it won’t be truly free until April 2012, at which point the masses of (two) people who want to read it will have given up and gone elsewhere, distracted by the hover-boards, jetpacks and flying cars that will be plentiful in 2012.

There is a silver lining however; if you want a copy you can go to the White Rose page and press the request button, at which point I will email one out to you post haste. The form just asks for an email and a reason for requesting it. I don’t mind if you put a reason or not but stick ‘DCI’ in there for good measure.

LINK: Request your copy now! (Hoverboard not included)

Passion

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Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their directors’ incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is removed.

Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, 1944

It became apparent on New Years Eve, whilst watching the umpteenth ‘top songs of the decade’ show that the general pop music landscape was unchanged from 2000 to 2009. The majority of it was cultural product designed off the back of market research and demographic profiling. What was interesting however was the process by which these acts came into being. Whereas the early part of the decade still ran the process of designing and manufacturing a pop group in the background, only to release them to the world in a flurry of doves and multimillion dollar marketing budgets, the latter part of the decade was more transparent. What we now find is that although the acts are produced in much the same way as they were before, the process of producing the act is itself a lucrative entertainment empire. The target audience is actively encouraged to become complicit in the construction of the next big hit, and that construction is as much pop culture as the final end product.

The observations regarding the increasing transparency of manufacturing pop are nothing really. A blip, a grain in the decades of actions that Adorno and Horkheimer first recognised in the 1940s. The quote from them is one of my favourites. It is a quote that I truly believe should be read by as many people as possible, if only once. It is clear concise and blunt, but most importantly it is sixty-six years old and is truer today than the day it was written. I find it strangely beautiful in the vehemence it conveys, I often wish academia had some more of this passion left.

If you feel inclined you can read the entirety of Adorno and Horkheimer’s essay on the Culture Industry online.

I Often Plagiarise Myself

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Here’s a thought for those of you that like to mix your academic work with your blogging vices. My university is trialing some software that detects plagiarism. It runs the submitted work through a few trials and tribulations to see if any significant strings match anything found online. It’s primarily there to make sure an essay isn’t actually a liberal quoting of Wikipedia.

However what happens when the software picks up a match for online content that the author of the submitted work is also the author of? What will happen in two years if my thesis gets run through this algorithm and a big arrow points at this blog? Obviously the mess should swiftly be resolved (one would hope) by me explaining the source of the blog. However it demonstrates both the problems of relying on algorithms and the problem that occurs when someone’s output is no longer contained to a professional sphere. Fifteen years ago no-one would expect a student to be airing their work anywhere outside their professional sphere. Now it should be compulsory.