The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

I’m doing some work at present for a friend who researches in the area of sustainable housing. Wendy is currently trying to recruit participants for a study of how homes respond in heat waves and how well homes perform in terms of heating/cooling in relation to approved design and construction plans. If you’re in Brisbane or Townsville, and interested in participating, please read on.

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I read an interesting article on Mumbrella this morning: apparently Kyle Sandilands has said something offensive and regrettable on his terrible radio show. The station owners are in damage control and sponsors are publicly abandoning the show.

So what was it this time? Apparently he made disparaging remarks about Magda Szubanski’s weight. What? Oh, sorry, wasn’t I clear? It was an article by Tim Burrowes called “Is Kyle Sandilands’ live broadcasting career over?” published in September 2009. Read it here.

On that occasion Kyle and co-host Jackie O were taken off air for two week as punishment for a series of inappropriate stunts, most spectacluarly the lie-detector rape debacle. As I recall there was outrage on Twitter and elsewhere, advertisers furiously distanced themselves, and the man himself appeared chastened and apologetic. Sound familiar?

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This website comprises a series of interviews with key players in Queensland politics over the last 40 years:

www.queenslandspeaks.com.au

This is the first I’ve heard of this initiative: perhaps it has only just gone live, there is no copyright date on the website. As it describes:

Queensland Speaks is a free website that presents the extraordinary personal and political world of decision making in Queensland over the past 40 years. It aims to enable students, researchers and the general public to gain some understanding of political and bureaucratic decision making in Queensland from the 1970s to the end of the Beattie Government in 2007.

Each interview is clearly summarised, and internally indexed to allow easy access to key points. There is also an extensive tagging system that allows the listener to follow themes across a number of different interviews, and the search mechanism seems to work well. There is also an effective in-text glossary of terms, which provide the explanation of acronyms or background to particular events.

Given the period involved is guess it’s natural that first thing I searched was “Fitzgerald inquiry.” This brought up six pages of references, covering more than twenty interviewees from all sides of politics and including people like Russell Cooper and Wayne Goss.

Coming from the Centre for the Government of Queensland at the University of Queensland, the main drivers of this initiative are Professor Peter Spearritt and Dr Danielle Miller. It is well worth a look.

There’s something interesting going on with the Occupy Sydney and Occupy Melbourne protests at present, and I can’t quite get my head around it.

The first thing that struck me was that the same people who celebrated the Arab Spring, and even Occupy Wall Street to some extent, were pouring scorn on the Australian protests.

One argument against the Australian movement is that things aren’t so bad here, so Australians have no right to protest in the same way. Yeah, right, well that depends on where you sit, even in Australia.

But is it better here? Or is it just that we tend to be a more individualistic and complacent lot? If we start asking about power rather than just the state of the economy, the answers start to change.

Another objection to the Australian movement has been that the protestors are a disorganized bunch with no unified objectives and no clear idea what it is that they are protesting about. That doesn’t surprise me. You don’t have to understand how a car engine works to know when something is wrong with it. Likewise, you don’t have to understand exactly how the social and economic systems work to realise that something is amiss.

Actually, I paid little attention to any of this until the riot police were sent in to break up the protests in Melbourne and Sydney. Then the questions really started to flow.

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Tuesday 19 October marks 10 years since the SIEV X sank and 352 asylum seekers, mostly women and children, drowned. We should remember this day. A nation should remember its shame with the solemnity that it usually reserves for its sacrifices and victories. In theory, remembering should help us to avoid the patterns of decisions that led to the tragedy that is being commemorated.

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Steve Jobs died yesterday. I cried.

Of course, I also cried over this story too. But I did not know Steve Jobs, any more than I knew this couple. I knew little about him beyond the fact that he was CEO of Apple and stepped down recently due to cancer. I certainly was no fan boy; I have a Mac simply because Dell pissed me off and Windows was threatening to unleash Vista on me.

So, why did I cry? Why were so many of the people in the news and in my feeds visibly upset, most of them with little or no more connection to Jobs and Apple products than I have?

Mark Cohen, in The Drum, puts it down to a ‘cult of personality’. Possibly, to a degree, for some people. No doubt there is a degree of parasocial attachment for some people as well, a phenomenon whereby perfectly ordinary, rational people form intense one-sided relationships with others (usually celebrities, actors, or other high profile identities) whom they don’t know at all, or barely know, in person. This was an explanation given for the outpouring of emotion at the death of Princess Diana.

I have a theory, though, that there is something else going on that requires no particular knowledge of, or attachment to, the person who dies. Here’s my theory. Hear me out as I try to figure out what this cultural phenomenon is that I can see playing out around me and where the theory of parasocial relationships doesn’t seem to cut it as an explanation.

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Yesterday, Greg Jericho linked to two contrasting reports on the most recent household expenditure report. The first was telling how the rising costs of food, housing, and transport, in particular, were stressing families, with some families having to spend more than half their income on these basics. The second report claimed that because spending on cafés, hairdressing, and pay TV and internet was up, we were all better off than we thought. This has been a bit of a theme lately, especially for Ross Gittins. It is also the line that was picked up and run with by the ‘leftist’ twitterati in my feed.

The most sensible comment I saw came from Graham Young, whose response was, “Maybe. If everyone were average.” Thank you Graham! Seriously, guys, you don’t have to have a sophisticated grasp of statistics to realize that just because some people are more able to spend on luxuries that does not mean that others are not struggling. That’s the point of statistics, they appear to even things out.

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Last night I went to a public lecture by Christina Slade, who talked about the media use of Arabic-speaking migrants in the European Union. She introduced and contextualised the issues that her research has been investigating with reference to a statement by Nicolas Sarkozy in which he stated that Muslim women who wear the veil are “cut off from all social life, deprived of identity”. It does not matter greatly in context whether Sarkozy was referring only to the full covering as there has been legislation to ban head scarves as well in various countries. Even in Australia, we occasionally get politicians calling for a ban. Slade then proceeded to demonstrate how, in terms of their cultural citizenship, these migrants were certainly not socially or politically disconnected, in fact quite the opposite was the case. I think that she used the term ‘cultural citizenship’ but whether or not she actually used it, that’s what I thought I heard and it got me thinking.

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I usually appreciate Media Watch. Usually. On this occasion though, I can’t help but feel that the story is a beat-up that fails to acknowledge one of the basic social functions of media. Holmes’ point seems to be that anyone who was not in the UK at the time of the riots and who had not actually spoken to any of the rioters did not have a legitimate right to comment. I beg to differ on this one. First a disclaimer: I put my own thoughts to keyboard here last week.

Yes, much of the commentary was speculation. At this point, it had to be. . .

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There’s been some excellent commentary on the London riots today, for instance this by Gavin Heaton and this one by Laurie Penny. I won’t add much to it, but I want to point interested readers in the direction of Jon Stratton’s article in the most recent Continuum: Journals of Media & Cultural Studies 25.3, June 2011. The article is about the Cronulla riots, and while superficially it might seem to be drawing a long bow to compare the two situations, what makes Stratton’s article so useful for thinking about London is that he grounds his observations solidly in theories of citizenship. He also, in a move far too infrequently undertaken in commentary, tries to understand where the rioters are coming from. (There’s been enough people saying about both events that there is no excuse. No, there’s not, but the discourse of individual moral responsibility does little to help us understand what is going on here because it is thoroughly grounded in the causal conditions.)

He looks at the way that those involved in the riots, both the young people ‘of Middle Eastern appearance’ and the young white Australians, have experienced reduced levels of citizenship in an exclusionary state. Changes to migration legislation have made it more difficult for migrants to become citizens, and Temporary Protection Visas created different classes of relationship to the nation with differential rights.

In the past, the notion of the inclusive state meant that once citizenship was gained, certain rights came with it. No longer . . .

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