The Memes of Production: A cultural studies weblog

I’ve been approached on a couple of occasions now to help spread the word about a new graduate/early career researcher networking site. They’ve been around for a year now and seem to be growing, which overcomes my initial hesitation. It is called Graduate Junction and you can check it out for yourself if you are interested. I’m not a member of this network so can’t vouch for it and it seems that you have to register to access most of the information. There is a heavy UK bias in the team that runs the site, but that may be a reflection of its origins rather than its purpose or functioning.

Please don’t respond to me if you have questions about this site. The person who contacted me is called Daniel Colegate, and you can direct your questions about the site to here.

News Corporation has begun blocking user-generated content from Photobucket on Myspace.

Good news for media researchers and movie gossip-hounds alike: Variety has deactivated the paywall to its online content.

I’ve been inspired by Mel’s post about academic blogs to broaden the Memes blog-roll. So I call on our readership for help! What cultural studies blogs are out there? Or are you thinking of starting one and want advice? Ask away!

I might possibly make this post an on-going resource and add it to the forthcoming “essays” section—which I just invented in my head now. But in any case, I’m intrigued by the ways that professional writers and media creators are using the Internet both as a promotional and creative outlet. So I’m going to create a list, perhaps with a bit of commentary on each. Consider this a work in progress.

• Fantasy writer, John Crowley
• Black Books, Father Ted, Big Train, and The IT Crowd creator, Graham Linehan
• Battlestar Galactica writer, Ron D. Moore
• William Gibson
• Doctor Who writer Paul Cornell’s House of Awkwardness
• (new) The world’s most prolific SF writer, Charlie Stross
• (new) Ken McLeod, The Early Days of a Better Nation

Suggestions from commentators are very welcome. They don’t all have to be genre writers—that’s just my own bias. I’m particuarly interested in stuff that’s “authentic”, (Hello, John!) in that it’s obviously created by the author, rather than expensively furnished by a publisher or production company—although at least two of the starting group fall into the latter category.

I’m going to try and do more quick posts leading readers to interesting tidbits elsewhere. After all, that’s what blogging is all about.

To begin, here’s a great comments thread on this post about problems in utopian or post-utopian SF, leading to a particularly interesting and lengthy discussion of Adam Robert’s SF work.