thinking is the new black

Jumpsuits are on trend, official.

The last time I wore a jumpsuit was in the 1980s, to Elizabeth Eslers’ birthday party where we went to see Sootie “live”. My passion for fashion and natural inclination towards celebrity began at an early age, since I remember making my poor mum trawl around the shops to find some leather dye to match my party shoes to the jumpsuit just in case Mathew Corbett invited me up on stage.

One of 2008s key looks will be the jumpsuit as reported by Vogue, The Sunday Times Style supplement, Grazia and me. I am a little unsettled by this. Not sure adults should wear jumpsuits unless they’re a forensic scientist or a skydiver /human cannon ball. I wish to focus on another key trend this year, not the clutch bag, not The Macintosh (raincoat not computer), but having its’ turn on the catwalk, fashion fast-forward – it’s communication theory. Hurrah and Hurraz.

It’s written on the wind
It’s everywhere I go
So if you really love theory
Come on and let it show
You know I love theory, I always will
My mind’s made up by the way that I feel
There’s no beginning, there’ll be no end
‘Cause on theory you can depend la la la la repeat x’s 10.

In the month where I’ve been contacted by someone who described themselves as a discourse consultant and have been doing tricksy things with reflexivity in one of my chapters, I’m happy to commune, communication theory is having its’ day.
Check out the great blog by Grant McCracken (thanks to Mr Mustoe for alerting me to this). The inspired Anthony Mayfield has been discussing communication revolutions and Ian Delaney draws on some of the greats such as Marx & Althusser. My favourite find on this is a brand agency who are recruiting for a semiotician ( true!) with 5-8 years experience. Genius. “I am a practiced decoder of cultural signifiers, and am used to applying the trichotomy of the sign and syntagmatic dimensions in a fast paced environment”. So my style tip for a day through to evening look is slip a copy of Das Kapital under your arm, team with a copy of “For Marxs” by Althusser and you’re good to go.

Very briefly – I have an iPod Touch now. It rocks.

Also thanks to my technical consultant at oneidea.co.uk for their help migrating thinking is the new black to its’ own domain finally. You rock too.

Quick bit of procrastination before I get cracking today. I had a hideous day yesterday riddling through Marxs’ theory of general intellect and its’ relationship with the consumer/producer debate. FYI The only way to deal with the likes of Italian theorist Paulo Virno is to eat a large bag of Minstrels and listen to some banging techno.

Anyway – time to conclude on the Google/white bread debate. My thoughts on the subject are based around a couple of issues. One is the decline of critical thinking as a skill, then there is what Foucault would call regimes of truth, and finally what it means to teach.

Lets work backwards. Tara hasn’t taught me, though I have been to 2 of her public lectures in the past year, and was privileged to have her read through some of my work and sit in on my transfer viva and give comment. I’ve also taught some of the same students as her last year on a module at Brighton University. This means I know her to be an effervescent and exceptional teacher who inspires students. There’s another article about her in The Guardian today btw.

Now I don’t want to go all “Dead Poets Society”, but good teaching is magic, and can have life changing effects. Which brings me to “Oh Captain my Captain”. My Tara is Paul Cobley who taught me semiotics on my B.A over a decade ago. Up until then I was some what of an education anomaly, reported as less than remarkable at 2ndry school. I began A-levels and promptly dropped out half way through when I discovered rave and bad men. The only reason I went to Uni way back when, was because I worked out I’d be better off than on the dole. However a year into the course I started to get interested and the reason is simply – great teaching introduced me to awesome ideas. Thoughts that I could not shake, which have influenced me to go on and work in the media, take an M.A and now write a thesis. All my lecturers on that course were without exception, passionate, involved and inspiring, and I am not alone in this opinion. I am the only one to return to University education, but of the good mates I made back then, they all still refer to Paul Cobley as “Oh Captain my Captain”.

OK, so “Regimes of Truth”. A nice explanation can be found in Sara Mills’ book ‘Michel Foucault”, part of the Routledge Critical Thinkers series.
Foucault 1st introduced this concept in an interview that he gave called ‘Truth and Power” in 1979 with Fontano. In it he described truth statements as common sense knowledge within a society, “truth like knowledge, is of the world; it is produced there by virtue of multiple constraints” (Mills, S 2003 p74). Basically what he was getting at is that certain knowledge is presented as truth because it is kept in place by institutions of power, and knowledge that doesn’t meet with the criteria of the institutions of power fades away. All I’m saying is, SEO. When someone goes to Google looking for info they will merrily tap in a few keywords to begin their search, and usually rely on a nippy click through the first 2 or 3 pages. Therefore it’s not objective, but via a set of institutional practices and criteria determined by Google. I feel what we need is for them to be more explicit about how they measure the metrics of a site to determine its’ page ranking and rigorous analyses on the practices of Google. However I think it is pointless to think in terms of achieving an objective knowledge via the internet and instead, always keep in mind the question of who’s’ interest do those page rankings serve?

Lastly critical thinking. This is weighing up ideas and making your mind up whether to accept or reject, if you’re really good you might have some of your own based on the ones you’ve evaluated and so it goes… Honestly I think this is a lot to demand of a first year university student. I can’t comment on other disciplines but in respect of media and communication studies it’s one hell of an ask, given the theory they are required to engage with. It is not enough to simply understand something, critical thinking involves going above n’beyond, and fitting in other peoples ideas with your own view of the world. To get into the validity of information one must go outside the context and this to my mind is an issue with online material in the academic world. We need to bring to bear outside knowledge and standards.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

A break in the google/whitebread debate to tell you the heart breaking news that my iPod has tragically passed away this morning. We have been together since 2003 and have had over 4 happy years together. I am not sure what this means for the thesis since I find it almost impossible to write without music. Equally the bose sound dock has gone into herself and refuses to speak with anyone. This is a sad day. A nation mourns.

I’m always impressed by good public speaking. 2 speakers whom I‘ve yet to see surpassed are Professor Lord Giddens and, you guessed it… Mr Steve Jobs. I’m captivated when they’re on stage. So intoxicated by their modus operandi that for the duration of the talk I suspend any critical facilities I possess, and in the round up and applause I find myself almost besotted.

piccie of Giddens

At Tara Brabazon inaugural lecture she gave a great performance. But like the other two, what I find amazing is that, and this is particularly true of Giddens, the performance itself is so energetic, convincing, dynamic etc. that there’s this while, where I shelve my analysis in favour of being totally impressed by them and their intellect.

Here’s a synopsis of her lecture as I understood it.

Tara began talking about what she calls “the seagull effect”. You know when a dirty fat gull swoops down and nicks your ice cream, right out of your hands. When it comes to reading, writing and thinking, we’re all racing to take the last chip off the plate in case it goes. With a super-size portion of irony she used the image of the cover of Malcolm Gladwells’ Blink – “Thinking without thinking”. The audience sniggered; thinking without thinking is the stooooopist funniest thing ever to an audience of professional intellectuals.

The idea of the collapse of time and space has been knocking around since Daniel Bells seminal “The coming of the Post Industrial society”, perhaps even a tad before when the invention of papyrus by the ancient Egyptians ignited globalisation 1.0. But according to Tara the events of 9/11 have seen a parallel trajectory with the speeding up and condensing of information. We expect everything bite size and quick about it.

Academic expertise will crumble under web 2.0 & I will end up as a cheap talking head, according to her. Experience is now much more important than expertise. Oh dear.

Her beef with Google is that it ranks on popularity not importance and therefore we can no longer tell the difference between popular and significant information, especially, because to be popular you need to be popularist. And finally in a passionate call to arms to the academic world she urged the community to improve the calibre of scholarship online. Google, she said, has provided the infrastructure and it is down to us to improve the social structure.

Part 3 coming soon...where I’ll actually share my thoughts.

Last week I received an invitation to attend Tara Brabazons’ inaugural lecture Google is the Whitebread of the Mind, which I will be going to tomorrow evening.

Well, it seems everyone is cockahoot about it. Check out the article in The Times and another in The Telegraph.

I should disclose that I do know Tara professionally as she was kind enough to attend my transfer viva last year and subjected me to a right old grilling.

I was saddened by some of the comments in the “have your say” section that attacked academia in general, media studies as a subject, and finally the intellect of students and uni professionals alike. One of my project supervisors is a professor, and I know this is not something one becomes easily peasily in the UK, where as in The States the title is used for a qualified lecturer. Here you have to have a PhD, research and publish over a lengthly period of time and have some type of impressive effect on your discipline, your work is reviewed by your peers, before sitting in front of a panel to defend what might be your lifes’ toil. So when some numpty calls any professor an “idiot professor” I feel rather upset.

In defense of media studies I suggest reading this article as it puts it better than I.

Finally in the case of the comments about university students, Grrrrrr! I found some of my students to be so bright, and the discussions which arouse out of seminars so interesting and inspirational at times, that without teaching in the first 2 years of my PhD I very much doubt that I would have had the motivation or momentum which I experience now.

As I haven’t actually been to the lecture yet I reserve judgement on the real debate, but my hunch is there are several issues, which are being confused. One is all about SEO and the quality of information on the internet, then there is the whole critical engagement becoming extinct as skill thang, finally and possibly the most interesting is Google as a primary definer of knowledge and what that means ideologically.

Absolutely more to come on this.

A very important announcement.

Like my husband Jack Bauer “I’m going dark” i.e. I am taking leave from the “commercial world of work” to write. It’s all agreed and I have a timeline and everything. This means I am going to be holed up in my office, chained to my desk, with only Miumiu cat & various melancholy play-lists for company. No day time TV for me. No sir. Until recently I watched TV through a high def projector and it was fantastic for getting out of the habit of daytime TV. I can’t afford curtains and the light in the south-facing lounge bleached the image on the wall out. The projector went with the long suffering b.f, so I am reduced to ye ordinary olde worlde TV at the mo, but I don’t feel the urge to watch vets in practice on holiday under the hammer. As yet. Plus I have Sky+ one of the greatest innovations of the modern world.

I factored in 2 days of organization/procrastinations and as part of that I went to the library this morning to pick up a copy of Bourdieus’ Distinction.

WTF?

This is a text that was fundamental to my M.A dissertation. This is a text I have read and re-read several times over the last decade in order to be able to complete my own bachelors, and later help undergraduates enjoy his wisdom in their first year of basic media studies.

Seriously? I mean seriously. Distinction is one of, if not the most impenetrable books I have ever tried to read. Good lord, how did Pierre get so famous? Talk about over convoluted, complicated, drawn out phrasing why don’t you. I am wondering if it will do to actually admit this in my own work. Dare I say it? Bourdieu for christsake SPIT IT OUT.

Here’s a snippet from page 101. He says class and social condition “conceals the structure of the symbolic space marked out by whole sets of the structured practices, all the distinct and distinctive lifestyles which are defined objectively and sometime subjectively in and through their mutual relationship”.

I won’t translate because this is a blog post and not a seminar tutorial nor my actual
thesis, which by the way I should be writing instead of this. And I’m gonna in a minute.

Here is a picture of Bourdieu first.

I think he has gotten away with it for so long because in the indices of academic attractiveness he is a little bit dishy. ( Note academia differs from outside world, because in academia people look funny)

Back to going dark, which is what I want to talk about. Apologies in advance if I go quiet on here or if the nature of the posts become totally fruit loop loony la la. I was thinking of changing the name of the blog to the unstable ramblings of a troubled mind as I suspect for a short while it is going to be more of a stream of consciousness slash diary of a PhD. I am also well aware of the long historical tradition of thinkers going completely ga-ga when writing up. Marx turned into a total arsehole, Wittgenstien apparently went to live in a cave for 10 years and Althusser murdered his wife.

What of me?

I am so giddy. I have been stirred by conversations at work again about the future of marketing, audiences, and social innovation.
My belief is everything can be understood through critically engaging with discourse. Yes EVERYTHING. Now I know this is not news, people with far more breath taking an intellect than mine such as Foucault, Althusser and “my guy” Marx were saying it a long time ago. But I am saying it now and in plainer English.

Discourse is power, because it is embedded with ideas and beliefs that reinforce institutions of power. Therefore discourse legitimises power.

I have been doing discourse analysis in my research for a couple of years, plus I have taught a series of workshops called Language Media and Power 2 years in a row, so why the renewed enthusiasm? Why am I all in tizz about discourse? We’re doing beyond exciting things with content and media, and social spaces in my team at work. Furthermore we’ve been talking and sharing our ideas A LOT. Not just amongst ourselves, we’ve been knowledge sharing with the rest of the industry, and of course with our clients. But the word discourse seems to be banded about with more and more regularity.

Just yesterday inspired by the recent postings of the Kaiser et al I was talking with one of my colleagues about shifts in marketing discourse, discourse effects and whether as an industry we are already preaching to the converted when it comes to network effects and social spaces, who exactly is “the audience” and do they really care? One of my fave quotes of late comes from another marketing blog, but I’ve read so many in recent weeks it is v. annoying I can’t remember where I saw it, but it was about the over use of the word conversation at the moment and the headline was taken from a consumer who said something like ” I don’t want a conversation with my toothpaste”. It really tickled me. It’s so true.

This is going to sound incredibly arrogant but at some level I think the team where I work are evolving marketing discourse. But the struggle, call it a moral struggle if you will, that I’m personally experiencing is that I feel that sometimes the marketing industry is employing discourse to validate its own existence. See ideology, power it’s all there. So exciting.

I’ve been working on some ideas for a few months around my role as a content and media analyst to do with digital ethnography and discourse analysis. Trying to marry my background as a social scientist and neo-Marxist scholar, with what I do in marketing. Not easy on an ideological one, on the one hand critiquing consumer society and errr on the other ultimately selling people more stuff, and I am certain orthodox and old skool Marxist alike will have a great deal to say about my appropriation of Marxist theory. But IMHO I think social innovation through marketing and espescially digital marketing is the way forward. I am not sure what to call this ism yet because I haven’t established a discourse. FYI: You don’t have to tell me that establishing a discourse is a substantial ambition.

That’s all I can say at the moment. Lots of thoughts of digital divides, class division, CSR, marketing, disrupting discourse and social change running around in my head….

More to come I hope. And I also hope I can tie this all together somehow in to a more coherant idea. Although when exactly I am not sure, because I am really really going to finsih writing up my thesis in the next few months. So they’ll be less of this and more of that as my mind turns to my own research.