Today Tim Markham and I have comprehensively updated the website for the ICA preconference we are co-organizing, titled Conditions of Mediation: Phenomenological Approaches to Media, Technology and Communication.

Amongst the new information added is:

* A provisional conference programme, including abstracts

* Biographical details of all presenters and keynote speakers

* Complete instructions on how to register, including details on obtaining one of 25 available student rebates of 50% off the standard registration fee

* Basic details on the venue

* Basic details on accommodation options

The great interns at BISR have written an excellent post on my seminar on ‘the networked academic’ which I think captures the event really well, in terms of content as well as the audience’s contributions (which I regret not allowing more time for at the end). One small correction – where I was referring to what might “make social media different” from other academic environments, I was actually drawing directly on the work of social media researcher danah boyd (2010), on what she calls ‘networked publics’.

A number of peeps have already shared this: spatial theorist Doreen Massey speaks with Nigel Warburton, of Philosophy Bites fame, on spatial theory and why it matters (of course). It’s part of Social Science Bites, a new-ish series made in association with Sage. Two other interviews caught my attention: one with Toby Miller on what makes ‘cultural studies’ distinct; and another with Sonia Livingstone on children and the Internet.

Wittgenstein heads out there might be interested to note that the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB) have made available a large numbers of papers and audio-visual materal (approximately 600 items in all) from the Kirchberg International Wittgenstein Symposia from the years 2001-2010, as well as from the Wittgenstein Archives publications series. The WAB are also keen to get any feedback, positive and negative, on the usability, accessibility and functionality of their platform.

I’ve just noticed an interesting and relatively new website: Figure/Ground. Originally a personal academic blog, it has now evolved into a student-led collaborative project. The site aims to bring ‘philosophers, historians and critics of media, literature and technology into a conversation’ and to be ‘a virtual salon or coffee house, creating a democratic space for a multitude of disciplines to discuss the university environment in the spirit of interdisciplinary studies and methodological pragmatism.’ In addition to a forthcoming e-journal, there are some interesting and often revealing interviews, which thus far include Eric McLuhan, Noam Chomsky, John Searle, Alphonso Lingis, Douglas Kellner and Simon Critchley.

Over at his blog Pop Theory, Clive Barnett has written an excellent post working through some of his recent thinking on publicness. In the post, Clive questions the frequent tendency of debates about publicness to either explicitly or implicitly rely on a substantive and singular sense of ‘the Public’ being exposed or not exposed to various matters of concerns. But rather than merely performing the fashionable move of adding plurality (adding an ‘s’, i.e. ‘publics’) Clive makes a very evocative argument for thinking about publicness in terms of attention, or more specifically in terms of the pragmatics of attentive action, rather than as the simple act of making things visible.

Just caught wind of what looks to be a pretty interesting new peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies which is set to launching its first issue in late-2013 (or 2014). The main remit of the journal seems to be articles giving balanced weight to, on the one hand, matters broadly related to urban studies (e.g. the built environment, urban rhythms, planning, transportation, etc) and on the other hand, what they can “specific forms of cultural (textual) production” (e.g. literature, film, music, art, graffiti, etc) as they relate to urban spaces. There certainly seems to be a preference here for interpretivist textual or representational analysis, which would in my view be too narrow or limiting vis-a-vis the journal’s title and implicit remit. Not to pre-judge things of course. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

On Saturday 16 June 2012, 14.00–16.30, the Tate Modern will host a conversation between German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and British geographer Nigel Thrift. For a while I’ve harboured a curiosity – still largely uninformed – about Sloterdijk’s ‘sphereology’ which is encapsulated by his three-volume magnum opus Spheres (taking in bubbles, globes and foam). I think, in part, it is because of my obsession with the idea of the public sphere (or maybe it’s public spheres), yet dissatisfaction with the way it is often theorized. I’m not taking a stab at normative political theory here, however, as actually I think a processual view of publics is critically important and even preeminent. But I suppose there is a side to me that is interested in what Paolo Carpignano called the material shape of the public sphere. Anyway, I didn’t mean to make this post a detailed exploration of spheres, mainly just to point to the event itself (for which there is a £15 ticket it seems), found via the ANTHEM blog via Stuart Elden.

I am a fairly regular reader of Graham Harman’s blog Object-Oriented Philosophy. Partly, of course, because his philosophy interests me, especially its implications for thinking about media, even though I certainly couldn’t claim to be doing object-oriented media research (there’s a lot of that, e.g. soon-to-be-former Birkbeck student Paul Caplan, and several of the contributions to a recent conference on The Nonhuman Turn) It is also that I just find he has generally interesting viewpoints, notably his regular reflections and advice on writing, research and academic life in general which I am quite sure has a large following amongst PhD students in philosophy and beyond.

With the elections taking place in Egypt, where Harman is based, recent posts provide some glimpse of Harman’s ‘politics’. Which is to say, a glimpse of the fact that Harman does not feel compelled to have an overbearing ontology of the political like many philosophers do. He reflected on his quite deliberate avoidance of grand politics in a recent interview with Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan – an episode of the interesting Cultural Technologies podcasts. Harman has been blogging about the events in Egypt because he has some unique insights into events on the ground, based as he is in Cairo. In short, these events are his ‘local politics’. Reading his posts, you’ll find few traces (some indirect, perhaps) of an object-oriented approach to politics. Instead, you’ll hear of conversations with taxi drivers, brief details of recently viewed television interviews, contextualised links to news articles, perspectives from staff and students at the American University in Cairo, and very occasionally, an account of something more dramatic, such as being tear-gassed.

Somewhere in there, perhaps there is a sort of politics of particularities, or of distributed contingencies. From my own perspective, as someone interested a lot more than Harman in the constitution of politics and public life as an object of research, I don’t necessarily consider that to be adequate grounds for a holistic political philosophy. That is, if we ever wanted such a thing, and maybe we do not. But neither does Harman. What I value in his approach is the denial – as a well-known philosopher whose ideas are increasingly seen to be at the cutting edge, even fashionable – of offering a grand Žižek- or Badiou-like interpretation of events and their political significance, which often seem thin on philosophy and rather large on strategic proclamation.

Bradley Garrett, author of Place Hacking – a key blog for urban explorer geeks with an added tinge of bravery – has recently announced he’s started up a very interesting business venture: Academic Media Productions, basically an audio/visual media service that partners with academic researchers.

Last year I seemed to get quite worked up about the possibilities of using new technologies and platforms for creating, storing and publicising research – film included. Certainly a lot of this had to do with being a co-organiser of the Doing research amongst technologies workshop series. That excitement hasn’t completely disappeared – and I still have a couple of forthcoming non-texty-tricks up my sleeve – but it’s definitely subsided. Perhaps it’s just reality setting in. After all, it’s actually pretty hard to branch out and use lots of new technologies in creative new ways.

Not to mention the question of possible de-skilling. As a geographer with the somewhat odd fortune of mainly dealing with journalism and media students, I am well aware that the notion of a so-called ‘multidisciplinary journalist’ carries strengths and drawbacks in equal measures. Yes, it means thinking laterally about content production across several platforms. This is a good thing in as far as it helps you shift perfectives, express ideas in new ways, and potentially connect to new and unexpected publics. On the other hand, multidisciplinary journalism is almost a byword for being a platypus – doing a lot of things but none particularly well. In effect, being multidisciplinary can actually distract journalists from their primary skills of reporting, investigation and, usually, writing. Because of this, journalists sometimes lament the days when writers did writing, photographers did photography, and designers did graphics and illustrations.

I’m sympathetic to the deskilling argument, but I don’t totally buy into it. It is not only clear that shifting perspectives, expressing ideas in new ways and connecting to new publics are all good things, but also, exploring other forms of expression is just fun. But there’s always the possibility that fun can be had with a little help from a partner. There’s no shame in outsourcing some of that talent from your own embodied self. This may just be my own anxieties speaking out loud here, but you can’t always do it all.