In the presence of a legend

A claim that we were in the presence of greatness at the Leonard Cohen concert last night is easy to defend.

First, the instrument: his voice was extraordinary after all these years, from the first spirited bars of "Dance Me to the End of Love" when the honeyed tones filled the stadium with ease, yet with intimacy (singing only to me, surely), to the prayerful intoning of the poems "A Thousand Kisses Deep" and "If it be Your Will". Until he left the stage at 11.30pm, the voice did not waver, and I suspect it could have easily played on.

Then there was the performance, like a devotion: kneeling, or singing with eyes closed in rapture as if to the Lord of Song. The tender enfolding of the mike in two hands arranged as if in prayer, or offering up something holy to be handed on.

He's funny. "I spent a few years looking into religions and philosophies, but cheerfulness kept bursting through". There was joy, and an exquisite sense of the power of the moment to be savoured, right now, as one never knows when one's voice will be silenced...(if it be Your will).

Acknowledging everyone in the venue, he included thanks to the audience "for keeping the songs alive all these years". Our pleasure.

The Aussies are so damn hot there's a heat wave in NZ

Thought for the day: the NZ Herald reports today

"Warm air coming across the Tasman Sea has been blamed for the scorching temperatures (in NZ yesterday), which went into the 30s in several North Island centres" (...and unofficially topped 40C..)

ANZCA news for Media International Australia (Feb.09)

The first days of 2009 in Auckland are a blur of spectacular summer days, still nights, and the sweet sense of a few last hurrahs before we begin the serious business of handling a recession. Reluctantly back at my desk, I join a few hardy souls at my place of work scanning the figures, attempting to divine whether an economic downturn will bring increased interest in higher education – that is, more bums on seats. We all like to think so. There may be nothing like the cool breeze of rising unemployment to focus our attention on the relationship between university study and “the industry”.

The lull of summer is also a traditional opportunity for page 1 media exposure for university researchers. So it was that Professor John Hattie from the University of Auckland appeared on the front page of a NZ Sunday newspaper on January 4, where his 15-year study of student achievement, involving a total of 83 million students, was hailed as “teaching’s Holy Grail”. Hattie’s key finding: the most important factor in student achievement is - not class sizes - but the relationship a student has with the teacher, embodied in trust and effective feedback. My lifetime of teaching so far tells me this is indisputable, but with the relentless focus on increasing student/staff ratios in the tertiary education sector in NZ, my challenge is how to protect the conditions in which the necessary trusting relationships can be fostered. Hattie calls for a carrot approach: boost salaries and provide the incentive of performance payments for excellence. Presumably then, we will find creative ways to produce it. Time and motion studies, anyone?

Our upcoming conference, Communication, Creativity and Global Citizenship at QUT in Brisbane from 8 - 10 July 2009 is an unparalleled opportunity to ensure that we are mixing with peers in communication research and education, debating the issues that unite us, sharing in one another’s latest research and hearing from outstanding keynote speakers. Abstracts and papers are due 6 February. Now is the time to ensure you register for the conference and consider accommodation options in this most appealing of mid-year destinations.

Finally, I invite you to take up the opportunity to renew your membership online. We have installed a PayPal facility on the ‘Join’ page of the ANZCA site so that the business of ensuring your continued access to MIA, the Australian Journal of Communication, a wonderful network of peers across the Australasian/Pacific region, the annual conference and more, is as easy as 1-2-3.

Poisonous toxins

So why on earth do people stll forward urban legends? Does it not seem somewhat implausible to read that microwaving food "...causes poisonous toxins to actually melt out of the plastic wrap and drip into the food"? If it were true, would there not have been mass poisonings throughout the microwave-prevalent reaches of the world, hospitals overflowing and doctors perplexed, with an accompanying public outcry and panic? Oh but "Sheryl Crow said that exact same thing"! OMG then it must be true.

I can't think of the number of times I have politely replied to perfectly sane folks, some of them my friends (referring them to urban legend sites like snopes.com or urban legends) who seemingly read this garbage with their critical faculties on hold. Perhaps there's a cachet about being first to "pass it on". They just don't seem to get it. It must be like a drug - the racing heart, the thrill of discovering the world is conspiring against us, full of wild-eyed villains lurking like goblins.

Let's see, what have people in my networks informed me with a completely straight face? That Bill Gates wants to give me some money (lots). That I should look out for men in shopping mall carparks inviting me to sniff samples of perfume so they can knock me out and do unspeakable things. Or to look out for flyers under the windscreen wiper when I look in the rear vision mirror - oh, but don't get out of the car! It's a trick, and there are villains lurking who will leap into the driver's seat and steal your car! It happened at the mall just down the road! True!

I feel better now.

Reclaiming Place

The Association of Internet Researchers conference theme “Re-thinking community, re-thinking place” proved apt in Copenhagen October 15 – 18, with scores of papers and powerful keynotes reflecting in different ways on the complementarity of online and offline community. While once we might have considered space to be losing importance, as digital media freed us from the constraints of geography, the real world turns out to be crucial after all. The social web is reinforcing ideas of the territorial grounding of identity and the permeability of online and offline interactions. The Suburban Crossings project in Fairfield, Western Sydney, asks “How do maps work? What do they mean? What is ‘home’? What makes a place special? ...Welcome to Suburban Crossings, a project about migration, maps, home, territory and settlement”. This project uses social media to reclaim space through digital images with narrative authored by community members uploaded to maps using Flickr. In this way residents can re-animate community in a kind of democratic ‘place-making’ of their own, reinterpreting other people’s maps, “moving across territories, mapping different stories”.

Inspiring conference keynote, Professor of Human Geography Steve Graham, considers “technophiliac dreams” of technological omniscience to be cause for critical reflection on the politics of place. Urban surveillance is practically militarised “anticipatory risk management” in which everything has to be justified in advance of its presence for the purpose of control. I couldn’t help but agree as I submitted several times in two weeks to the dehumanising processes of airport border control in which the unpacking of identity is highly ritualised (such as, in the UK, through checking 53 variables for each person in transit) to locate, track, position, anticipate and know the (potential) enemy. Urban activism offers a challenge to the logic of militarised, corporate and commercial spaces, through participation in urban visualisations such as the Greenwich emotion map, the Murmur project in Kensington, Toronto, and the North 118 West project.

From IT University of Copenhagen

Hearing about the aesthetic difference between a photo and a picture, at a 'Digital Images & Photos Online' session at the Association of Internet Researchers conference...that a picture makes us focus on the affective character of everyday life, while a photo just gives us the object.

With this in mind, I'll spare you all the photos, and give you a picture representing the everyday for me this week. Last night on the way out of the UIT campus, I should say.

Autumn in Copenhagen

As a descendant of Danish immigrants to NZ, it was an odd but somehow happy experience to walk down into the departure lounge at Bangkok Airport about a day ago to board my flight to Copenhagen to find that most of the large gathering of waiting passengers - 90% of them fair-haired - actually looked as though they could be my cousins! All the conversation I could hear was Scandinavian and by something about people's physical appearance, I could have sworn they’d wandered in from a family gathering in my childhood. Head shapes, hair texture, height, build and colouring, all instantly reminded me of my brother, sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, my grandparents. High Slavic cheekbones, strong brows. The women are small, and everywhere I see versions of my kindly aunts.

It’s the fulfilment of a long-held wish to see this place my grandparents and their parents left behind for a punishing life as farming pioneers in New Zealand; to see the people and the culture. A few hours walking Kobnhavn streets in the old quarter and the city seems gracious and civilised. The people clearly love fine things – design, art, furniture, fine craftsmanship; and their food and ale. Today they were out in happy droves in the Autumn sun, pushing strollers and big-wheeled prams, or sitting over long lunches of ‘fiske’ and beer.
And then there’s the Association of Internet Researchers conference at the IT University. I’ll keep you posted.