Losing their buzz: are Routledge and Sage the next Starbucks?

A two-day conference to look at how implementing the Finch Review on Open Access Publishing will affect researchers and learned societies in the arts, humanities and social sciences, has been announced by the Academy of Social Sciences. Co-chaired by Dame Janet Finch, the conference will be held on 29th and 30th November, 2012. 

For more details, see: www.acss.org.uk

Given this event is being sponsored by the Times Higher Education magazine and the publishers Routledge, SAGE, and Wiley Blackwell, and includes a panel discussion on the future of journals with senior managers at Routledge, SAGE and Wiley Blackwell, those interested in attending might want to read:

David Harvie, Geoff Lightfoot, Simon Lilley and Kenneth Weir, ‘What Are We To Do With Feral Publishers?’, submitted for publication in Organization, and accessible through the Leicester Research Archive;

Simon Lilley, ‘How Publishers Feather Their Nests on Open Access to Public Money’, Times Higher Education, 1 November, 2012.

Harvie et al call for what is effectively a boycott of Routledge if their parent company, Informa plc, does not bring down its journal subscription charges and pay the UK Exchequer the approximately £13 million lost to the treasury as a result of its 2009 decision to become a Jersey company domiciled in Zug, the canton with the lowest rate of taxation in Switzerland.  

It seems Informa can be placed alongside Amazon, Apple, Facebook, eBay, Google and, most famously, Starbucks, on the list of companies who's reputation has been hit as a result of their being charged with aggressively avoiding paying the standard rate of 26% corporation tax in the UK. According to analysis by The Guardian newspaper, for instance, ‘four US companies – Amazon, Facebook, Google and Starbucks – have paid just £30m tax on sales of £3.1bn over the last four years’. To put this in context, collecting the taxes that have been (legally) avoided in this fashion would do a lot to reduce the amount of UK debt for which the standards of living of the working and middle-classes in Britain - not to mention funding for universities - are being forfeited. ‘The total tax gap between what's owed and collected has been estimated by Richard Murphy of Tax Research UK at £120bn a year: £25bn in legal tax avoidance, £70bn in fraudulent tax evasion and £25bn in late payments’.

With over ‘half of Informa’s total annual operating profit… derived from academic publishing:  £85.8 million’ in 2010, and its journals alone providing ‘gross profit margins of over 70 per cent’, according to Harvie et al, such a boycott would have implications for some of the most respected titles in the cultural studies, critical theory and radical philosophy fields. They include:

Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities;
Cultural Studies;
Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies;
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies;
Culture, Theory, and Critique;
Feminist Media Studies;
Parallax;
Rethinking Marxism;
Women: A Cultural Review.

Nor do independent publishers escape their attention. Harvie et al also call on editors, writers and readers to abandon Organization, the journal to which they have submitted their paper, and start up an identical yet  more affordable alternative, if its publisher, SAGE  - which has an operating profit margin of a little below 19 per cent and ‘gross profit across both books and journals of over 60 per cent’ - does not lower its prices to those of a comparable society title ‘such as the £123 charged for the AMJ or the £182 for ASQ’.  Here again, the adoption of a similar withdrawal of labour by editors, writers and readers of cultural studies, critical theory and radical philosophy would have consequences for some of the most highly respected titles in these fields, including Theory, Culture and Society, to provide just one example, for which an institutional print only subscription is currently £906.00.    

#MySubjectivation: I

('#MySubjectivation' can be considered a companion piece to the article on 'pirate philosophy' published in the journal Radical Philosophy, 173, May/June, 2012. The full text of 'Pirate Radical Philosophy' is available as a FREE download from the Radical Philosophy website: http://fb.me/1DZmgrmNV)

‘The only way to change society is to produce and share differently’
(Kleiner, The Telekommunist Manifesto)

Over the last few years a number of radical philosophers and critical theorists, including Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Jodi Dean and Sherry Turkle, have positioned networked media technologies, and corporate social media in particular, as contributing to the formation of a new kind of human subjectivity. It is a subjectivity that is supposedly suffering from attention deficit disorders, and rendered anxious, panicked and deeply depressed by the accelerated, over-stimulated, over-connected nature of life and work under 21st century capitalism.  Meanwhile others, such as Felix Stalder, David Harvey and Manuel Castells, have been keen to portray the Arab spring, anti-austerity and student protests as expressive of new ways of being human that are markedly different to those generated by neoliberalism.

Yet in the era of Anonymous and Occupy, with their explicit rejection of the drive toward individual fame that constitutes an inherent part of modern capitalist society, and emphasis on non-hierarchical forms of organization instead, do we need to critically explore new ways of being radical philosophers and theorists too? Ways that are unlike us, at least as we currently live, work and think, in that they are not quite so tightly bound up with the logic of neoliberalism?

Significantly, few of the key theorists whose thought provides a framework for the study of contemporary media have paid much attention to the implications changes in the media landscape have for their own ways of creating, performing and circulating knowledge and research (and this despite the opportunities that are provided by networked media technologies especially to perform ideas of the human, authorship, the text, the book, the university, originality, intellectual property and copyright differently).  The majority have been content to operate with norms, conventions, material practices and modes of production that originated in very different eras. Indeed, a number of them would be familiar even to scholars in the second half of the 17th century, when the world’s first peer-reviewed journal was established, let alone the 19th or 20th.  With surprisingly few exceptions they are those of the liberal humanist author, working alone in a study, office or library. Motivated by a ‘desire for pre-eminence, authority and disciplinary power’ (to quote Stanley Fish’s recent characterisation of his own ambition as a literary critic), this author produces a written text designed to make an argument so forceful and masterly it is difficult for others not to concur.  Claiming it as the original creative expression of his own unique mind, the lone author proceeds to present this contribution to knowledge to his peers in the form of a talk delivered at an academic conference or some other scholarly gathering. Having incorporated the resulting feedback, he then submits the written work for publication as part of a paper (or papercentric) journal or book. Once the work has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication, it is eventually made available for sale under the terms of a publisher’s policy, licence or copyright agreement which:

•    asserts his right to be identified and acknowledged as its author and to have it attributed to him as his intellectual property;
•    transfers the rights to the commercial exploitation of the text or work as a commodity that can be bought and sold for profit to the publisher;
•    reserves the right to control and determine who publishes, circulates and reproduces the text, how, where and in which contexts;
•    prevents the integrity of the original, fixed and final form of the text from being modified or distorted by others.

Yet if the majority of key theorists have remained somewhat blind to the implications of changes in the media landscape for their own ways of performing knowledge (a landscape that shapes even if it does not determine human consciousness), one thinker has paid a lot of attention to the relation between subjectivity, technology and time at least: the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. It is to his work that I am therefore going to turn in what follows in order to think through the relation between networked media technologies, social media, temporality and our ways of living, acting, working and thinking as philosophers and theorists.

('#MySubjectivation' II is above here, and III here)

Two new books from OHP: New Materialism; and Terror, Theory and the Humanities

In anticipation of Open Access Week 2012, Open Humanities Press is
delighted to announce the release of 2 new open access books,
published in partnership with MPublishing, at the University of
Michigan Library:

New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies by Rick Dolphijn and Iris
van der Tuin, includes interviews with Rosi Braidotti, Manuel DeLanda,
Karen Barad, and Quentin Meillassoux

Terror, Theory and the Humanities, ed. Jeffrey De Lio and UppinderMehan, contains essays by Christian Moraru, Terry Caesar, David B.Downing, Horace L. Fairlamb, Emory Elliott, Elaine Martin, Robin TruthGoodman, Sophia A. McClennen, William V. Spanos, Zahi Zalloua.

Like all the OHP books, these are freely available for reading online
and downloading as PDF (as well as for purchase through Amazon).

Open Media lecture series

Coventry School of Art and Design and the Department of Media and Communication
invite you to

OPEN MEDIA

a year-long series of lectures on the theme of openness in media in all its forms

All the lectures are free to attend and open to all

————————————————————————————————————————

Programme: October — November 2012

October 23rd: Nathaniel Tkacz (University of Warwick) – ‘From Flame Wars to Frame Wars: The Structure of Conflict in Networks’ (Read More)

November 13th: Matt Johnston (Coventry University) – ‘Online/Offline: How Digital Media Facilitates and Encourages the Generative Experience’ (Read More)

November 20th: Caroline Bassett (University of Sussex) – ‘Silence, Delirium, Lies: An Uncoded Response to Social Media’ (Read More)

November 27th: Eva Weinmayr and Lynn Harris (AND) – ‘Men Meets Machine’ (Read More)

————————————————————————————————————————

When: 12:15-1:15pm on selected Tuesdays in October and November
Where: ET 130 (Ellen Terry Building)
Coventry University
Jordan Well
Coventry
CV1 5FB

All lectures are free to attend and open to all

For further details on how to get to Coventry see:
http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/university/maps/Pages/Travelinformation.aspx

All enquiries please contact:

Janneke Adema | Email: ademaj@uni.coventry.ac.uk|

http://www.openreflections.wordpress.com

http://twitter.com/Openreflections

————————————————————————————————————————

OPEN MEDIA

Digital Media have today become ubiquitous and all pervasive. Our lives and experiences are being mediated non-stop by a host of mobile and web-based devices which offer the possibility of merging, mixing, and mashing-up texts, images, sound and other data formats. In the digital age we are no longer confined by the boundaries that once governed traditional media. Notions of authorship, expertise, authority, stability, ownership and control from above are all being challenged by the prosuming multi-user and crowd-sourced use of borderless multimedia applications. People can produce and publish their own books via Lulu.com, promote their art on online gallery sites, and advertise their music via Myspace and Youtube. They can educate themselves via iTunesU, call friends abroad for free via Skype, connect and update the world via Facebook and Twitter, and fund projects via Kickstarter.

These developments have led many to claim that the web and digital media offer unprecedented democratizing possibilities for media producers, consumers and critics. However, the reality is of course more complicated than that. A lot of (public and tax-funded) media are still behind pay-walls. Our private data are hosted and distributed by commercial social media platforms. Blogs are still not taken seriously in the academic world. Google is digitizing our books. Many makers of music mash-ups are being sued for copyright infringement and fears regarding ebook piracy continue to rule the literary world.

The concept of openness is often employed as part of a radical critique of the closed-off worlds of what might be called ‘traditional media’. It is variously used to urge for the right to transparency, the ethics of sharing, the value of re-use and the benefits of connecting. But openness also has its drawbacks. If cultural products are freely available, who then pays the producers of those products? Does open data pose security risks? And who gets to control the data? Who governs our creative outputs? In what way can we control and keep a check on the media we use? Is there still a place for authority and expertise in open media, or are these notions being explicitly challenged? In what ways can media be open, and can they ever really be truly open? What are the limits of openness? Where does openness end? Or should we perhaps just focus on degrees and aspects of openness? How can we compose a media critique when media - including our critique itself - are constantly in the process of being upgraded, updated, merged, mixed and changed?

In this lecture series various examples of aspects of openness in media will be explored. Special attention will be given to what the benefits and drawbacks of openness are and what kind of possibilities openness offers for the future of media production, use and critique.

Paying attention: new issue of Culture Machine

CULTURE MACHINE 13 (2012)
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/current

PAYING ATTENTION
edited by Patrick Crogan and Samuel Kinsley

How are the ways we understand subjective experience – not least cognitively – being modulated by political economic rationales? And how might artists, cultural theorists, social scientists and radical philosophers learn to respond – analytically, creatively, methodologically and politically – to the commodification of human capacities of attention? This special issue of Culture Machine explores these interlinked questions as a way of building upon and opening out contemporary research concerning the economisation of cognitive capacities. It proposes a contemporary critical re-focussing on the politics, ethics and aesthetics of the ‘attention economy’, a notion developed in the 1990s by scholars such as Jonathan Beller, Michael Goldhaber and Georg Franck.

Contents

Patrick Crogan, Samuel Kinsley, ‘Paying Attention: Towards a Critique of the Attention Economy’

Bernard Stiegler, ‘Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon’

Tiziana Terranova, ‘Attention, Economy and the Brain’

Jonathan Beller, ‘Wagers Within the Image: Rise of Visuality, Transformation of Labour, Aesthetic Regimes’

Samuel Kinsley, ‘Towards Peer-to-Peer Alternatives: An Interview with Michel Bauwens’

Sy Taffel, ‘Escaping Attention: Digital Media Hardware, Materiality and Ecological Cost’

Ben Roberts, ‘Attention-seeking: Technics, Publics and Software Individuation’

Taina Bucher, ‘A Technicity of Attention: How Software “Makes Sense”’

Martyn Thayne, ‘Friends Like Mine: The Production of Socialised Subjectivity in the Attention Economy’

Rolien Hoyng, ‘Popping Up and Fading Out: Participatory Networks and Istanbul’s Creative City Project’

Bjarke Liboriussen, ‘Second Life: Message (to Professionals), Attention! Economic Bubble (to the Rest of Us)’

Bjarke Liboriussen, Ursula Plesner, ‘Current Architectural Use of Virtual Worlds’

Ruth Catlow, ‘We Won’t Fly for Art: Media Art Ecologies’

Constance Fleuriot, ‘Avoiding Vapour Trails in the Virtual Cloud: Developing Ethical Design Questions for Pervasive Media Producers’