Intercommunication - get all the information

One of the things I keep meaning to do is make some of my work available.  And the key concept that I have developed recently that I find has incredible utility in the study of new media is intercommunication.  Here we have the blend between media and communication, the highly mediated and the interpersonal and how these are all part of online and mobile culture. Indeed, what I claim is that we need to think about the Intercommunication industry as opposed to the media industry to fully grasp the movement of information and entertainment in contemporary culture via social media in all its manifestations.  In any case, I wrote something for last year's ICA conference and here is the version of that in all its glory.  Check out The Intercommunication Challenge. If you do happen to read it, tell me what you think.  I am eager to expand the concept and build on its utility.

Contemporary leadership and the interpersonal: Julia Gillard and the reincarnation of Kevin Rudd

In the last few months, there seems to be something peculiar happening in contemporary Australian politics: an ousted leader -Kevin Rudd - that was seen to be toxic before the last election is preferred in opinion polls over the current prime minister - Julia Gillard - and the current opposition leader - Tony Abbott. And in more recent days we have had efforts to patch an obvious chasm between the prime minister and former prime minister with what's known as the Kiss.

So, here is the quick interpretation of these two events. Although it is slow and lugubrious, we are seeing the decline in the institutional organisation of the Labour Party in Australia. The details of its decline have been charted for some time, but what is emerging is a distance developing between the sources of labour's strength with, for example, unions and the way in which it organises its politics. Rising from political ashes is Kevin Rudd because his original rise was not organised directly through factions or unions, but in a peculiar bid to a personalisation of politics through perhaps a political bureaucracy of connections. Rudd's institutional power was always weak because of its different tactical positioning that led him to both oppositional leader and the prime ministership in 2007. Labour's embrace of this strategy to electoral success was always lukewarm because of its disconnect from - once again - factions and other institutional sites in the Labour Party.

In contrast, one of the elements that remains a shackle around the leadership of Prime Minister Julia Gillard is that she has had to tread through this institutional territory to achieve her current status. Indeed, the career of Julia Gillard - a woman in the very masculine game of labour/union politics - has served as a form of repression of the Gillard persona, a constraint that manifests itself in her speaking style, in her penchant for repetition, and in her very careful media presence. She has negotiated the shoals of infighting in Labour and labour effectively. However, those techniques do not necessarily make it easier for her to represent herself as a distinctive leader in national politics.

It is not that Kevin Rudd is likeable; it is that his organisation of power was derived from populist sources despite his bureaucratic tendencies. Appearing on network 7's Sunrise morning program for two years prior to 2007 allowed Rudd to humanise himself and to construct a distinctive persona that played in the contemporary politics slightly removed from the institutional structure of party politics.

The Kiss between Gillard and Rudd is an interesting turn. It is invested - saturated really - with affect and perhaps affection. However, the interpretation is one of coldness - a disconnect because of the past animosity between the leader who ousted the past leader. All of this underlines the way that both persona and affect are at play in contemporary politics and are whittling away at the institutions of political parties. Political leadership is now a display of a public presentation of the self that can embody sentiment. Both, through the kiss, demonstrated their inability to translate politics into the personal.

Just started persona studies

Along with others, we have just started a blog called persona studies. Please check out the first of many posts on that site. It is designed to be an investigation of persona in all its online and offline manifestations. Enjoy.

Making cents of place: the connection of consumption

When I was recently traveling in Israel, I became aware of a certain phenomenon of travelling that I had rarely thought of before: the impact of buying and its capacity to connect you to place.

In Tel Aviv, I was forced soon after arrival through the disintegration of my sandals to search for a new pair. I had never been to Israel or any part of the Middle East before and thus had really no idea of the cultural conventions of shopping. After having been advised by hotel staff to search for sandals at the Carmel Market and knowing that markets usually imply either a closer relationship to the local culture or, on occasion a reconstruction of a touristic version of the local, I set out on my mission with a relatively open mind but a clear purpose.

Carmel Market is the largest "bazaar" in Tel Aviv and, in its main long passage-way and series of sidestreets, provides a mixture of stalls of food, clothing and trinkets. The food of course when one courses down a market often produce the most lasting impression; via its smells of butchers down one alley, the groceries of vegetables, nuts and dates on the main, the essences of decay of past days of the market transformed slightly by a residue of previous night's and early morning water-cleaning, the input of the emerging heat of the summer sun, the colognes and deodorants of the shopkeepers, and the more tender smells of cloths and leathers the nose is treated to an intriguing and enduring workout.

I had a clear purpose as I walked and I systematically eliminated each of these shops unless they had some element of footwear. When I finally found an open stall with shoes and sandals I was relieved and asked the shopkeeper if he had the appropriate sandals for me. He indicated that he had the "best" and that I "would never complain about these" for their comfort and durability. "In fact," he said, " if you break them any time in the next two years, come back here and I will give you another pair. You will be very happy with these sandals."

Of course I tried them on and my desperation made me one of the easiest sells I am sure of his day. I hesitated for only a second after asking the price - partly to determine whether I should barter not really knowing the conventions of the market - and then indicated that I would both take them and wear them home. I headed out of his stall in triumph.

But something else happened in that exchange, something that is simultaneously more meaningful and mundane. I had crossed a threshold into a culture. The act of buying drew me into the communicative exchange world of one to another and one culture to another. There was the obvious effect that I had passed my shekels to the shopkeeper and I had new soles to protect my feet. There was also the more ethereal "affect" that I experienced through the exchange. It emboldened me to the place, to this market and my capacity to be a player, a participant because I had entered this world of consumption and was taking something from that world away. The immediate effect of this affective feeling was a greater assurance that I could enter another shop, engage with the merchant and buy something else. In a very real sense, it made me - however weakly - a part of the community of the market.

The act of buying makes a place come alive. There is no question this has been commodified and recommodified into the routine of buying that we experience whenever we travel and inhabit the space of the tourist. Airports revel in this sense of providing the last point of connection through their many shops with their touristic trinkets for sale. Nonetheless, this does not diminish the sense of connection that is put into play by buying something wherever you are.

Although slightly different, eating at a restaurant pulls you into that orbit of place. In Tel Aviv, we regularly experienced the wonders of the Israeli salads as they were combined with fish and even other vegetables heaped and arranged in impossibly large quantities. The affective move from surprise to expectation over our days there produced that sense of connection- however temporary - to our place.

Place is never as simple as it appears. It is layered with affect and meaning as soon as we move through its space. There is in the act of exchange, of consumption, of buying - a making real and material our location and our place within a community.

Presentational media

It is important to explore the full dimensions of presentational media.

Affect-the flow of popular culture

Leadership, Persona and Self-effacement

We are now entering a new election campaign in Australia. and the world is a-twitter with conjectures and interpretations of what the future holds. Because the campaign is a brief five weeks, and because media need to focus their energies, a contemporary Australian election campaign is incredibly leader-focussed. Of course, this is only marginally different than the extended campaigns of American politics, or the slightly shorter British version or even the in-between Canadian campaign. What all of these democracies share is a simplification of politics on leadership and election campaigns both highlight this structure and concentrate its delivery.

In the Australian campaign, we have the newly acknowledged Labor leader and Prime Minister, Julia Gillard jockeying with the Leader of the Opposition and the Coalition of the Liberal and National parties, Tony Abbott. There are many interesting dimensions to explore related to the political persona and elections permit a microscopic study and analysis of this form of presentation and representation; but perhaps one of the most interesting phenomena of the last 15 years is how the political leader has to demonstrate their capacity to be ridiculed, to be the object and subject of humour and its sometime companion, humiliation - and the leader has to do this with a jocularity that they can take it and they enjoy the process. In a more general sense, political leaders have had to cross the divide between entertainment and politics and permit their "personalities" to become part of popular culture as they campaign for their political lives. We might remember the pantheon of key images of the cross between the popular and the political engaged in by politicians: Bill Clinton with his saxophone on the Arsenio Hall back in June 1992; Paul Keating and John Hewson both appearing on the Australian comedy/sports program Live and Sweaty; Barack Obama with his iconic appearance on Oprah; a myriad of successful and unsuccessful New York and national politicians hosting Saturday Night Live. In the American context, there is now the regular crossover moment occurring with Comedy Central's The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and Showtime's Real Time with Bill Maher.

We can expect that in the current Australian campaign this "playing" of politics with comedy to continue. In fact, Australia demands this quality in their politicians may be more than other parts of the world because a self-deprecating humour is such a quintessential Australian characteristic.

So Julia Gillard's recent interview (14 July) on the comedy drive-home nationally networked radio program Hamish and Andy began to establish her credentials of self-effacement. In the at-times nonsensical interview, Gillard had to answer questions about what she had to do with the leftover stationary from Kevin Rudd's prime ministership and whether she needed to cross out his name and write her own to save both money and the environment. And in looking for appropriate rhymes with her name, Hamish riffed on the idea of "Jule's Rules". Julia laughed appropriately and improvised as best she could in the interview. She acknowledged that she was the clumsiest person in the world and would perhaps win a knitting contest with Tony Abbott, but not any sporting contest.

All of this points to a breaking down of gravitas around political leadership and may identify some other developments that have been accumulating over the last 20 years. Certainly the intercommunicative dimension of contemporary life and politics demands a personalisation of politics. One has to maintain a connection to a political audience through tweets, facebook sites, media appearances, youtube re-presentations, which are added to by consumer/political junkie-generated blogs, videos and commentaries. All of these are circulating and informing the flow and significance of television programs and newspaper reports and interviews. Gillard's interview on Hamish and Andy could be seen simply as a way to attach to a more youthful audience demographic to ensure her future election; but it also could be seen as part of a wider trend that breaks down the distinctions between politics and popular culture and where politicians have to reveal greater aspects of their personal life. Within that revelatory culture, one has to acknowledge that these moments reveal but they are also further constructions of identity and persona. Self-effacing flattens the politician to make them part of their audience and not some distant representation.

Self-effacement of the political persona is an interesting contemporary development which may also point to a more dramatic change in our forms of legitimation of politics. Are these signs of how our system of representation - and specifically political representation - is breaking down in their capacity to represent the populace? Are our political leaders losing that capacity to embody? Are we seeing signals of how the representational regime of both politics and media is being eroded by a system of presentation and personalisation?

Credits

Gillard image - Reuters, Andrew Taylor 17 July 2010

Abbott Gillard photo - ABC News online 17 July 2010