(con)juncture was lawson fletcher's thought pile. Now blogging at soundofruins.net
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25.12.08

what chu waiting for

"Time is for white people"
(Erykah Badu, in Blender magazine, March)

"[T]he idea of modernity as modernization [sic] turns relations of space - relations between cultures - into relations of time, where the white man stands at the pinnacle of world evolution"
(Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, p9)

This ain't just some bullshit about 'island time'.

16.12.08

james bidgood

Regarding James Bidgood, federal Australian politician who took photos of a man threatening to set himself alight outside Parliament in protest of his parents' visa troubles. I have little to say on the issue of the photo itself and the ethics of the whole thing, but just find it interesting how the entire event was such a meta kind of media ritual - a ritual about the media within the media.

Says Nick Xenophon, Senator, SA Independent:
"You don't need a code of conduct to tell you whether you're being a jerk or not, and I think there's an enforceable code of conduct in place right now. And that is the media, public scrutiny - if you behave like a jerk you'll get kicked in the public arena, and that's what happened."

That's fascinating enough about what it says about the mediated public sphere and fourth estate etc, but even more interesting is how media is both judge and culprit in this event - able to take differing and even conflicting discursive positions according to how and where the event and its tail of happenings is reported. For the entire reason the photo was taken was because Bidgood has an innate sense of the fact that (news) media space is THE social-political space, in fact one might say he actually helped the protester in this sense. But then are the media culpable? What the fuck is 'the media' anyway?