It has been some time since my last post. Partly this is because I’ve had no immediate teaching reason to be playing around with web design, partly this is because I haven’t had much spare time of late but MOSTLY this is because the last time I wrote a post (about the inherent corruption of insurance) word press swallowed up the draft. This was enough of a kick in the teeth for me to stop this hobby for a while.
But today, the kids are at their grandparents and I have a moment to myself so I thought I would take the time to update all my plugins (etc) and make a post about what has been going on.
1. Australia says ‘Yes’ to marriage equality.
Phew. *packs application for NZ citizenship back into drawer*.
I have nothing insightful or intelligent to add to this, except that this was a case where a ‘no’ answer would have driven me to the pits of despair. I can also add that I did not encounter a ‘no’ argument that made any logical sense and while I understand that ‘no’ voters are scared of change, I’m a big believer in Yoda’s claim that fear leads to hate, hate leads to anger and anger leads to suffering. Fear is not the basis of an argument, it’s an emotion (and an often irrational and dangerous one at that).
Mostly I am just relieved that Australia wasn’t revealed to be more conservative than Ireland and the US(!) and hopefully this shift towards equality can be realised in ever more broader terms.
2. Zombie writing continues apace.
My article with Katie Atwell and Ian Dolphin ‘Wishing for the Apocalpyse: The Walking Dead as ecosophic object‘ was turned around very quickly by Continuum and has been published. It was great fun to write with Katie and Ian, who are old friends and TWD afficionados. I’m not sure it makes a strong a fist as it could – I was hoping to make a broader important point about the fate of literary criticism needing to avoid profound ‘individuation’ – but we were really hampered by the word limit.
The next project is really the book Humans vs Zombies, which will draw on that article and other work I’ve been doing on big data, and previous work on what it takes to be human (as well as the central conceit, that mobile phones may be helping us become zombies). I’m having trouble really figuring out whether its a book concerned with zombism (the lack of agency in desire) or a book concerned with technology (a summary of all the research out there about what mobile phones and digital media are doing to our culture). But I’m trying to snythesise those two arguments. At the moment, I’m reading Zombie Capitalism by Chris Harman, and he’s definitely using zombie as a pejorative adjective rather than a possibly creative concept. It has been a useful refresher on Marxism and thus has reminded me of endless units from undergrad.
3. Teaching semester is wrapping up
Hence the blog post. Grades more or less all done now. I had some great students this year but overall am a little alarmed about the declining level of ‘investment’ or effort in tertiary students. Don’t get me wrong – the great students are still great – but the ‘middle’ students who could once be inspired now listen online, work from Google and learn the bear minimum. They avoid effort and they avoid difference and thus the net effect of teaching (lifting people beyond what they already know) is being reduced IMHO. I see this as a little bit of a crisis for education, at the very least at the tertiary level. And I guess I’ld like to write more on it later.
Anyway, that’d be enough for now. There’s more on my mind – such as the #MeToo campaign and the role of social media in policing social crime. But I’ll stop now to keep it fresh and hopefully not spend too long before I do this again. And hopefully, this time, the internet won’t swallow my draft.