Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Life imitates blog
Been feeling rather uninspired lately, hence seeing “real” life imitate my blog (“art”?) doesn’t much tickle my fancy. Nor does even – in an autard’s wet-dream – a symmetrical (front page/back page) contradiction within one section of one newspaper on one day.
But here’s the detail on these (related) phenomena, anyway.
Wendy Bacon, an academic, journalist and former Tharunka [student newspaper] editor at UNSW, shares the concern over [post-VSU student newspaper funding] independence but sees the shift to the internet as a potential positive for student activism.
"Perhaps the whole thing could become more interactive and democratic and more difficult to censor," she says. Another former editor, Paul Comrie-Thomson, says that although uni papers were an important alternative voice in the 1960s and early '70s, the internet had probably superseded them.
Sounds like Bacon and Comrie-Thomson read this post of mine from June, and decided that if positing a ~30 year black-hole in recent history (from which emerged fully-formed, the Internet, perky GenY boomer-protégés and all that) is good enough for Keith Windschuttle and the IPA’s Chris Berg . . .
Bacon and Comrie-Thomson’s relishing of greater “democracy” in academia doesn’t seem to have an analogue in inter-generational superannuation equality, however. Bacon (not sure what Comrie-Thomson does for a living) would almost certainly be entitled to retire under a defined benefit (= not funded by personal contributions) super plan. Such plans were closed to new entrants in the 1980s, just as Xers started work. Gee Wendy – wouldn’t it be even more “interactive and democratic” for you to forfeit your demographic windfall (or one small aspect of it, at least), particularly as you insist on crapping on about how cutbacks (of the sort that your generation never had to deal with, then or now) can be “positives”?
A few pages away from Bacon and Comrie-Thomson’s offensive tosh in the Oz’s Higher Ed section comes this:
There's academic freedom and democratic debate. Then there's codswallop. And a new James Cook uni blog seems to have a fair chunk of the latter . . . in its fight for truth and justice, the blog has attracted the predictable raft of anonymous ravers . . . The quality of content on the blog is probably best summed up by this gem: "I have no rumours or facts to offer. I'd just like to say, for the record, that if all this is true ... then I am completely disgusted with JCU."
So media “democracy” can lead to poor quality content. Well, hold the presses! And keep holding them, until boomer fucktards like Bacon are but a distant memory, and “completely disgusted [of Townsville]” has something (positive) to say in the hardcopy media, under his/her own byline.
Been feeling rather uninspired lately, hence seeing “real” life imitate my blog (“art”?) doesn’t much tickle my fancy. Nor does even – in an autard’s wet-dream – a symmetrical (front page/back page) contradiction within one section of one newspaper on one day.
But here’s the detail on these (related) phenomena, anyway.
Wendy Bacon, an academic, journalist and former Tharunka [student newspaper] editor at UNSW, shares the concern over [post-VSU student newspaper funding] independence but sees the shift to the internet as a potential positive for student activism.
"Perhaps the whole thing could become more interactive and democratic and more difficult to censor," she says. Another former editor, Paul Comrie-Thomson, says that although uni papers were an important alternative voice in the 1960s and early '70s, the internet had probably superseded them.
Sounds like Bacon and Comrie-Thomson read this post of mine from June, and decided that if positing a ~30 year black-hole in recent history (from which emerged fully-formed, the Internet, perky GenY boomer-protégés and all that) is good enough for Keith Windschuttle and the IPA’s Chris Berg . . .
Bacon and Comrie-Thomson’s relishing of greater “democracy” in academia doesn’t seem to have an analogue in inter-generational superannuation equality, however. Bacon (not sure what Comrie-Thomson does for a living) would almost certainly be entitled to retire under a defined benefit (= not funded by personal contributions) super plan. Such plans were closed to new entrants in the 1980s, just as Xers started work. Gee Wendy – wouldn’t it be even more “interactive and democratic” for you to forfeit your demographic windfall (or one small aspect of it, at least), particularly as you insist on crapping on about how cutbacks (of the sort that your generation never had to deal with, then or now) can be “positives”?
A few pages away from Bacon and Comrie-Thomson’s offensive tosh in the Oz’s Higher Ed section comes this:
There's academic freedom and democratic debate. Then there's codswallop. And a new James Cook uni blog seems to have a fair chunk of the latter . . . in its fight for truth and justice, the blog has attracted the predictable raft of anonymous ravers . . . The quality of content on the blog is probably best summed up by this gem: "I have no rumours or facts to offer. I'd just like to say, for the record, that if all this is true ... then I am completely disgusted with JCU."
So media “democracy” can lead to poor quality content. Well, hold the presses! And keep holding them, until boomer fucktards like Bacon are but a distant memory, and “completely disgusted [of Townsville]” has something (positive) to say in the hardcopy media, under his/her own byline.
