Getting my podcast groove on...

"Saint-Germain-des-Prés - Paris" 2017, oil pastel on paper by Margarita Georgiadis

The picture above is a work by Margarita Georgiadis. It is in with the framer and will look like a million dollars when we get it back later in the year. When thinking of a picture for this podcast, I thought of all the linkages this photo provides.

The building pictured above also happens to appear in a Google images search results for "le flaneur". I don't look gift horses in the mouth anymore, I just go with the flow. Here is the same building in a painting by Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877 (see below).

Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877. Public domain via Wikimedia.

In putting together these test podcasts, I am drawing on years of learning, hours of time in the chair in front of the screen, trial and error, heartache, disappointment. But was any of it wasted time? I don't think so.

Years ago I was using Facebook and wikis and blogs in my teaching - this was back in 2008. The something happened with an upgrade to the learning management system and I lost all interest in doing it again. 

But after a decent break and a revamp of my teaching philosophy and my research philosophy, and a little bit of work on being grateful for the opportunities I have had to learn, I can see a way to reconcile the competing demands of modern life with my ideas of the pastoral lifestyle that escaped even Virgil.

Enter the podcast. Doing a podcast by oneself is a lonely thing. I daresay it isn't very interesting for others either. But I need to work through the process. I am using a number of old faithful applications plus a few new ones. 

The biggest issue is the latency when I use the microphone. One must have headphones on, which means one then needs to monitor the microphone through the headphones. It is a catch-22 dilemma.

I have some interesting music which is licenced with Creative Commons. Some I found from the Free Music Archive. The track at the end of this podcast is Beaconsfield Villas Stomp by Doctor Turtle and is licenced CC BY-NC 4.0.

The sound effects are from AR Sound Effects on YouTube. The Terms and Conditions tell me I can use an MP3 converter so I used Youtube to MP3 Converter. it works really well and the sound effects are great.

In this podcast, I try to weave too many things together, as there wasn't much thought put into it. I was really just thinking out loud while getting a workable system happening. I have a while to go but it feels much smaller than the massive hulk that had me cringing at the thought of honour my own commitments to myself that I could easily have ignored because nobody else knew. But that is hardly the examined life.

The talk with John Laws happened before I was in the embargoed journalists' meeting with the then Communications Minister and now Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, and former Telstra legend Dr Ziggy Switkowski, for the launch of NBN Lite after the coalition's election victory. The Conversation asked me to go in and get a story out as soon as the embargo was lifted. Here is a link to that article.

I remember thinking that to be a real academic, one had to be on Tripel J's Hack. I got two guernseys on that show, but John Laws, even in retirement, really took the cake. To be talking to the man who I had listened to almost every day forty years previously was certainly a career highlight. I daresay this podcast may not be. it is heartfelt, but its main purpose is to be my audio lorem ipsum so I can get a decent podcast technique happening. But I do I hope you enjoy it.

Credits:

Sound effects: AR Sound Effects, YouTube. Royalty free, see Terms and Conditions.

Music: Beaconsfield Villas Stomp by Dr Turtle, CC BY-NC 4.0.

Instructions: Marziah Karch, Lifewire.

Art is Dead (again); or, The coward within Art is momentarily resurrected, then dies one of its ten thousand deaths...

Art is Dead. Long live Art!
Photo: Flickr/Peter Bihr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

I believe that my work must be guided by a philosophy, and not just any philosophy, but one that begins at my beginning and hopefully stands the test of time, or at least my time. This week I insisted with some colleagues that having a clear philosophy was important. Not everybody can see the importance. But when things go wrong, or we disagree about a particular direction, our arguments become philosophical.

I had decided that my task as a philosopher must be to compose a theory of representations, which would be a philosophy of what it is to be human (Arthur Danto).

Take Andy Warhol as an example. Art or not? Well. Arthur Danto played a big part in bringing out the philosophy of art.

Andy Warhol and art is dead? Again, it is the philosophy that makes art and thought and music live.

A bunch of brillo pads isn't art, but a painted wooden box made to look exactly the same is art. Why? Philosophy.

Watch Synecdoche, New York. Does it make sense now?

Technological Disruption: What role for government?

Photo by Paul Townsend (CC BY-ND 2.0)

I picked this draft post up from February this year and decided just to get it out there... My article in The Conversation was used in a Parliamentary Brief on the at the time of broadcasting legislation amendments in 2015-16. This topic is worth revisiting.



The demise of Presto has been attributed to too many service providers in Australia's small market. But competition in the Australian television industry has been absent for too long and it is the normal functioning of competition in the market.

While some suggest that free trade is not living up to its expectations, Australians should not be too eager to criticise local attempts to offer alternatives to Netflix. The origins of broadcasting in Australia were plagued by government attempts to avoid competition, and much like the taxi industry, consumer prices for pay-TV services such as Foxtel were a function of the regulatory environment.

In his book The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer, Paul Barry tells the story of Steve Cosser's attempt to deliver pay-TV services using microwave, known as Multichannel Multipoint Distribution Systems (MMDS) in Australia. Why things should be any different today one might wonder.