English

This is Draft 2.5 of the first quarter of one of my 3 case study chapters, on the London-based Furtherfield art group.
Some weeks ago I posted a quarter of another of my case studies, the Hong Kong In-Media citizen journalism project.
It seems i can only work in quarter chapters - perhaps this is like semi-tones in music....

Belated notes après beach and back into real life, however I always wonder which one is madder (the juggler on a unicycle on a tightrope between two high rises must ask themselves, but where would I be if things were not so ordinary?)

Here is an outline of a chapter for my colleague Jon Marshall's book on It & Disorder. Like much of what I seem to be doing for uni stuff, I have clearly crammed way too many things into this chapter. probably i could reduce it by 2/3 and it could still make a good contribution to the book, which has otjer chapters on software and failure, IT and social movements, IT and financial disorder, and quite a lot of philosophy. anyway, armin's critique of my P2P text-in-progress reminded me about this other thing i am supposed to write this year, and i am thinking some of A's ideas could fit.

dear all,

as some of you may know, "world-information city" has been invited to paris at the beginning of the month (this was also scheduled in tnl-calender). there i had the chance to make an interview with saskia sassen which i wanted to share with you (s. attachment)...

a+ c

About 2 weeks ago it became horribly clear I was stalled on finishing my chapter on the Hong Kong case study. I had done 3/4 of it, but i had no ideas for the final section. Days of a blank screen.

So i eventually went to the library and borrowed some of those comforting books on how to write a thesis. many of them were quite dull, but one is great ..i had read it before but had forgotten some of the good, advice...title is "writing your dissertation in 15 minutes a day" by joan bolker

The Postmodern Condition, A Report on Knowledge, by Francois Lyotard, first published in French in 1979, was not the first book to carry the word postmodern in its title, but probably one of the most influential ones in the long term, with both its warnings and sometimes its overly optimistic assumptions about the future of knowledge in a computerised society. Reading it now what is perplexing is the rather one-sided reception it has got. While Lyotard's critique of meta-narratives and the proposed switch to language games has characterised the postmodern debate, his ambiguity about the development of science and the university under the condition of neoliberalism appears to have been given much less consideration by his followers.

I found this book, History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukacs, London, Merlin Press 1971-1990, very enlightening, confirming my interest in Marx and consolidating the idea to inquire the possibility of working with dialectical materialism as a methodology for my PhD. Thus I have transcribed copious notes from this book, interspersed with a few notes to myself where further to look, in terms of the continuity of this type of thought, as well as its critique. Publishing those notes in this group may or may not be of value to anyone else, I do it nevertheless.