Media
Twitter and Oz Lit
I don’t know diarist William Bunn personally but I know that on February 6 he was “Reading Sunshine and Snow” and that he had “read it nearly through”. You may wonder why someone would care what Bunn had on his bookshelves at the start of February, but Bunn felt it important enough to record this [...]
eLearning: Fleshpots and Gunsights
Like Mark Twain’s stroll through Australia’s abbreviated history, the Internet has ‘acres of the most strange and fascinating things’.
Critical Foresight: Unfinished?
King Solomon once wrote that ‘where there is no vision the people perish’. [1] It is arguable that vision is a strong and necessary foundation in the building up of society, its members and the projects of civilisation. From this viewpoint it is not unreasonable to say that the vision or future envisioned differentiates the citizen, community or society from its peers. Different visions modify emotion, intellect, politics, vocation, ethics and behaviour in different ways. To act as an ombudsperson of these processes of modification — to ensure an expansion of options rather than an artificial narrowing — is an ambitious task. It is prudent then to expect generalisations of many kinds collecting around ‘vision’ and ‘future’ where critical and reflexive thinking of the kind described in previous chapters is not utilised. For example, statements of the nature below gather much attention in newspapers, radio broadcasts and publications.
Critical Foresight: New Ways
Hugh Mackay in Turning Point: Australians Choosing Their Future (1999) writes that ‘Attitudes are the symptoms of a society’s state of mind. They reveal our responses to the things that have happened to us and, occasionally, they offer a glimpse of the kind of future we are hoping for’.[2] Using a selection of personal interviews and group discussions which form the 1994 edition of The Mackay Report as representations of these ‘attitudes’ and interests of society, Mackay explores the notion that contemporary Australians are participants within a radical form of culture shift, one that ‘amounts to the discovery of a new way of thinking about Australia’.[3] Mackay’s identification and use of contradiction within these collective beliefs and evaluations of Australian citizens develops the theme of a ‘turning point’, that the dissonance existing between our value judgements about Australian socialisation articulates an emergent cultural identification with resolution or ‘turning point’. Such a ‘turning point’ is enacted by active citizenship: ‘This is the time’, Mackay writes in an inspirational tone, ‘for setting our goals and directions, but there’s no short cut to depth and maturity. We are still, in cultural terms, in our adolescence … [But] what’s wrong with being young? Why not relish the chance to shape our future; to create this Australia in our own image?’. [4]
Critical Foresight: Alt. Styles
Through this investigation of contemporary futurestext I argue that fragmentation of Australia’s future perspective along apocalyptic fault lines is most visible during the last decade of the twentieth century. Indeed, apocalyptic subjects exercise a strong influence over Australia’s internal styles of thinking about the future towards the close of the 1990s. During this period, many religious organisations through their publishing arms provided an intellectual justification and articulated account of their apocalyptic and endist positions that usually always opposed dominant cultural values of progress. The default view is to regard their accounts as positioned on the margins of society. Yet their styles of futures-thinking — which suggested a form of apocalyptic anticipation towards the times ahead — were produced and expressed within a specific historical, cultural and symbolic conjuncture of late twentieth century globalisation, postmodernism and pre-millennial apocalyptic expectation inclusive of society.
Just A Little Conflict Investment
I’m growing very tired of the superhero genre lately and its rather repetitive instances of urban gang warfare between chemical, genetic, extraterrestrial, supernatural or technologically-enhanced freaks. As Theodor Adorno might say, contemporary cinema is certainly providing the public with an “unconscious canon of what they do not want, that is, something different from what they are presently being fed”. How many times should we endure the same narrative structures and sequences, the same beats, the same super-augmented character battling it out with another super-powered character in a city or highway setting, throwing cars and people about like raging toddlers with their toys? It was innovative the first time in Superman 2 (1980) but after Hulk, Fantastic Four, X-Men 3, and now Ironman (and Edward Norton’s soon-to-be-released The Incredible Hulk), it seems probable that road rage is becoming the metaphor of our times and the lazy conflict device of contemporary cinema.
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