PUTNEY DEBATER
A personal blog
Jury Service in Digital Times
It’s only late in life—I’m in my sixties—that I find myself being summoned for jury service. Like all of us, I’ve seen innumerable court room dramas, in films and on television—fiction, docudramas and documentaries—and on three occasions I’ve been in the court room as a witness (I’ll come back to that). But only now, as a member of a jury, do I properly discover for myself that the courtroom is the setting for a very strange form of theatre. Read more
Transformations of Consumerism
In the last few days, three major UK retail chains have gone bankrupt and are shutting up shop: Jessops, HMV and Blockbuster. Photography, music, and film rental. Pundits are saying that it’s inevitable as sales move to the web, and doesn’t mean the market will contract (except for film rental, which is no longer a viable business); there’s also a lot of comment on what Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian calls ‘a recession-backed, online-fuelled evisceration of the high street’. The health of the record market doesn’t interest me here, but what these closures say about the transformation of consumerism as capitalism seeks to adjust to its own crisis. Read more
Against ‘Impact’
The other day we interviewed a couple of PhD scholarship candidates. Good applicants, with interesting and unusual research proposals. However, I was saddened when one of them started talking about ‘impact’. So, she’d found out about the institutional regime of evaluation that now governs research and learned the lingo, but is this the game that applicants ought to be playing? Read more