Auswahl der wissenschaftlichen Literatur zum Thema „Library Science|Speech Communication|Sociology, Sociolinguistics“

Mesthrie's Concise encyclopedia of sociolinguistics (hereafter, CESO) is a newly edited, condensed, and updated offshoot of the Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, originally published in ten volumes in 1993. This laudable volume aims to “give a comprehensive overview of the main topics in an important branch of language study, generally known as Sociolinguistics” (p. 1). As theoretical background, the branch is traced from the Sanskrit scholar Pānini to more recent origins in historical linguistics, anthropology, rural dialectology, and the study of mixed languages. The field is further presented as the most proper of all branches for language study today, as Mesthrie – updating Labov's (1972) famous claim about the implications of the term sociolinguistics – writes that “having ‘human communication’ as part of the definition of language makes it impossible to study language comprehensively without due regard to social contexts of speech” (1). CESO is an attempt to catalog the relevant components of those social contexts.

ABSTRACTThis study examines the use of words per pause (W/P) as a practical means for identifying solidarity in everyday conversation. Eight listeners recorded the narratives of a female and a male, either friends or strangers. Ten speakers were categorized as friends and six as strangers; they talked about a good and a bad experience. Average reliability of coding pauses was .83. The results indicated a statistically significant difference in W/P of speakers who were friends and those who were strangers. Statistical results support the conclusion that friends are more likely to employ many W/P and strangers few W/P. One practical implication of this study is that W/P can be employed by researchers with relative ease and a high degree of reliability for investigations of speaking style in a variety of contexts. A second practical implication is that W/P is a diagnostic device that can serve as a social litmus test in everyday conversation to identify the expression of sympathy and estrangement. (Expressive language, nonverbal communication, paralanguage, pauses, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, solidarity, speech and personality)

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment… (Eliot 204) Questions of just what home might mean emerged with unfortunate biting salience during the writing of this article with the vicious attack of a student knocked to the ground by the force of a broken bottle and then kicked mercilessly in the head. If not for the ministrations of a bystander, there would have been one less person on the planet. Such disruptive and distressing incidents shake up our world – not only for the person who experiences the original event but also for those who find themselves as witnesses. Using the given incident as an exemplar, the following paper explores the concept of home in the context of ruptures and breaks for people who inhabit a blended world of the digital and the physical. To focus investigations, the Winnicottian concept of the holding environment provides a novel way of understanding home as a seamless domain of continuity which, in this instance is the worldspace spans the physico-digital divide. Sitting writing a paper about ‘home’ and the manner in which the virtual and the physical worlds are blending, I glanced up and was shocked. It is very easy to sit within the warmth and comfort of academe, especially if you have a nice toasty office in the midst of winter and to postulate about what home might be. Theories and concepts, heater, pc and comfy chair support feelings of being at home, of feeling like you have a place in the world, that you have an academic home, you have a conceptual home and, …just wait a minute… back shortly… just answering an email… and a virtual home, in which you can interact and exist in wholly other ways. The other day, however, I abandoned writing the earlier paper with the disorienting experience of seeing a student at my door, a person who tumbled in amidst a mass of scrambled sentences, bandaged bleeding hands, and a bruised head-kicked face. An overseas student who should have been knocking on my door to tell me that ‘Hey, I’ve finished my exams’ instead arrived to ask for my advice: ‘Someone attacked me the other night and I don’t know what to do.’ Home, at least the home about which I wrote before the shock of meeting a traumatised student, was a concept and reality that had transformed markedly over the last quarter of the twentieth century. It was a concept that in its shifts revealed a parallel between the setting up of share housing and the emergence of virtual/physical world blending. Home, as I construed it was about the move, by people aged up to thirties, who were frequently moving from family homes towards blended environments in which share housing became specific non-related familial space (McNamara & Connell), a space/place replicated by social networking in the domain of the digital. There it was. Leaning on the work of theorists such as Miriam Meyerhoff in relation to communities of practice in a linguistic sense, to the earlier work of Lesley Milroy in relation to social networks, I was set to make an argument that the textual world of the internet and other digital domains was developing in a manner that replicated linguistic – specifically spoken – communities of practice based on speech patterns. Buoyed by the recent discovery of the more recent writing of Line Dubé, Anne Bourhis and Réal Jacob in relation to virtual communities of practice, I was certain that my propositions regarding textual practices had something to offer to the current edition of this journal. Further, my argument would proceed in such a way as to infer that the textual base played out in digital media was advancing into the domain of speech in the physical world to the extent that it was possible to determine who had an active digital life – especially in relation to domains on the net – merely by their vocabulary and their sentence construction. My proposition was that the digital domain had not only blended with the virtual in the manner that Dubé, Bourhis and Jacob suggested, but that textual communication was now a home base for the development of the English language for a broad section of the general populace in English speaking countries. The sudden jar of a physical world shock shook loose the comfortable home of text and theory and challenged what I wrote. What was home for the young student who stood before me? We had spoken of ‘home’ before, of making home in a new country, of how your housemates become your family to a certain extent, of how internet and mobile phones made it easier, how home was really with you wherever you went BUT, with the disaster that was an assault, some of that rhetoric resonated as hollow – rhetoric without substance, cold comfort, no comfort. In this situation, home is a concept tested. Perhaps only in such a context can the boundaries and meanings of home come to the fore. It is to that issue that I will address this version of the paper and for that purpose, I will advance the argument that although there may well be a modified version of home developing for a specific generation or cohort of people, that there remains a need for anchoring in the various domains of engagement. To that end, I will use the theory of psychoanalytic theorist D.W. Winnicott who constructed the concept of the holding environment (Winnicott ‘From Dependence;’ and Seinfeld). This article therefore takes its new springing point from hereon in and starts with a brief exploration of the holding environment by its originating author, reconstructs this as a contextually relevant concept, and then talks into some of the original propositions using the given incident for illustrative purposes. The holding environment as construed by D.W. Winnicott is, under optimal conditions, the first environment that an infant experiences, the warm and caring one provided by a primary caregiver who, for this article will be known as the m/other (“The Concept of the Healthy Individual” 27-28). Within this environment of literal and metaphoric holding, the infant knows nothing other than an all-encompassing domain which includes physical and psychological care, the anticipation and provision of needs, and a titrated introduction to the world of things and people (“From Dependence” 86). From the perspective of the infant and within this circle of holding, the world belongs to the infant and is composed largely of the m/other. Only when there is a break in the continuity of care does the infant notice/perceive a world that is anything other than seamless with her/his own existence. In Winnicott’s schema, if a holding environment operates in an optimal manner, it largely remains invisible (Winnicott, “From Dependence” 86; Winnicott, “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship” 52; Ogden 200). This manner of experiencing the world changes with the developing person so that in adulthood, we experience a range of environments that attend to our various needs, if we are fortunate enough. For example, your office supports your work to a greater or lesser extent and perhaps your partner supports you in a psychological sense, and your personal trainer supports your physical training needs. Other instances of support and holding could include the glasses that support your sight and the car that supports your proclivity for drives in the country and a particular lifestyle. There are therefore, many things, people, institutions, and even phenomena such as birthday celebrations that support different aspects of who we are – our being – and different aspects of our activities – our doing. This mirrors theories developed within the context of sociolinguistics in which authors parallel what people are with social networks and what people do, with communities of practice (Moore 22). In the context of Winnicott and linguistic theory, without those supports, our lives would be different and for many of us, would be diminished. The supports I describe are those I construe as holding environments and I believe that by considering a holding environment as a form of ‘home’ that we can reveal a specific way of understanding not only what a home might be, but also the manner in which it operates when people perceive it to be under threat. In the context of the digital domain, there are many media such as email, chat rooms, twitter, real time chat in a range of venues and digital social networks and virtual worlds that support different aspects of our identities, of things that we want to do, of contacts we make and maintain, and of communication for fun and for business. My initial proposition included the concept that various language forms operate to support and construct our identities and that what digital media provided were various venues for the operation of differing but overlapping holding environments in a textual sense. What do these elements, or those like them mean in the situation in which the student found himself? What does it mean and why was it that despite some time in between, that his primary quest was to seek out a person in the physical domain rather than finding solace online when, as I understood, he spent a great deal of time in digital communication? I believe that although there is a blending of domains – the digital and analogue – that when a holding environment of either variety breaks, fractures or at least reveals cracks, that it is likely that a person will seek redress in both modes and in so doing, will reaffirm what is a vital element for the healthy existence of every person – the maintenance of a sense of home – be that on or offline. Despite the seeking for redress in the mode in which the break occurred, the parallel search for social sanction and acknowledgement in the alternative domain may be just as significant for a slightly different reason. When Winnicott writes about ruptures and breaks, it is about those impingements that destroy continuity (“The Fear of Breakdown” 93) – the break in going on being. In the current context in which a person or community inhabits both the online and offline realms, part of their continuity of being, their worldspace (Hardey 2) is the seamlessness between the domains. It is therefore necessary to bring the sense of rupture/failure that occurs in one domain, across into the other to maintain the meta- holding environment or home. Home is that space where ‘you speak my language,’ whether on or offline, the holding environment is one that adapts to you, that understands your speech/text and responds in a manner predictable and in your own genre under optimal conditions, home meets you where you are and, importantly, is a space and place that when it ruptures, mends in such a way as to your restore your faith in its capacity to perform as a holding environment (“Transitional Objects” 10-11). Winnicott writes that only with an environment that was not perfect, (only with an environment that failed occasionally in a minor way), is it possible for a person to sense that there was a holding environment at all. Further, rather than a person construing this failing as a marker of lack of dependability, that the small failure revealed the significance and value of its effective functioning for most of the time. Additionally, a minor break revealed that the holding environment/home held the potential to respond to some unanticipated and distressing break by supporting the person experiencing it. By operating in this manner, there is now an imaginal space of holding/home. In a sense, this mirrors what other authors such as Thomas Lindif and Milton Shatzer write about when they describe social presence in relation to the manner in which an online arena supports or is perceived to support activities such as communication between peers. One of the most noted and public manifestations of the phenomenon of a failed holding environment becoming mended and therefore stronger was that experienced in several places in relation to terrorist attacks such as that of 2001 in the USA. In relation to the attacks on the twin towers in New York, the people of that city experienced a shattering of the integrity of their holding environment/ their home. However, they also noted – as reported across a range of media (for example: Gamble 1.iii; Grider), a huge outpouring of compassion and caring by their fellow New Yorkers thereby experiencing a certain mending and elevating of the significance of their home city holding environment (Gamble 2.vi). In the context of the aforementioned student being attacked, the break also occurred in the physical domain. Although he sought some form of reassurance online could provide some solace. However, it would leave him with the experience that the physical environment was no longer homelike, that it had failed as a holding environment. That is, home in the physical realm was, for a time, failing to support him. To effect a mending in the physical domain, it was therefore important that he seek out solutions that equally involved the physical world of people – mirroring the break – the assault by a person. What occurred when he visited my office was that he received a physical world hearing and witness to his injuries and then with the aid of colleagues, he received further care, advice and support. One of the consequences of such an experience is that although the possibility of assault is now imaginable, because it has been experienced; there is also the knowledge that assistance is at hand – a situation that may not have been known or predicted before. In some manner therefore, with other imagined ghastly events, there is now an expectation of potential assistance. That imaginal knowing therefore now forms part of his holding environment in his physical world, that form of home that ensures ontological security as mentioned by McNamara and Connell (82). Outrage over incidents in Second Life and in other domains such as myspace predominantly play out in those arenas but, like the assault of the student, also get played out in other arenas, including mainstream media. For example, an attack on the virtual headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Second Life attracted attention in newspapers and other mainstream media (Hutcheon). It seems therefore that not only is it necessary to mend the breaks in a sense within the medium in which the original break occurred but also to reassert the blended domain of the digital and the analogue and the capacity of each to form part of the meta holding environment that exists in contemporary society. There is yet to develop a discourse that links the digital and the physical worlds as constituents of a worldspace (Hardey 2), that can be viewed as a meta- holding environment/home. However, even with the few examples proffered here, it seems apparent that by investigating breaks and ruptures in the lives of people who maintain a life world that spans the digital/physical divide that it might be possible to understand the apparent merging of the two. Further, it may lead to significant observations about the newly emerging worldspace as a holding environment /home in a novel way with leads for the assisting people across the divides that may otherwise have not been considered. The implications for maintaining the seamlessness and continuity of home/holding environment in the instance of natural or person-effected disasters in either domain is the demand for an appropriate response in both. Although this already occurs, it is in an ad hoc manner without a consideration of the significance of mending ruptures and re-enlivening both domains for a sense of ontological security of the worldspace – that is at its very heart, a sense of home. References Dubé, L., A. Bourhis, and R. Jacob. “Towards a Typology of Virtual Communities of Practice.” Interdisciplinary Journal of Information, Knowledge, and Management 1 (2006): 69-93. Eliot, T. S. “East Coker V.” Collected Poems 1909-26. London: Faber, 1974. 202-204. Gamble, Jennifer M. The Aesthetics of Mourning & the Anaesthetics of Trauma: Transformation through Memorial Space. Ph.D. thesis. The University of Sydney, 2006. Grider, Sylvia. “Spontaneous Shrines: A Modern Response to Tragedy and Disaster (Preliminary Observations Regarding the Spontaneous Shrines Following the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001)”. New Directions in Folklore 5 Oct. 2001: 1-10. 1 Dec. 2002 http://www.temple.edu/isllc/newfolk/shrines.html>. Hardey, Mariann. “Going Live: Converging Mobile Technology and the Sociability of the iGeneration.” M/C Journal 10.1 (2007). 2 July 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0703/09-hardey.php>. Hutcheon, Stephen. “Vandals ‘Bomb’ ABC Island.” Sydney Morning Herald 22 May 2007. 23 May. 2007 http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/vandals-bomb-abc-island/2007/05/22/1179601400256.html>. Lindlif, Thomas R., and Milton J. Shatzer. “Media Ethnography in Virtual Space: Strategies, Limits, and Possibilities.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 42.2 (1998): 170(20). McNamara, Sophie, and John Connell. “Homeward Bound? Searching for Home in Inner Sydney’s Share Houses.” Australian Geographer 38.1 (2007): 71-91. Meyerhoff, Miriam. “Communities of Practice.” Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Eds. J.K. Chambers, Natalie Schilling-Estes and Peter Trudgill. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2002. 526-548. Milroy, J., and L. Milroy. “Linguistic Change, Social Network and Speaker Innovation.” Journal of Linguistics 21.2 (1985): 229-284. Moore, Emma. Learning Style and Identity: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of a Bolton High School. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Manchester, UK: University of Manchester (2003). Ogden, Thomas H. The Matrix of the Mind: Object Relations and the Psychoanalytic Dialogue. London: Maresfield Library, 1990. Seinfeld, Jeffrey. “Donald Winnicott and the Holding Relationship.” Interpreting and Holding: The Paternal and Maternal Functions of the Psychotherapist. Northvale, New Jersey & London: Jason Aronson, 1993. 101-121. Winnicott, Donald Woods. “The Concept of a Healthy Individual.” D.W. Winnicott: Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst. Eds. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis. New York: Penguin, 1975 (A talk given to the Royal Medico-Psychological Association, Psychotherapy and Social Psychiatry Section, 8 March 1967). 21-39. ———. “The Fear of Breakdown.” D. W. Winnicott: Psycho-Analytic Explorations. Eds. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd and Madeleine Davis. Vol. 1. London: Karnac Books, 1989 (paper originally written c. 1963). 87-96. ———. “From Dependence towards Independence in the Development of the Individual.” The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Karnac Books, 2002 (Paper first presented in 1963). 83-92. ———. “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship.” The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. London: Karnac Books, 2002 (Paper first presented in 1960). 37-55. ———. “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” Playing and Reality. London: Brunner-Routledge, 1971/2001. 1-30. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Gamble, Jennifer M. "Holding Environment as Home: Maintaining a Seamless Blend across the Virtual/Physical Divide." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/11-gamble.php>. APA Style Gamble, J. (Aug. 2007) "Holding Environment as Home: Maintaining a Seamless Blend across the Virtual/Physical Divide," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/11-gamble.php>.

On May 18, 2003, the Australian Minister for Education, Brendon Nelson, appeared on the Channel Nine Sunday programme. The Yoda of political journalism, Laurie Oakes, attacked him personally and professionally. He disclosed to viewers that the Minister for Education, Science and Training had suffered a false start in his education, enrolling in one semester of an economics degree that was never completed. The following year, he commenced a medical qualification and went on to become a practicing doctor. He did not pay fees for any of his University courses. When reminded of these events, Dr Nelson became agitated, and revealed information not included in the public presentation of the budget of that year, including a ‘cap’ on HECS-funded places of five years for each student. He justified such a decision with the cliché that Australia’s taxpayers do not want “professional students completing degree after degree.” The Minister confirmed that the primary – and perhaps the only – task for university academics was to ‘train’ young people for the workforce. The fact that nearly 50% of students in some Australian Universities are over the age of twenty five has not entered his vision. He wanted young people to complete a rapid degree and enter the workforce, to commence paying taxes and the debt or loan required to fund a full fee-paying place. Now – nearly two years after this interview and with the Howard government blessed with a new mandate – it is time to ask how this administration will order education and value teaching and learning. The curbing of the time available to complete undergraduate courses during their last term in office makes plain the Australian Liberal Government’s stance on formal, publicly-funded lifelong learning. The notion that a student/worker can attain all required competencies, skills, attributes, motivations and ambitions from a single degree is an assumption of the new funding model. It is also significant to note that while attention is placed on the changing sources of income for universities, there have also been major shifts in the pattern of expenditure within universities, focusing on branding, marketing, recruitment, ‘regional’ campuses and off-shore courses. Similarly, the short-term funding goals of university research agendas encourage projects required by industry, rather than socially inflected concerns. There is little inevitable about teaching, research and education in Australia, except that the Federal Government will not create a fully-funded model for lifelong learning. The task for those of us involved in – and committed to – education in this environment is to probe the form and rationale for a (post) publicly funded University. This short paper for the ‘order’ issue of M/C explores learning and teaching within our current political and economic order. Particularly, I place attention on the synergies to such an order via phrases like the knowledge economy and the creative industries. To move beyond the empty promises of just-in-time learning, on-the-job training, graduate attributes and generic skills, we must reorder our assumptions and ask difficult questions of those who frame the context in which education takes place. For the term of your natural life Learning is a big business. Whether discussing the University of the Third Age, personal development courses, self help bestsellers or hard-edged vocational qualifications, definitions of learning – let alone education – are expanding. Concurrent with this growth, governments are reducing centralized funding and promoting alternative revenue streams. The diversity of student interests – or to use the language of the time, client’s learning goals – is transforming higher education into more than the provision of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. The expansion of the student body beyond the 18-25 age group and the desire to ‘service industry’ has reordered the form and purpose of formal education. The number of potential students has expanded extraordinarily. As Lee Bash realized Today, some estimates suggest that as many as 47 percent of all students enrolled in higher education are over 25 years old. In the future, as lifelong learning becomes more integrated into the fabric of our culture, the proportion of adult students is expected to increase. And while we may not yet realize it, the academy is already being transformed as a result. (35) Lifelong learning is the major phrase and trope that initiates and justifies these changes. Such expansive economic opportunities trigger the entrepreneurial directives within universities. If lifelong learning is taken seriously, then the goals, entry standards, curriculum, information management policies and assessments need to be challenged and changed. Attention must be placed on words and phrases like ‘access’ and ‘alternative entry.’ Even more consideration must be placed on ‘outcomes’ and ‘accountability.’ Lifelong learning is a catchphrase for a change in purpose and agenda. Courses are developed from a wide range of education providers so that citizens can function in, or at least survive, the agitation of the post-work world. Both neo-liberal and third way models of capitalism require the labeling and development of an aspirational class, a group who desires to move ‘above’ their current context. Such an ambiguous economic and social goal always involves more than the vocational education and training sector or universities, with the aim being to seamlessly slot education into a ‘lifestyle.’ The difficulties with this discourse are two-fold. Firstly, how effectively can these aspirational notions be applied and translated into a real family and a real workplace? Secondly, does this scheme increase the information divide between rich and poor? There are many characteristics of an effective lifelong learner including great personal motivation, self esteem, confidence and intellectual curiosity. In a double shifting, change-fatigued population, the enthusiasm for perpetual learning may be difficult to summon. With the casualization of the post-Fordist workplace, it is no surprise that policy makers and employers are placing the economic and personal responsibility for retraining on individual workers. Instead of funding a training scheme in the workplace, there has been a devolving of skill acquisition and personal development. Through the twentieth century, and particularly after 1945, education was the track to social mobility. The difficulty now – with degree inflation and the loss of stable, secure, long-term employment – is that new modes of exclusion and disempowerment are being perpetuated through the education system. Field recognized that “the new adult education has been embraced most enthusiastically by those who are already relatively well qualified.” (105) This is a significant realization. Motivation, meta-learning skills and curiosity are increasingly being rewarded when found in the already credentialed, empowered workforce. Those already in work undertake lifelong learning. Adult education operates well for members of the middle class who are doing well and wish to do better. If success is individualized, then failure is also cast on the self, not the social system or policy. The disempowered are blamed for their own conditions and ‘failures.’ The concern, through the internationalization of the workforce, technological change and privatization of national assets, is that failure in formal education results in social exclusion and immobility. Besides being forced into classrooms, there are few options for those who do not wish to learn, in a learning society. Those who ‘choose’ not be a part of the national project of individual improvement, increased market share, company competitiveness and international standards are not relevant to the economy. But there is a personal benefit – that may have long term political consequences – from being ‘outside’ society. Perhaps the best theorist of the excluded is not sourced from a University, but from the realm of fictional writing. Irvine Welsh, author of the landmark Trainspotting, has stated that What we really need is freedom from choice … People who are in work have no time for anything else but work. They have no mental space to accommodate anything else but work. Whereas people who are outside the system will always find ways of amusing themselves. Even if they are materially disadvantaged they’ll still find ways of coping, getting by and making their own entertainment. (145-6) A blurring of work and learning, and work and leisure, may seem to create a borderless education, a learning framework uninhibited by curriculum, assessment or power structures. But lifelong learning aims to place as many (national) citizens as possible in ‘the system,’ striving for success or at least a pay increase which will facilitate the purchase of more consumer goods. Through any discussion of work-place training and vocationalism, it is important to remember those who choose not to choose life, who choose something else, who will not follow orders. Everybody wants to work The great imponderable for complex economic systems is how to manage fluctuations in labour and the market. The unstable relationship between need and supply necessitates flexibility in staffing solutions, and short-term supplementary labour options. When productivity and profit are the primary variables through which to judge successful management, then the alignments of education and employment are viewed and skewed through specific ideological imperatives. The library profession is an obvious occupation that has confronted these contradictions. It is ironic that the occupation that orders knowledge is experiencing a volatile and disordered workplace. In the past, it had been assumed that librarians hold a degree while technicians do not, and that technicians would not be asked to perform – unsupervised – the same duties as librarians. Obviously, such distinctions are increasingly redundant. Training packages, structured through competency-based training principles, have ensured technicians and librarians share knowledge systems which are taught through incremental stages. Mary Carroll recognized the primary questions raised through this change. If it is now the case that these distinctions have disappeared do we need to continue to draw them between professional and para-professional education? Does this mean that all sectors of the education community are in fact learning/teaching the same skills but at different levels so that no unique set of skills exist? (122) With education reduced to skills, thereby discrediting generalist degrees, the needs of industry have corroded the professional standards and stature of librarians. Certainly, the abilities of library technicians are finally being valued, but it is too convenient that one of the few professions dominated by women has suffered a demeaning of knowledge into competency. Lifelong learning, in this context, has collapsed high level abilities in information management into bite sized chunks of ‘skills.’ The ideology of lifelong learning – which is rarely discussed – is that it serves to devalue prior abilities and knowledges into an ever-expanding imperative for ‘new’ skills and software competencies. For example, ponder the consequences of Hitendra Pillay and Robert Elliott’s words: The expectations inherent in new roles, confounded by uncertainty of the environment and the explosion of information technology, now challenge us to reconceptualise human cognition and develop education and training in a way that resonates with current knowledge and skills. (95) Neophilliacal urges jut from their prose. The stress on ‘new roles,’ and ‘uncertain environments,’ the ‘explosion of information technology,’ ‘challenges,’ ‘reconceptualisations,’ and ‘current knowledge’ all affirms the present, the contemporary, and the now. Knowledge and expertise that have taken years to develop, nurture and apply are not validated through this educational brief. The demands of family, work, leisure, lifestyle, class and sexuality stretch the skin taut over economic and social contradictions. To ease these paradoxes, lifelong learning should stress pedagogy rather than applications, and context rather than content. Put another way, instead of stressing the link between (gee wizz) technological change and (inevitable) workplace restructuring and redundancies, emphasis needs to be placed on the relationship between professional development and verifiable technological outcomes, rather than spruiks and promises. Short term vocationalism in educational policy speaks to the ordering of our public culture, requiring immediate profits and a tight dialogue between education and work. Furthering this logic, if education ‘creates’ employment, then it also ‘creates’ unemployment. Ironically, in an environment that focuses on the multiple identities and roles of citizens, students are reduced to one label – ‘future workers.’ Obviously education has always been marinated in the political directives of the day. The industrial revolution introduced a range of technical complexities to the workforce. Fordism necessitated that a worker complete a task with precision and speed, requiring a high tolerance of stress and boredom. Now, more skills are ‘assumed’ by employers at the time that workplaces are off-loading their training expectations to the post-compulsory education sector. Therefore ‘lifelong learning’ is a political mask to empower the already empowered and create a low-level skill base for low paid workers, with the promise of competency-based training. Such ideologies never need to be stated overtly. A celebration of ‘the new’ masks this task. Not surprisingly therefore, lifelong learning has a rich new life in ordering creative industries strategies and frameworks. Codifying the creative The last twenty years have witnessed an expanding jurisdiction and justification of the market. As part of Tony Blair’s third way, the creative industries and the knowledge economy became catchwords to demonstrate that cultural concerns are not only economically viable but a necessity in the digital, post-Fordist, information age. Concerns with intellectual property rights, copyright, patents, and ownership of creative productions predominate in such a discourse. Described by Charles Leadbeater as Living on Thin Air, this new economy is “driven by new actors of production and sources of competitive advantage – innovation, design, branding, know-how – which are at work on all industries.” (10) Such market imperatives offer both challenges and opportunity for educationalists and students. Lifelong learning is a necessary accoutrement to the creative industries project. Learning cities and communities are the foundations for design, music, architecture and journalism. In British policy, and increasingly in Queensland, attention is placed on industry-based research funding to address this changing environment. In 2000, Stuart Cunningham and others listed the eight trends that order education, teaching and learning in this new environment. The Changes to the Provision of Education Globalization The arrival of new information and communication technologies The development of a knowledge economy, shortening the time between the development of new ideas and their application. The formation of learning organizations User-pays education The distribution of knowledge through interactive communication technologies (ICT) Increasing demand for education and training Scarcity of an experienced and trained workforce Source: S. Cunningham, Y. Ryan, L. Stedman, S. Tapsall, K. Bagdon, T. Flew and P. Coaldrake. The Business of Borderless Education. Canberra: DETYA Evaluation and Investigations Program [EIP], 2000. This table reverberates with the current challenges confronting education. Mobilizing such changes requires the lubrication of lifelong learning tropes in university mission statements and the promotion of a learning culture, while also acknowledging the limited financial conditions in which the educational sector is placed. For university scholars facilitating the creative industries approach, education is “supplying high value-added inputs to other enterprises,” (Hartley and Cunningham 5) rather than having value or purpose beyond the immediately and applicably economic. The assumption behind this table is that the areas of expansion in the workforce are the creative and service industries. In fact, the creative industries are the new service sector. This new economy makes specific demands of education. Education in the ‘old economy’ and the ‘new economy’ Old Economy New Economy Four-year degree Forty-year degree Training as a cost Training as a source of competitive advantage Learner mobility Content mobility Distance education Distributed learning Correspondence materials with video Multimedia centre Fordist training – one size fits all Tailored programmes Geographically fixed institutions Brand named universities and celebrity professors Just-in-case Just-in-time Isolated learners Virtual learning communities Source: T. Flew. “Educational Media in Transition: Broadcasting, Digital Media and Lifelong Learning in the Knowledge Economy.” International Journal of Instructional Media 29.1 (2002): 20. There are myriad assumptions lurking in Flew’s fascinating table. The imperative is short courses on the web, servicing the needs of industry. He described the product of this system as a “learner-earner.” (50) This ‘forty year degree’ is based on lifelong learning ideologies. However Flew’s ideas are undermined by the current government higher education agenda, through the capping – through time – of courses. The effect on the ‘learner-earner’ in having to earn more to privately fund a continuance of learning – to ensure that they keep on earning – needs to be addressed. There will be consequences to the housing market, family structures and leisure time. The costs of education will impact on other sectors of the economy and private lives. Also, there is little attention to the groups who are outside this taken-for-granted commitment to learning. Flew noted that barriers to greater participation in education and training at all levels, which is a fundamental requirement of lifelong learning in the knowledge economy, arise in part out of the lack of provision of quality technology-mediated learning, and also from inequalities of access to ICTs, or the ‘digital divide.’ (51) In such a statement, there is a misreading of teaching and learning. Such confusion is fuelled by the untheorised gap between ‘student’ and ‘consumer.’ The notion that technology (which in this context too often means computer-mediated platforms) is a barrier to education does not explain why conventional distance education courses, utilizing paper, ink and postage, were also unable to welcome or encourage groups disengaged from formal learning. Flew and others do not confront the issue of motivation, or the reason why citizens choose to add or remove the label of ‘student’ from their bag of identity labels. The stress on technology as both a panacea and problem for lifelong learning may justify theories of convergence and the integration of financial, retail, community, health and education provision into a services sector, but does not explain why students desire to learn, beyond economic necessity and employer expectations. Based on these assumptions of expanding creative industries and lifelong learning, the shape of education is warping. An ageing population requires educational expenditure to be reallocated from primary and secondary schooling and towards post-compulsory learning and training. This cost will also be privatized. When coupled with immigration flows, technological changes and alterations to market and labour structures, lifelong learning presents a profound and personal cost. An instrument for economic and social progress has been individualized, customized and privatized. The consequence of the ageing population in many nations including Australia is that there will be fewer young people in schools or employment. Such a shift will have consequences for the workplace and the taxation system. Similarly, those young workers who remain will be far more entrepreneurial and less loyal to their employers. Public education is now publically-assisted education. Jane Jenson and Denis Saint-Martin realized the impact of this change. The 1980s ideological shift in economic and social policy thinking towards policies and programmes inspired by neo-liberalism provoked serious social strains, especially income polarization and persistent poverty. An increasing reliance on market forces and the family for generating life-chances, a discourse of ‘responsibility,’ an enthusiasm for off-loading to the voluntary sector and other altered visions of the welfare architecture inspired by neo-liberalism have prompted a reaction. There has been a wide-ranging conversation in the 1990s and the first years of the new century in policy communities in Europe as in Canada, among policy makers who fear the high political, social and economic costs of failing to tend to social cohesion. (78) There are dense social reorderings initiated by neo-liberalism and changing the notions of learning, teaching and education. There are yet to be tracked costs to citizenship. The legacy of the 1980s and 1990s is that all organizations must behave like businesses. In such an environment, there are problems establishing social cohesion, let alone social justice. To stress the product – and not the process – of education contradicts the point of lifelong learning. Compliance and complicity replace critique. (Post) learning The Cold War has ended. The great ideological battle between communism and Western liberal democracy is over. Most countries believe both in markets and in a necessary role for Government. There will be thunderous debates inside nations about the balance, but the struggle for world hegemony by political ideology is gone. What preoccupies decision-makers now is a different danger. It is extremism driven by fanaticism, personified either in terrorist groups or rogue states. Tony Blair (http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6535.asp) Tony Blair, summoning his best Francis Fukuyama impersonation, signaled the triumph of liberal democracy over other political and economic systems. His third way is unrecognizable from the Labour party ideals of Clement Attlee. Probably his policies need to be. Yet in his second term, he is not focused on probing the specificities of the market-orientation of education, health and social welfare. Instead, decision makers are preoccupied with a war on terror. Such a conflict seemingly justifies large defense budgets which must be at the expense of social programmes. There is no recognition by Prime Ministers Blair or Howard that ‘high-tech’ armory and warfare is generally impotent to the terrorist’s weaponry of cars, bodies and bombs. This obvious lesson is present for them to see. After the rapid and successful ‘shock and awe’ tactics of Iraq War II, terrorism was neither annihilated nor slowed by the Coalition’s victory. Instead, suicide bombers in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Indonesia and Israel snuck have through defenses, requiring little more than a car and explosives. More Americans have been killed since the war ended than during the conflict. Wars are useful when establishing a political order. They sort out good and evil, the just and the unjust. Education policy will never provide the ‘big win’ or the visible success of toppling Saddam Hussein’s statue. The victories of retraining, literacy, competency and knowledge can never succeed on this scale. As Blair offered, “these are new times. New threats need new measures.” (ht tp://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6535.asp) These new measures include – by default – a user pays education system. In such an environment, lifelong learning cannot succeed. It requires a dense financial commitment in the long term. A learning society requires a new sort of war, using ideas not bullets. References Bash, Lee. “What Serving Adult Learners Can Teach Us: The Entrepreneurial Response.” Change January/February 2003: 32-7. Blair, Tony. “Full Text of the Prime Minister’s Speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet.” November 12, 2002. http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page6535.asp. Carroll, Mary. “The Well-Worn Path.” The Australian Library Journal May 2002: 117-22. Field, J. Lifelong Learning and the New Educational Order. Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, 2000. Flew, Terry. “Educational Media in Transition: Broadcasting, Digital Media and Lifelong Learning in the Knowledge Economy.” International Journal of Instructional Media 29.1 (2002): 47-60. Hartley, John, and Cunningham, Stuart. “Creative Industries – from Blue Poles to Fat Pipes.” Department of Education, Science and Training, Commonwealth of Australia (2002). Jenson, Jane, and Saint-Martin, Denis. “New Routes to Social Cohesion? Citizenship and the Social Investment State.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 28.1 (2003): 77-99. Leadbeater, Charles. Living on Thin Air. London: Viking, 1999. Pillay, Hitendra, and Elliott, Robert. “Distributed Learning: Understanding the Emerging Workplace Knowledge.” Journal of Interactive Learning Research 13.1-2 (2002): 93-107. Welsh, Irvine, from Redhead, Steve. “Post-Punk Junk.” Repetitive Beat Generation. Glasgow: Rebel Inc, 2000: 138-50. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Brabazon, Tara. "Freedom from Choice: Who Pays for Customer Service in the Knowledge Economy?." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/02-brabazon.php>. APA Style Brabazon, T. (Jan. 2005) "Freedom from Choice: Who Pays for Customer Service in the Knowledge Economy?," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/02-brabazon.php>.