Waiting on the Platform

After a fanfare of message alerts and email notifications my copy of Literacies in the Platform Society arrived today. It's a collection that's skilfully edited by Philip Nichols and Antero Garcia and I would like to wish them every success with it. The book has a chapter that Cathy and I wrote which may or not pass the test of time, but it reflects on the way that academic work has become commodified and drawn into a market economy under the influence of technological processes. One of the features of this piece is our use of an imagined dialogue with the software. We use that technique to capture or characterise the internal experience and affective responses of those scholars who have to engage with journal publishers' platforms. That strategy of layering fictional accounts into the academic practices of theory and data has been a long-standing pre-occupation of ours. It might make for a more readable text, it's fun to do, but more than that there is a sense that fictional work can carry more complex meanings than something that is baldly scientific. In a way it's the next logical step forward from narrative research. There's quite a lot of it in my new book Rethinking Digital Literacy which is due to be published in October. Since submitting the manuscript of that book my writing life has turned quite decisively towards fiction. Of course, I've been doing bits and pieces for some time now, but this is both more serious and more playful. My first short story, a fiction that seems to me to be more or less complete in that it stands on its own two feet, is finished and I'm poised for a follow-up. I have no particular ambition for this new writing. No contract. No deadline. Free from all that I can just explore writing as a purely creative process - one that I have considerable investment in and derive a certain sort of pleasure from - and then see where that takes me. I'm happy with the transition although I have nothing but fond memories for the academic writing I've had the privilege to be involved in - even a strange sort of nostalgia for those journal platforms, successor to what we once called 'electronic submission'. Looking back on it that seems like such an odd term. Were we even then submitting to an unknown power? The power of the electronic. In contrast 'platform' is such a neutral term, but as our chapter title suggests, it's where you wait.