Inaugural lectures

On Wednesday, I attended two fantastic inaugural lectures at the school of management, University of Leicester. I particularly enjoyed the latter of the two that focused on media convergence in terms of the organisation (BBC, Sky etc). One thing that was brought to my attention was the role of the journalist to cover a range of media platforms. This is an interesting juxtaposition to the inherently social understanding I have come in contact with of convergence in the past. Konstantinos Saltzis put forward the idea of a 'one man band' journalist that writes once and publishes everywhere. It opposes the popular notion that convergence makes life easier by pulling everything together in one place. For journalists, the range of media platforms that their news has to reach causes more work. Interestingly, Konstantinos noticed how the journalisits consider their increased level of work is because of a rise in competition and not the nature of convergence itself. Thereby, it is because of the bloggers that the news has to now compete more often. I was surprised to hear that the journalists had located the problem in the people and not in the technology.

Seemingly unintentionally the first lecture from Sverre Spoelstra gave a philosophical insight into the differences between work and labour. As I am currently trying to work my way through a thousand plateaus this was really useful. Sverre explained how Labour is never used a noun. It never refers to an end product. Therefore, labour is unproductive. Labour is an endless cycle. Work is productive makes objects that have a life of their own. In the world we have a relationship with these products and We are consuming the products more and more in today's society – computers, mobiles etc. Sverre used a range of eminent philosophers from Locke to Foucault to present his argument.