Toby Bennett

@tgpb.bsky.social

618 Followers 664 Following

Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture & Organisation at University of Westminster Wrote a book on the mundane work that makes Big Music work; do editorial bits at Journal of Cultural Economy; some other stuff... https://tgpbennett.wordpress.com

Put these things together and you have a picture that does not flatter the peer-reviewed journal article as an institution. We have a publishing system optimized for volume, financed by uncompensated labor, controlled by profit-seeking entities, producing increasingly incremental work, now facing an AI-driven capacity to generate competent manuscripts at near-zero marginal cost when the broader research enterprise is under severe fiscal constraint. What exactly is this enormous expenditure of collective intelligence through peer review buying us? What is it safeguarding? The honest answer is: not as much as we tell ourselves. Indeed, maybe in its current form, the peer-reviewed article has simply outlived its primary function as a mechanism for certifying and communicating novel scientific advances. This obviously doesn’t mean peer review is worthless: to a considerable degree, it’s central to the way we structure communities around knowledge, practices, puzzles, and instruments. Yet this fact should not stop us from rethinking the architecture of the system rather than continuing to patch a structure designed for a different era of science. What might that look like?
Screenshot of my endorsement of the book in the quoted post. “Big Music never lets a serious crisis go to waste. This compelling history of corporate storytelling guides us through four decades of recorded music’s moral panics. With characteristic iconoclasm, and an analytic scalpel that cuts through industry myth, Arditi reveals how fears are weaponized to manage transformation.”
FT graph showing comparisons of the change in "graduate premium" as graduates take up an increasing share of the workforce between 1997-2022. For US, France, Canada, Spain and Netherlands, line go up. For UK, line very much go down.
Photo of said rickety pyramid
Screenshot of Google blog titled "Bringing state-of-the-art Gemini translation capabilities to Google Translate"
The smuggest picture of Bourdieu I could find.
A pile of five books on a bread bin: - Chihaya, Emre, Hill and Richards - The Ferrante Letters - Garnham - Capitalism and Communication - Osborne - Philosophy in Cultural Theory - Habermas - The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere - Bourdieu - Homo Academicus
A Marxist and materialist philosopher that I don’t think Virno felt any kinship for, Louis Althusser, once observed that “our age threatens one day to appear in the history of human culture as marked by the most dramatic and difficult trial of all, the discovery of and training in the meaning of the ‘simplest’ acts of existence: seeing, listening, speaking, reading.” Virno reinvented and revitalised materialism for our late-capitalist society by asking after the “simplest” acts as they turned into the crucial stakes of a society whose productive forces and relations appear marked by the greatest complexity, abstraction, and volatility—a predicament perhaps not unrelated to Brecht’s poetic definition of communism: “It’s the simple thing / That’s hard to do.”
Netflix cover for My Secret Santa.
Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit
Screenshot of the Ones and Tooze podcasts "Heterodox Economists: Lenin" episode, with faulty transcript reading "Obviously, Lennon didn't only run the revolution".
It's 1989's Glenn Miller sampling hit single "Swing the Mood" by kitschy Rotherham DJ chancers Jive Bunny - released a good half-decade before the birth of Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny.
Two books: Dan Sinykin's "Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature" and Timothy Kuhn's "What Do Corporations Want?"
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Dear Dr. Bennett, The journal Economies (ISSN 2227-7099, IF 2.1) is currently running a Special Issue entitled "Advances in Applied Economics: Trade, Growth and Policy Modeling". Dr. Amirreza Kazemikhasragh, Prof. Dr. Alicia Girón are serving as Guest Editors for this issue. From your publication record, we can see you are an expert in this subject area...
A sign in amidst trees and seating consisting of a red circle with a silhouetted instrument in black - perhaps a flugelhorn? - and a red line through it. The message is clear: NO BRASS.
The student pictured is a cat in a small grey pouch. She looks tired. I have displeased her.
Thatcher showing us her saucepan in the kitchen. She is wearing a cook's pinny and an exceedingly smug look.
Image of what appears to be a shiny room, lit from multiple directions, as in a Hype Williams video - but is on closer inspection a handy kitchen appliance. Caption reads: "Why does the inside of a cheese grater look like every rap music video from the early 2000s?"
Four albums: Roots Manuva - Run Come Save Me Brothomstates - Claro Radiohead - Amnesia Squarepusher - Go Plastic
Jacques Derrida screenshot from a documentary with the subtitle, as if commenting on the quoted post, "Everything is false."
A graph showing twelve and a half years of "sales data". The line is flat until yesterday, when it peaks dramatically to 1.
Quote from today's Financial Times. An “extremely challenging fiscal” situation required compromises, Phillipson said, as she set out plans to target top-up funding for expensive courses in strategic sectors by removing support for media studies, journalism, publishing and information services.