“In some ways, the great danger for this commodified universe is our boredom with it ... " -McKenzie Wark
McKenzie Wark is an Australian writer best known for his work in media theory and new media. He is currently a professor of media and cultural studies at The New School in New York.
Employment at Macquarie University
During the events of the play, Ken was employed at Macquarie University, a public research university in the suburbs of Sydney. The university was founded in 1964 and modeled themselves partially after Stanford University in their focus on technology and the interaction between industry and the university. Although Macquarie is not a very old school, it is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in Australia and has a student population of over 40,000.
Their media, creative arts, and communication program is the first in the country and aims to teach their students about traditional mass communication while preparing students to respond to the rapidly evolving media environment.
In 2001, Macquarie University established a Gender & Sexuality Centre called QueerSpace that offers services and resources for faculty and students who identify as LGBTQI+. Prior to the formal founding of this center, gay students at Macquarie mobilized independently, especially in the late 1960s and through out the 1970s in response to the Stonewall Riots and similar events internationally. However, as Ken points out in his emails, the gay community was not always and still is not consistently supportive of bisexual individuals.
Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events Published 1994
"One has to write differently not only because the community one writes for changes. To borrow again from Howard Rheingold, there are emerging 'virtual communities' that are unanchored in locality but are made possible by the ever more flexible matrix of media vectors traversing the globe. We no longer have origins, we have terminals."