Category Archive for ‘Technology’ at Larvatus Prodeo

Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Death and the Internet

Published

2 days, 8 hours ago

. 19 Comments

There have been a number of tragedies of late (e.g. the suicides in Bridgend) which supposedly featured the Internet in some capacity or another.

Of course, when such things happen people who didn’t grow up with the Internet put the blame on that relatively new medium for such tragedies.

While such views are misguided, it’s still worth wondering what the role of the Internet is in influencing the decisions made by the people concerned.

It’s also worth considering what the Internet tells us about the way we respond to such tragedies today.

Megan Meier killed herself after being bullied via MySpace

Continue reading ‘Death and the Internet’

Bloggers united for human rights

Published

suz

2 days, 11 hours ago

in Activism, Blogging, International and The Web

. 4 Comments

It’s Bloggers Unite for Human Rights Day. Here’s a quick focus on two blogs/bloggers:

- Burmese Bloggers Without Borders is an independent voice reaching out to the rest of the world. In March they highlighted the case of two Rangoon journalists who were imprisoned. Amnesty International has also taken up the case of Thet Zin and Sein Win Maung.

- Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer has been in prison for over a year now, for writing about political repression, religious extremism and discrimination against women. Amnesty is also working for his release.

Climate Policy Salad

Published

dk.au

1 week, 1 day ago

in Climate change, Energy, Environment, Policy and Technology

. 31 Comments

Fresh updates from the world of emissions trading:

Climate Need Not Corporate Greed

* The BBC Reports that a plan for national Personal Carbon Trading for the UK, arguably one of the most ambitious, complex and comprehensive Neoliberal projects in recent times, has been shelved. DEFRA research into the proposals to give every adult in the UK a personal ‘allowance’ included interviews with 92 people. The money quote is one for all the national psycho-social historians, “Just straight away it reminds me of going back to the war and rationing.”

* NSW Govt has announced it plans to join HSBC, NAB, ~~Coldplay~~ et al by becoming carbon neutral by 2020. The plan will include state-run operations like police, hospitals, schools, ~~and power-stations~~. It looks like most of the emissions reductions will be made by ~~eating koala~~ buying carbon offsets rather than making significant changes to BAU.

* PhD Comics has some sustainability tips

Tracking urban eccentrics

Published

Mark

1 week, 1 day ago

in Blogging, Brisbane, Sociology, The Web and Urbanism

. 45 Comments

There’s a really fascinating article at Wired about blogs and websites tracking down urban eccentrics. You know who I mean. In Brisbane, I can think of “Rock & Roll George”, the Marilyn Monroe woman (always impeccably groomed), the evil homeless guy who hits people with his umbrella, the plastic bag man who used to sleep outside the Anglican church in Toowong, the fake nun in the white tuxedo who pushed an empty wheelchair down the middle of New Farm streets for many years, and the cowboy whom I once overheard refusing at Rics to explain to the barwoman why he was what he was or who he was, all the while conscious of his minor celebrity.

The article doesn’t cover stalking or the right to privacy, which raises some questions. It also doesn’t really adequately get to grips with the sociological phenomenon of why we talk about such folks and what they feel about it all. Any thoughts?

Intertubes and catalogues, liberatory and otherwise

Published

Mark

2 weeks, 5 days ago

in Books, Writers & Writing, China, Economics, History, International, Life, Media, Philosophy, Politics, Sociology, The Web and USA

. 12 Comments

There’s a thought provoking review of Richard Barbrook’s new book Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village at Mute magazine. I came across it via bookforum.com, and my curiosity was piqued because I received a flyer for Imaginary Futures enclosed with another book I recently ordered from Pluto Books in the UK (whom I wholeheartedly endorse for customer service btw - not only did they deliver a book I needed from Britain within a week, but I got an email telling me about it from an actual person as opposed to an Amazonbot).

Ian A. Boal asks some interesting questions - how did we get from seeing the computer as an instrument of dehumanisation (think HAL in 2001 and other such fictional and filmic representations of the 60s and 70s) to seeing it as a utopian saviour of humanity? How can we understand the history of “digital utopianism” and what of the interests and social positions of those who spruiked it?

Continue reading ‘Intertubes and catalogues, liberatory and otherwise’

Wordpress.com enables another new “feature” to far from universal acclaim - PSA

Published

tigtog

2 weeks, 5 days ago

in Asshattery, Blogging, Ethics, Media and The Web

. 33 Comments

This post is likely to be of interest mostly to those who are hosting a blog on Wordpress.com.

Looking at Fire Fly’s blog, I noticed that she’s discovered that a new feature on her hosted-by-Wordpress.com blog. It turned up without direct notification, and is opt-out, not opt-in. … » Problem No.1 (She’s disabled it, and you should too if you blog on wordpress.com - see below for instructions)

This new feature generates a list of “Possibly Related Posts” at the foot of your own posts, and it searches through a database of all other Wordpress.com blogs to do so. Now, just consider the variety of attitudes people have to the words “feminism” and “racism” for instance, and can you guess where this is going? Oh yes it did - the list of “possibly related posts” on Fire Fly’s feminist blog included links to posts written by white supremacists and anti-feminists (often in the same link) - fanfuckingtastic, eh? So your readers might well think that these posts are being recommended by you, instead of automatically, and what does that do to a poster’s credibility? …. » Problem No.2

Did I mention that these “possibly related post” links are not visible or able to be edited when you are writing your post? … » Problem No.3

Not only that, by having this feature enabled on your blog, it also means that posts from your blog are being included in the list generated by this “feature” on other people’s blogs, which for Fire Fly included those self-same white supremacists and anti-feminists, thus sending their readers to her blog. This is why she titled her post thusly: Warning! The new WordPress feature is utter trollbait. … » Problem No.4

I was very grateful for her post, because it enabled me to immediately disable this “feature” Continue reading ‘Wordpress.com enables another new “feature” to far from universal acclaim - PSA’

Molitor@UNSW

Published

dk.au

3 weeks, 2 days ago

in Climate change, Energy, Environment, Government, Markets and Technology

. 11 Comments

Michael Molitor gave a public lecture last night at UNSW, where he now holds an adjunct professorship with the Climate Change Research Centre between appointments as a ‘Carbon Manager’ for PriceWaterhouseCooper. The talk was entitled Climate Change: ‘Show Me The Money’, which is the famous line from Tom Cruise’s character in Jerry Maguire - so when Molitor spoke passionately of the ‘Governor of NSW’, I was thankful that there were no couches onstage. Though, to be fair, the event showcased a fascinating, eclectic and sometimes contradictory mix of bravado-filled insights on the problem of climate change from someone on the inner circle of business elites. The message was familiar enough - that we aren’t moving quickly enough for the scale of the problem - his analysis, however, was somewhat less conventional.

The ‘good news’ began with the observation that our ‘carbon productivity’, that is, our economic outputs from machines relative to their spewing waste into the global carbon dump has actually been increasing over time. Continue reading ‘Molitor@UNSW’

Guest post by Miriam Lyons: Summit Idol - Mostly covers but some real gems too

Published

Administrator

3 weeks, 4 days ago

in Australia 2020 summit and The Web

. 14 Comments

Director of the Centre for Policy Development, and 2020 summit delegate, Miriam Lyons, writes in today’s Crikey (republished with permission):

Suddenly ideas are sexy. The Australia 2020 Summit has done for Deep Thought what Australian Idol did for karaoke - what was once a mildly embarrassing hobby best practised under cover of drunkenness is now played live to a national audience.

Like music professors asked to comment on the success of Idol, most of the wonks who went through the last two days can’t quite decide whether to be pleased that so many people are paying attention to ideas or annoyed that serious attempts to grapple with complex, long-term policy problems were sometimes lost amidst the all-singing, all-dancing Summit show.

In the governance group Marcia Hines was played by Maxine McKew, who, after listening to report-backs from groups with ideas ranging from FOI reform to a new Federation Commission, entreated us to put a little soul into it. Kudos to youth summit delegate Owen Wareham who read between the lines, said something like “here’s a sound bite, if that’s what you’re looking for” and delivered a punchy straight-to-camera pitch for automatic enrolment.

I had a lot of sympathy with Ms McKew’s call for more ideas that would capture people’s imagination. Continue reading ‘Guest post by Miriam Lyons: Summit Idol - Mostly covers but some real gems too’

Towards an e-Creative Australia?

Published

Kim

1 month ago

in Australia 2020 summit, Australiana, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Media, Policy, Sociology, Television and The Web

. 5 Comments

Following up on posts and pieces by Mark, Marcus Westbury and Ben Eltham, I’ve got a little point to make about the whole Towards a Creative Australia 2020 stream too. And it goes to the links between creativity and innovation. Futurists often try to dream up pseudo-apocalyptic models of creative destruction - the death of the book, for instance (on which, see a sceptical Cory Doctorow on e books and screen reading). And, after all, one of the best selling books by a futurist in America last year was a tome by Hillary Clinton’s (ex) chief strategist, Mark Penn, for chrissakes.

If we’re thinking 2020, a lot of what we need to think about is emerging now - a point made in a good comment on an earlier thread by DeeCee. Take the biz of online news and views - what’s becoming very clear already is that platform is relatively unimportant (a broader trend that is hurting Microsoft for instance) and content trumps branding. Because readers are already making their own compendia of news and views, with or without tools such as social bookmarking. Established media are often playing catchup - as with the Australian tv networks. Here’s the killer quote from a story on enabling legal downloads:

“The reason people are illegally using P2P [peer-to-peer] networks is simply because content isn’t available elsewhere,” says Ten’s general manager, Digital Media, Damian Smith.

What’s the point of requiring a certain percentage of Australian content on free to air tv when most of it’s awful, and people are watching whatever they like from wherever they like whenever they like? As Tama Leaver glosses Damian Smith:

(So give me a legal way to download Battlestar Galactica today and I will!)

Innovation isn’t so much in *the next big thing* but in clever ways to surf what’s already happening, and arrange it in new and exciting ways. Continue reading ‘Towards an e-Creative Australia?’

Friends, journos, constituents…

Published

Mark

1 month ago

in Blogging, Media, Politics, Sociology and The Web

. 2 Comments

A fascinating little tidbit on PollieGraph from Rachel Hills about Malcolm Turnbull’s web 2.0 politics. (At least he gets these intertubes I guess…) Rachel (rightly) thinks Turnbull’s degrees of access regime on his Facebook profile raises some interesting questions about pollies and online interaction.

Annals of Naive Science, Episode 12938/WWF

Published

dk.au

1 month ago

in Disasters, Energy, Environment, Science, Sociology and Technology

. 44 Comments

SMH Reports that the WWF and Climate Institute will join the CFMEU and Coal Industry to promote clean coal funding by governments

“If it’s going to work we need to know quickly. If it’s not going to work we need to know even more quickly,” Mr Bourne said. “If it’s never tested we are have deep problems on a world wide basis.”

As an aside, it’s hard to know whether there is actually a World Wildlife Fund funding, y’know, Wildlife behind the hyper-managed brand these days. They seem more concerned with planting vacuous stories in The Age about vacuous people publicising that they’ll be switching their lights off or getting photo ops with Telstra’s fanciful, Futurist exercises in potential reality-displacement.

What’s immediately concerning about Bourne’s statement is the implicitly Whiggish invocation of a ‘test’ that will resolve disputes about the place of carbon sequestration in the policy mix, presumably by speaking for Nature itself. If the last four decades of Science Studies research have taught us anything, it’s that testing does not magically resolve hypotheses. The best you can hope for on the boundaries of technoscience is some kind of closure. Continue reading ‘Annals of Naive Science, Episode 12938/WWF’

Sunday Salon! (with cocktails!)

Published

Mark

1 month ago

in Blogging, Brisbane, Life, Notices and The Web

. 21 Comments

As well as hosting public fora, one other thing LP is up to is facilitating conversation in livespace. I want to get away from the whole “meet a visiting blogger and get trashed” thing and more towards the have a few quiet Sunday drinks and have a convo thing. If you’re interested, and in Brisbane on Sunday, we’ll be at Kaliber in the TCB Building on the Brunswick Street Mall from 4pm. As Nabs might (just) recall, they do good cocktail. And there’s a band, but also outside seating where you can have a chat.

A bit more notice has been given of this event via Facebook, and it really is convenient for organising stuff - for instance, if there’s a late change in plans, it’s easy to contact all attendees quickly. So do please sign up for the FB group if you think you’d be interested in such events and other fora in future.

If anybody wants to organise something under the LP banner in their own town, give us a shout (as Brendan Nelson would say).

Valley lights by *phenomenologist on deviant ART

Web 2.0 scary, Web 3.0 alert and alarmed

Published

Mark

1 month, 1 week ago

in Astroturf, Media, Sociology and The Web

. 11 Comments

The term ‘moral panic’ is actually one of the contributions of sociology to the wider world - it originated with Stanley Cohen’s 1972 monograph Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and the Rockers, which if you ever get a chance, is actually quite a fascinating read. Cohen drew on the resources of anthropology and semiotics in conceiving a concept which would explain the mediated construction of a particular type of deviant - and as the title of the book suggests, its initial reference was to subcultures, particularly youth and music related ones. Probably because Cohen emphasised the role of the media in moral panics, the concept entered the realm of media and communication studies, where, unsurprisingly, the focus was on the role of the media.

But in terms of the mapping of a particular phenomenon, the sociological literature casts a broader net. Continue reading ‘Web 2.0 scary, Web 3.0 alert and alarmed’

“The internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.”

Published

Mark

1 month, 1 week ago

in Elections, Politics, Sociology and The Web

. 18 Comments

Some clever “Liberal Party source” thought that the opposition might be galvanised into better e-campaigning through leaking this gem:

Christopher Pyne, Malcolm Turnbull and Joe Hockey were the only senior former Howard government ministers who could use a computer, a Liberal party source said.

Rachel Hills has made some savvy comments on this story (which also provided much comedic fare for the SMH leader writer yesterday.) She argues:

I agree that Howard’s YouTube videos were an abject failure, but I don’t agree that the election was lost online (despite writing a weekly column on the subject throughout the 2007 campaign). That the Libs failed to make much of an impact online was a symptom rather than the cause of their broader out-of-touchness.

I’d add that their other big mistake was their attempt to use YouTube and other social media to manipulate mainstream media coverage, rather than actually sway or engage a target demographic, as I noted a number of times last year in the lead up to the campaign. Continue reading ‘“The internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.”’