Archive for the 'The Web' Category

Death and the Internet

Published
by
Darlene
1 day, 10 hours ago
in Sociology and The Web
. 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
by
suz
1 day, 12 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.

Tracking urban eccentrics

Published
by
Mark
1 week 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
by
Mark
2 weeks, 4 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
by
tigtog
2 weeks, 4 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’

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

Published
by
Administrator
3 weeks, 3 days ago
in Australia 2020 summit and The Web
. 13 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
by
Kim
4 weeks, 1 day 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
by
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.

Sunday Salon! (with cocktails!)

Published
by
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 deviantART

Web 2.0 scary, Web 3.0 alert and alarmed

Published
by
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
by
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.”’

Vibewire’s e-festival of ideas

Published
by
Mark
1 month, 2 weeks ago
in Notices, Policy and The Web
. Closed

is coming soon. Looks very spiffy. [Via Rachel Hills]

Continue reading ‘Vibewire’s e-festival of ideas’

Beyond the pale

Published
by
Kim
1 month, 3 weeks ago
in Consumerism, Culture, Ethics, Feminism, Government, Media, Parenting, Sexuality, The Web and Women
. 141 Comments

I’m normally a bit sceptical about some of the claims about the sexualisation of teenage girls and women, because I think that sometimes such discussions play into the hands of those who’d want to circumscribe or erase the possibility of a positive and autonomous definition and articulation of female sexuality in favour of either puritanism and/or the reinscription of traditional gender roles, because I like to lean towards the libertarian side of the sex wars, and because we just have too many moral panics. Nuance often gets lost. And the insta-loud condemnation thing often works against any examination of complexities or reflection on issues. But there’s not a lot of nuance in this really vile “Bimbo avatars” site targeted at teen girls. [I decline to link directly to the site.]

One word: Ewwwwww.

Via Laurel Papworth, whose post you can read for all the sickening detail.

Getting away from this repulsive website, it may be of interest to note that Andrew Bartlett advises that there is currently a Senate Inquiry into the Sexualisation of Children. Andrew’s blogged about it here.

Blogging or Myspace boosting social life?

Published
by
Mark
2 months, 2 weeks ago
in Blogging, Sociology and The Web
. 12 Comments

No doubt lots of people have seen this story from the ABC website:

Blogging can help you feel less isolated, more connected to a community and more satisfied with your friendships, both online and face-to-face, new Australian research has found.

The research, from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, found after two months of regular blogging, people felt they had better social support and friendship networks than those who did not blog.

I won’t go over the same ground that Claudine Ryan does in the story in summarising the research, but I had a quick thought when I read that the population for the survey was drawn from Myspace users. Without having seen the paper, which hopefully has demographic data, I’d imagine that the sample was quite young. It might have been interesting to see if the same effect was found among older people who don’t necessarily either have well developed school/uni peer group networks, or feel as if they should. I’m also not sure that blogging on Myspace is exactly comparable to blogging on other platforms. As a social networking platform, Myspace (and in a different way, Facebook) enables users to access feeds of friends’ blogs, participate in groups and form affiliations, plan and attend events - not necessarily things you can do in the same way or as easily from a standalone blogging application. It seems to me that would impact on any generalisation of the results outside Myspace.

Still, interesting stuff.

What is the exact nature of the attraction?

Published
by
Kim
2 months, 3 weeks ago
in Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Media, Sexuality, Sociology, Television, The Web and Women
. 5 Comments

Henry Jenkins’ work on popular cultures and the internets has been recommended to me, though I haven’t gotten around to reading his stuff. It seems as if I really should take a look at his latest - Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Essays in Participatory Culture. This review in Particip@tions by Neil Perryman suggests it contains at least one intriguing essay:

‘Normal Female Interest in Men Bonking’, an essay that examines fan forums dedicated to the discussion of slash fiction, and which originally appeared in Theorising Fandom: Fans, Subculture and Identity (1998), follows. This is one of Jenkins’ first attempts at forging a dialogue with the fan community, growing as it did out of the author’s frustration with ‘academics who had little or no exposure to the fan community itself (who were) writing increasingly inaccurate descriptions of fan practices and perspectives’ (p.61).

If you don’t know what slash fiction is, think Kirk/Spock.

What is it with that, anyway? Just wondering…