Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
The typical order of business for most people when Google Street View came to Australia seemed to be:
But given the extraordinarily comprehensive coverage, another possibility came to mind. Can Street View replace the need to take one’s camera to show off a place you’ve visited?
There was some interesting discussion here at LP recently on this thread about the right to free speech, which I think took far too narrowly American and thus falsely universal a view. In the common law tradition of Britain and Australia and comparable countries, there hasn’t historically been a legal right to free speech (except in Parliament!). Though that’s changed to some degree here, and in Britain because of the importation of civil law jurisprudence via the European Union, it has always been the case that protection from intrusion and protection of reputation have been significant barriers to press “freedom”. Defamation law, however, is a blunt instrument when it comes to protecting privacy, and the Australian Law Reform Commission has released a report suggesting higher barriers for media intrusion into people’s private lives. The report can be found here and the salient recommendations are covered in this story.
The Right to Know Coalition - an organisation of Australian media companies - vigorously opposes any new legal protections for privacy.
In an op/ed pushing this barrow in The Australian, UQ’s Garrick Professor of Law James Allan makes the case against, predictably roping in the general conservative suspicion of any measure that might resemble a bill of rights. He concentrates on a recent UK case which turned on a right to privacy, brought by motor racing boss Max Mosley. Mosley’s adventures with sex workers and domination scenarios in a basement were reported by a British tabloid, and the story had all sorts of salacious elements - including the fact that Mosley’s famous father Sir Oswald was a home-grown British Fascist. But the court found that there was no public interest in revealing all this, and indeed it’s hard really to see what that public interest might be. The suggestion from the media crew is that “ordinary people” don’t have to worry about such intrusions into their private lives. But is that so?
Continue reading ‘Right to privacy or right to profit from celebrity trash “news”?’
The Evolution of Dance. Amazing routine.
Find more memes you missed back in the ancient days of Internets yore at the Internet Memes Timeline. There’s explanations for the ones you see around all the time, and even use, but may not know their origins.
In doing a bit of reading for a couple of courses I’m teaching this semester, I was struck recently by the concision with which Mark Deuze pings how mediated so many aspects of our everyday lives now are - and how he deftly places this constant mediation - through email, mobile phones, the intertubes, and so much more - in its sociological context, leveraging off the work of Zygmunt Bauman. Some day, when I have time, I’ll have more to say about that, and there’s lots of nifty academic research - a fair bit from my colleagues at QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty - which is exploring many of the ramifications of everyday mediation. Loath as I normally am as a sociologist to believe the new new anything really is fundamentally new under the sun, I am starting to be convinced that a shift in the conditions of our everyday lives is taking place, though I’m totally unconvinced by claims that it’s “dumbing us down” or whatever.
Continue reading ‘Always on: the internet, social media, communications and everyday life’
What do you do if you’re a columnist for the Opposition Organ and nothing is actually happening in the Peter Costello Leadership Story? Write about Chrissy Pyne’s Facebook status updates as if they’re news, that’s what! Score one zero for the Liberals in the Web 2.0 politics sphere, I guess.
Liberal frontbencher and staunch Costello supporter Christopher Pyne used his Facebook site to kill the speculation, writing: “Christopher Pyne thinks Peter Costello’s position is clear and unchanged since November and wishes everyone would move on and get stuck into the ALP. Who arehopeless!”
Well, thanks for that, Dennis. Paul Keating probably killed off the Great Pretender for the time being more effectively, but I suppose it is hard to keep writing the same columns and stories about a quintessential non-event day after day. We’ll miss the comedy value. I imagine we’re about to see the switch flicked back to that other “media narrative” - “the Rudd honeymoon is over” now.
So, is your house shown on Google Maps Streetview?
What about the directions to get to your place? Adequate, or rubbish? And did they have a clean lens round your way?
Inquiring minds etc.
Some of the themes I wrote about in my recent contribution to the Pacific Journalism Review on that tired, tedious and irritating bloggers v. journos meme have been starkly illustrated in recent days - in particular the co-optation of the space of blogging and indeed the persona or role of the blogger by big media. As Kim noted, Andrew Bolt, in a “my hits are big, really” misadventure (demonstrating his capacity to ignore evidence that’s drawn to his attention about what statistics actually mean) suddenly became an outsider Insider, or an Insider outsider. Or something.
Andrew Bolt is so proud of his “million page impressions” - take that, lefty journos! - he’s written a column in the mainstream media paper that employs him to write his blog to decry the media and talk up “blogging”. Which is what he does. Not media. Go figure. I imagine he’ll take his outsider message to Insiders on Sunday.
Then we’ve got a panel at the Byron Bay Writers Festival about blogging where the “blogger” doing the discussing is… George Megalogenis. Continue reading ‘Journos versus bloggers round #49503′
Like Andrew Bartlett, I agree entirely with Andrew Bolt regarding the shameful weaseling by the International Olympic Committee regarding the whole idea of granting the 2008 games to the authoritarian dictatorship of China in the first place.
UPDATE: It has been pointed out in comments that LP has not discussed the Rudd government’s continued determination to introduce ISP-level internet filtering this week. To redress that lack I’ll quote a post I made at Hoyden About Town a couple of days ago in its entirety below:
No surprises: internet filtering test results show products block legitimate content
We said it would. Despite a cheery press release from Communications Minister Stephen Conroy that all is going well, an analysis of the actual test results shows that the tested filters slow connection speeds significantly (which means ISPs would have to increase capacity, the costs of which would be passed on to consumers) and have a false positives rate that would block at least 10,000 legitimate sites (and that’s for the best product result - most would block more). It gets worse:
None of the products could effectively filter instant messaging, streaming video, peer-to-peer file sharing like BitTorrent, newsgroups or newly-invented Internet protocols except by blocking them entirely. Let’s count them again. None.
How long will the Rudd government continue to pretend that having this cumbersome, costly and ineffective product shoved at us under an opt-out scheme is in any way a good idea?
Boing Boing reports:
The Orwell Prize will mark the 70th anniversary of the Orwell Diaries by serializing them, one day at a time, on a blog — reminiscent of the way that Phil Gyford syndicated Pepys’s Diary.
That’s so cool. Though actually I suspect Pepys would have been the better blogger. He was LJ circa 1660.
The whole revival of Orwell thing is weird and so overdetermined. On one hand, there’s the Orwell as anti-po/mo theme. On the other, there’s Orwell as the “hero” of the “Decent Left” theme (cf. you know, everything Christopher Hitchens has recently written). What’s ignored and effaced totally is Orwell the polemicist in favour of imagining a postwar social democracy. If you read what he was saying in the 1930s, what he was wishing for - as a “realistic utopia” - was something very like what was envisaged in the whole Beveridge/Keynes libertarian social democracy vision. 1984 was also really meant to be more about the distortion of this “new Jerusalem” by the statist Labour Party than “Stalin”. But anyways… Orwell as a writer - and here I’d gesture to the almost forgotten Burmese Days - is also much neglected. Perhaps his diaries will stimulate a respectful consideration of him in regard to his own concerns not some dumbarsed political point scoring about teh war on terror or whatevs.
Last year I shared some thoughts on the state of political blogging in Australia. Trevor Cook has just examined the claim that the blogging phenomenon is “losing impetus”. I’m not sure that’s so, and coincidentally, I’ve just sent off a write up of the talk I gave at the Public Right to Know Conference at UTS last year, for a special issue of the Pacific Journalism Review being co-ordinated by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism. You can read it here [link to pdf].
From her cast iron balcony, Helen writes:
There’s a lot of rubbish written in the dead-tree media about blogging. On the one hand, there’s an obsession with comparing it with journalism (thus setting up a frame in which blogging can never seem worthwhile). Political blogging isn’t journalism. It’s not “breaking news”. Personal blogging isn’t simply a series of trivial comments about “what I had for breakfast”. Blogging is writing. That writing may tend more towards personal, literary, academic, political, parenting, food or craft, but it’s all writing. That is what we practice and we have a lot of fun on the way.
On a related note, Mark also recently suggested that the blogging/journalism conversation (or stoush) acts to obscure much of what is actually interesting about the practice of blogging (and presumably if a lot of bloggers actually wanted to be journalists, not being shrinking violets and being generally smart cookies, they’d have done that), particularly insofar as it avoids all sorts of conversations being dominated by “white blokes in suits”. So, as Helen suggests, if you want to read something sensible in the dead tree media about blogging, read this piece written by… a blogger. Elissa Baxter riffs off some research into blogging and happiness, and interviews a range of Oz bloggers, including Helen herself and our own Suze, about why they blog and what they get out of it.
Elsewhere: More from Lauredhel at Hoyden and Suze at Personal Political.
When I read about Andrew Leigh’s departure from academia into the pointy end of the social policy world on secondment to Treasury for six months, my first thought was that it was a mixed blessing - no doubt Andrew will do good things in the public service, but taking him out of the mix of commentary in the blogosphere and the pages of the Fin deprives us of one of the far too few provocative and interesting and informed writers on public affairs we have in this country. My second thought, having attended Richard Allan’s presentation at the CCi conference last week was that it didn’t need to be this way. Tim Watts got there before me - pointing to the much more enlightened view taken on public servants contributing to public debate in the Old Blighty. Once the home of the “Official Secrets Act” and all things backstage and hidden, Westminster is doing an awful lot better in promoting open government and facilitating public debate than we are in this country. And British citizens are doing a lot better at finding ways to talk back to power via the web. Worth thinking about why that might be so.
I’ve been reading Jerry F. Hough’s Changing Party Coalitions: The Mystery of the Red State-Blue State Alignment on and off over the weekend, after it arrived from Amazon on Friday. I’d been wanting to have a read for a while - after I saw this review. Part of what Hough - a long time Sovietologist and comparative politics scholar - is trying to do is to expose some of the myths that we tend to create about past political patterns and partisan alignments - based on our present understanding of voter motivation and party image. He makes the point - not in itself an unusual one but rarely developed to its full analytical potential - that the Democrats and Republicans have effectively swapped ideological sides several times, though his analysis of the Jacksonian-Jeffersonian mythos of the Democratic Party suggests that the Donkeys were never actually to the left of the GOP before FDR. It’s also highly relevant to note that Adlai Stevenson was the first “New Democrat” - adopting a “suburban strategy” that effectively turned its back on the New Deal’s economic agenda, and that JFK, although his ideas on foreign policy were quite distinct from Adlai’s, shared his economic conservatism and was effectively a do-nothing President in the domestic policy field. The fact that “left” and “right” or “liberal” and conservative” have shifted ground from the New Deal party system to a cultural focus, and that McGovernite cultural liberalism was a big part of that shift, obscures for instance the truth that Richard Nixon was arguably a moderate liberal domestically, while McGovern’s economics had more in common with Goldwater than Johnson.
Hough’s also fascinating on the contingency of racial and national identity, and although some of his own commitments are shaped by a relatively conservative developmentalist political science ideology of modernisation, his injection of a long historical perspective and a sociological toolkit into political analysis of the American scene is a very valuable contribution. Changing Party Coalitions was written in 2005, but his discussion of the dynamics of the recent “Red State-Blue State Alignment” is quite prescient - and very useful for thinking about what Barack Obama’s biggest political challenge might be, and why Hillary Clinton was able to do well as a very unlikely standard bearer of the white working class.
Continue reading ‘Beyond the red state-blue state dichotomy’
I spent the latter part of last week attending the Creating Value: Between Commons and Commerce conference organised by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. The CCi conference was here in Brisbane - at the Convention Centre over at Southbank - but it was evidently a bumper week for conferences and fora related to blogging - with Canberra hosting a Microsoft Politics & Technology Forum and PDF2008 (”Personal Democracy Forum”) taking place in New York.
I’ll be writing something up later in the week on what I gleaned from the CCi conference, but in the meantime, for anyone interested in the interfaces between citizen journalism, blogging, new media and online technologies and platforms, there is, of course, a lot of reading material available on the web. The Microsoft thing seems the least blogged - and perhaps that’s because rather oddly, political bloggers were largely left off the invite list - though I did hear that Annabel Crabb launched a memorable attack on us in absentia. Unfortunately there were no “sketch writers” present to record it. But Axel Bruns at Snurb has posted a comprehensive coverage of many of the key sessions of CCi, and Terry Flew and Jason Wilson also provide some information and commentary. Over in the Big Apple, Tim Watts from Tree of Knowledge has done a sterling job reflecting on some of the sessions he attended at PDF2008.
Jason Wilson picks up on the Burchell attack piece on bloggers I wrote about earlier today, and asks some pertinent questions. He also points to comments at Public Opinion:
He’s just trolling on an op-ed page.
Posted by: dj | June 23, 2008 10:33 AM
“He’s just trolling on an op-ed page.”
True. Baiting bloggers is the new tactic for attention seekers.
Posted by: Lyn | June 23, 2008 10:45 AM
Coincidentally, there’s a new post by danah boyd at apophenia about the diffusion of troll-like behaviour outside the intertubes:
Continue reading ‘Trolling, not just for the intertubes any more’
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