Before I forget…

Also it was brought to my attention that we were supposed to upload our articles to the blog…It’s done.

Drastic Measures: Catch up post #1

As you probably realise by now, I’m pretty bloody-minded in my cynicism…In fact my friends have been calling me a grumpy old man since I was 15.

I don’t believe in jumping on the bandwagon, and you have to work really hard to convince me that any new-fangled technology/device is really capable of being a catalyst for serious change. I was proven wrong by the internet…facebook…low-quality digitally encoded music (MP3’s and the like)…not that much else though.

Take a minute to think how much daily life has changed over the last decade – internet-wise –

But one that I still can’t accept is that real social change for the public good is easier to effect now that we have interwebs. Sure ALJAZEERA has done a lot to raise awareness with broader dissemination, but Flash Mobs are not significant in the fact that people can organise and gather en-mass faster than previously. There have always been avenues for communication, and the counter result of near-instant communication tends to mean that people want/need/expect immediacy. In the case of social causes…the outcome (from my cynical POV) is that while a whole lot more people can hit the ‘like’ tab on their facebook, less will be inclined to do something physical or demanding for the said cause. But don’t take my word for it: Malcolm Gladwell – the guy who wrote all those best-selling books that may or may not be self-help, but I think of as self-help and thus haven’t ever looked at – wrote this for the NY Times.

And while I’m at it.

post 3.15 class presentation (19 Oct)

So the news I mentioned in class can hopefully still be found at:

appologies if the links die…I’ve generally found that these news websites are pretty unreliable when it comes to this sort of thing.

Steve Jobs berates google and whatnot.

AP thinks of making a digital rights clearing house to finally capitalise on the internet

Facebook Apps are dodgy as hell

Spaniards sue google after google told them they had misbehaved

US and Aussies up to no good under the guise of helping everyone – remember the Australia Card?!?

and a strange one about everyone’s favourite Danny Katz that I didn’t mention at the time…

Also, with reference to interblogs talking about laughing at people who may or may not be happy about being laughed at (not to mention the moral implications)

LATF (the youtube-song at the top of the page is priceless)

Akward Family Photos

Vice Mag’s DOs & DON’Ts

enjoy –

(or flame…either way)

unrelated yet important

The Age on Helmets, bikes, music, and culture…

Fourth Post (week 6)

I decided not to talk about the election in the end – some things are just better left to oneself.

I am having a little trouble with something that we all seem to take for granted. Why is that everyone these days seems to need news? Lately it feels as though everyone assumes that it is important to have the news as soon as it happens.  Everyone wants to know everything, to be up on current events, all that stuff. I watch the ABC and SBS news most days, but often miss it if other things are happening in my life. Honestly I just don’t care that much about a lot of the things that seem to keep everyone else going. One could even argue that this proliferation of media and non-stop propaganda is just an Orwellian mode of control. How much of this stuff is really important?

Other cynical thoughts:

Does making information as readily available as the utopian idealists claim the internet can, somehow de-value the information?

Is the proliferation of such information blurring distinctions between different types of information – ie. The differences we used to refer to as either high-, low- or middle-brow cultural product.

Aside from the obvious responses with regards to medicine and the like, how much has technology really improved the life of the average person? How necessary is it?

Given that someone such as myself doesn’t really have all that many original things to say, and that we can easily extend this to a larger proportion of bloggers out there, what is the benefit of having so many secondary sources that all refer to each other in an endless and rather Baudrillard-ian lack of real meaning?

I realise that this is just really negative and could be construed rather counter-productive. I just thought it should be mentioned. I guess I’m just having a little bit of trouble coming to terms with why news on the internet/blogs/television/radio/newspapers/magazines/etc is a better/worse medium than the others…

Naturally this blog has no links…

Third Post (Weeks 3, 4 & 5) part 2.

…and now for something completely different…

So just to completely backflip on the last part of this soon to be 3-part blog, I came across something that has very little to do with actual ‘News’ as I have just laboriously attempted to define it, yet is all about tech and how tech is being used in a reasonably novel way. It seems that Stephen Fry (of ABC’s QI and a whole bunch of other stuff) is, after a recent visit to our sea-girt shores, planning to let his fans (via twitter) dictate the structure and content of his new shows. Much like the short-lived and often very un-funny GTV9 Merrick & Rosso television show ‘Merrick and Rosso Unplanned‘, this is probably based more on numerous other comedy shows (most famously and longest-ago that I can recall would be Lenny Bruce’s habit of never preparing for his stand-up and instead relying on the daily paper for inspiration) than on some radically new concept hitherto impossible but now feasible because of the magic of twitter. That said, it seems like a pretty cool idea and a nice way to show support for what must be the most maligned social networking tool of the decade.

On yet another (barely qualifying) tangent, I also came across this recently and found it rather amusing. Let’s hope they expand it to include buzz words and barely comprehensible jargon of all kinds – one in particular that irritates me no end is ‘to lift one’s game’ which etymologically doesn’t even refer to sports or playing of any kind. On the ABC news tonight, there was a great segment about the recent increase in Tram Related Accidents. Unfortunately they don’t seem to consider it important enough to make the internet, but never-the-less the idea of an accident that is related to a tram made me giggle somewhat. It’s a simple case of too many noun-modifiers and not enough prepositions. I guess they meant ‘accidents that have been caused by or are relating to use of trams’ – but maybe that was a little too long. Another ‘corker’ was in relation to the counter-terrorist exercise, mercury 10, that was held by Victorian Police today (again no online footage, but of course the Miss Universe results and some guy getting fined $500 for a burnout are there). We were told that ‘This is the biggest counter-terrorism exercise that the police have held since 911’…

For the moment that’s probably enough pointless late-night media-watch-type commentary…

Third Post (weeks 3, 4 & 5) part 1.

I’ve been busy, and ill, and lazy, so three posts will be rolled into one post of three parts and hopefully that will cover it.

I promised myself that I wouldn’t mention the election, so for the moment I wont.

Last week I came across a few amusing and interesting things on the interwebs…
The first one was one of those typically amusing concepts which unfortunately serve to highlight a much more serious and depressing issue – Journalistic Integrity and the Horrible Way in which The Press Seems More Interested in Selling Units than Actually Informing the Public about Real News. This could in fact easily turn into a fully blown rant – and it may in fact do so – but for the moment I’ll just post up the link and leave you to LOL at the witty idea: Journalism Warning Labels

So the problem as I see it is that this sort of lazy reporting or reporting in a certain way to please editors and publishers with agendas other than ‘The Truth’ – which let’s face it, is a completely unviable and way-too-lofty ideal in the first place – have managed to generally change public opinion and expectation into believing that stories like this are worthy of the main top news section on The Age Online. Now I’m not trying to advance some sort of low- vs. highbrow argument about the nature of news and/or the way that the internet seems to generally be more about tabloid than investigative ‘news’. I’m simply trying to highlight that ‘news’ as a concept has evolved to mean so much more than what I can only assume it used to, or at least what purists would hope it to. What I think I’m trying to say is that News and Journalism should be more or less about things that actually matter, things that actually affect us in our quotidian existence as either individuals or as a people. Whether or not the princess of some country, who used to be an australian citizen, came back to Oz to attend her friend’s 40th birthday should not be reported on as a main story of the nightly news. If no, natural or otherwise, disasters occurred that week, it should not be a reason for news services to run all those cutesy ‘human interest’ stories about a little old lady from Woolamaloo and her surfboarding dog that once saved her life in after a horrible pogo-sticking accident. But…
Obviously the public loves this stuff. We buy the ‘papers filled with this garbage (Warning: Subjective and inflammatory Opinion), we watch the programs, in short – we are the ones that allow this to continue, if not encourage it. All I am proposing is that we stop referring to it as news. It’s time we came up with a better term to differentiate it from stuff that actually matters. Infotainment is way too ‘buzz’ for my liking, and probably not quite broad enough anyway. Tabloid refers to too specific a concept. Gossip and celebrity gossip are closing in on it I guess. Suggestions?

Second Post (week 2)

So in relation to tech and news and tech for news and all that malarky, it appears that a top bureaucrat in the transport department (Michael Hopkins, ecex director of policy and communications) has been using twitter as a motivational/moral building tool. Every friday he sends out a few amusing tweets to keep the mood light and to try to promote a bit of departmental community which as we all know, in the face of myki and all the other public transport woes, is sorely lacking. In fact the dept of transport has one of the highest turn-over rates in the victorian public sector. Naturally one assumes (cynically or not) that as soon as various other political camps were informed, a quick call to the relevant propoganda creators ensued, and we have a scathing report on the Herald Sun online. Rather than go into a full blown rant about how I feel about politics and the media engine, I’ll leave you to ponder until my next post…

First Post (Week 1)

So given the subject itself, and my general attitude with regard to technology – or at least the attitude I am deciding to adopt for this particular blog – I am electing to comment on the manner in which technology and new technologies are portrayed on the net. So in essence I’m trying to confuse the issue even more by writing a meta-blog about writings about technology and how this particular technology affects the content/context.

First post seems to me to be more a statement of intentions that anything else so I’ll list a few sites and newsworthy items to be explored more later.

notcot.org is a fine example of a successful meta-blog. It’s in effect its a link page, updated numerous times throughout the day. Each entry (in this case an image and small blurb) sends you to another page that may or may not be the original source. Links are generally design, technology or architecture related as there are notcot offshoots dealing with other elements such as food, drink, fashion, etc.

Gizmodo.com.au, lifehacker.com.au and the other pages associated through what could be referred to as a webring are devoted to technology. News, products and whatnot are the general focus of their posts.

Also pennyarcade.com began simply as a games-related webcomic, but like so many internet entities seems to have expanded to tv, merchandising, charity and of course commentary on games, the net and all things tech.

And finally thinkgeek.com has all manner of kooky ‘geek’ technology products for sale – quite amusing.

This week I ordered an iPhone 4 (and although I could easily rant on about it: the name; the need for sequels or sequence in all things marketed these days; the way in which ‘high concept‘ marketing seems to have invaded our lives across so many aspects reducing and shaping our expectations,  positioning us into a certain way of consuming, behaving or thinking; our ever-increasing reliance on what could be seen as useless technological advancement; or at least the ways in which the technology seems to precede our need for it; and so on, I have been trying to cut down on angry rants lately, limiting myself to one a day, and as I have already used my quota on unrelated annoyances…) and I was really pleased to know that there is already a solution to the problems that the public were made aware of before the phones themselves were available.

matt.