Are you frustrated with Facebook because your profile only lists “Political Views” chosen from an American list (as opposed to being frustrated by all the other Facebook annoyances)? Be frustrated no more! “Political Views” is now a write-in field. Hat-tip to Mushroom and Rooster via Lavartus Prodeo’s Facebook group.
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In just two months, Twitter has become one of my core communication tools. Non-Twitter instant messaging and Facebook have all but disappeared from the mix. Here’s why.
Actually, before that… If you don’t use Twitter, or if you’ve taken a look but don’t “get it”, watch this 2.5-minute video Twitter in Plain English from those wacky Canadians Common Craft. Love their style.
OK, back?
Like the character in the video, I was sceptical about Twitter. Why do people need to know every little detail of my life? Who cares? I said as much to Perth’s Twitterati late last year. But then I actually tried using it — and I “got it” immediately.
Originally I wasn’t going to write about today’s Parliamentary Apology to the Stolen Generations. But the event has so captured the nation that writing will clarify my own thoughts. So here goes…
I’ll get the obvious comments out of the way first. Kevin Rudd delivered the Apology with dignity and grace. Brendan Nelson’s speech was moving in parts, but fortunately his attempts to weasel it failed to sour the overall occasion. I agree with Paul Keating’s comment that Nelson missed the point of the day.
I was disgusted to hear that Chris Pearce, the Member for Aston, was reading a magazine and cracking jokes during Rudd’s speech.
As Chris Graham, editor of The National Indigenous Times reports in Crikey:
At the part where Rudd was talking about the tragedy of infant mortality, the “little ones” in Rudd’s words, Pearce was cracking a joke to the rather uncomfortable looking member of parliament sitting next to him.
In fact, Pearce was so against an apology, that he also sat and read through his own leader’s entire speech. When Rudd finished and received a standing ovation, Pearce was the only member of parliament to remain seated. It begs the question, why did he even show up?
Who voted this ignorant yobbo into Parliament? Mr Pearce, you’re entitled to hold an opinion, but at least show some manners in the House. You could hardly accuse Wilson Tuckey of being Australia’s best-mannered parliamentarian, but at least when he decided against the Apology he didn’t turn up.
Nothing better than spending a rainy Sunday reading some thoughtful articles and listening to raindrops and corellas and koels chattering away — in between arguing with Laurel Papworth, of course! I’ve been reading some stuff Mark Pesce has posted recently, including his own essay Unevenly Distributed: Production Models for the 21st Century, as well as The Register saying that people are tiring of social network websites and a piece explaining why Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book The Tipping Point is bullshit. I may reflect upon some of them later.
Why is Facebook so popular? Sunrise presenter Pete Blasina has the explanation: “It’s because of the Internet.” Gotcha, Pete. Note, this man is paid to present this segment on technology. Obviously Channel 7 have scoured teh internetz for only the best of the best. Hat-tip to Cameron Reilly.
Speaking about politics and business, Laurel Papworth has posted a fascinating piece on The Philosophy behind the Men behind Facebook. Venture capitalist and “futurist philosopher” (whatever that is) Peter Thiel is an anti-multicultural neocon who sounds like a complete arsehole.
Data portability is the capability to control, share, and move data from one system to another, says Wikipedia. Michael Pick of Smashcut Media has made a very short video explaining it more clearly.
DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.
Data portability will become more important as more are more of our lives are conducted online. And the issues need to be thrashed out it advance — especially when people like Facebook reckon that even if you delete your account they get to keep your information forever. The Data Portability Workgroup is discussing it as the IT industry level, but where are are politicians and non-government organisations on this?
Thanks to Peter Black’s Freedom to Differ for the pointer.
Yesterday a Melbourne teenager was charged with creating a public nuisance and producing child pornography. Reuters tells us he “became a controversial media star after a wild party at his parents’ house became a near riot, forcing police to call in a helicopter and the dog squad”. Hands up if you think you know his name.
Now, keep your hands up if you’re completely bloody sure you know his name.
OK, hands down.
Yet again we see how Australia’s laws have failed to adapt to the Internet age.
Everybody and their dog, globally, has been reporting the rise to fame of glamorous Melbourne socialite Corey Worthington Delaney. I’ve written two essays already [1, 2], and this third one probably won’t be the last. My friends at Crikey published The Corey Timeline yesterday (republished by Peter Black too, if the Crikey original is behind their paywall).
Now, under Victorian law, as in many other democracies, the media cannot identify minors charged with criminal offences. Nor can they identify who’s brought before the children’s court. Fair enough. Once upon a time we all agreed that youthful indiscretions shouldn’t mar our reputation for life.
So now we have the ludicrous situation where National Nine News and The Age and everyone else is talking about “a 16-year-old boy” as if we haven’t noticed a flood of media reports about a specific, named 16yo who — in an amazing coincidence — held a wild party on the weekend where the police were called, including a helicopter and the dog squad.
Happens all the time. Could well be someone else.
Why do people pour their lives into proprietary environments like Facebook when everything they need to communicate with their friends is already on their desktops? Or their phones. The inimitable Stephen Fry has once again written complete sense, theorising that it’s deep human nature.
What an irony! For what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago? Is it part of some deep human instinct that we take an organism as open and wild and free as the internet, and wish then to divide it into citadels, into closed-border republics and independent city states? The systole and diastole of history has us opening and closing like a flower: escaping our fortresses and enclosures into the open fields, and then building hedges, villages and cities in which to imprison ourselves again before repeating the process once more. The internet seems to be following this pattern.
How does this help us predict the Next Big Thing? That’s what everyone wants to know, if only because they want to make heaps of money from it. In 1999 Douglas Adams said: “Computer people are the last to guess what’s coming next. I mean, come on, they’re so astonished by the fact that the year 1999 is going to be followed by the year 2000 that it’s costing us billions to prepare for it.”
But let the rise of social networking alert you to the possibility that, even in the futuristic world of the net, the next big thing might just be a return to a made-over old thing.
Another possibility, I guess, is that most people are overwhelmed by the choices available. Facebook and the rest just give them a few obvious options and they can get on with it. Or are both Mr Fry and I completely missing it?
Spotted on Facebook: “Eric TF Bat reckons all these people with their biting and requests and poking have too much time on their hands and should take up drugs or something.” Agreed.
Brian Clark has published an excellent piece which explains why I prefer to publish things here, on my own website, rather that on my Facebook profile. Worth reading in its entirety, but it concludes: “Valuable content on a site you own is a classic win-win for readers and the site owner, while publishing on Facebook is a lopsided relationship that favors Zuckerberg and his data-hoarding cronies. While I think social networking is useful in small quantities, I’ve no interest in becoming someone’s user-generated content, especially at the expense of my privacy.”
If 2006 was the year of Web 2.0 then 2007 is the year of social media. For individuals anyway. Australian businesses and politicians generally don’t “get it”.
Social media is mainstream. Two million Australians have Facebook pages and 3.5 million read blogs. MSN Messenger has 7 million users here, and even Ja’mie King says “I’ll MSN u 2nite” without explanation.
But few businesses use social media. Why? I suspect there’s two reasons, apart from an endemic inability to adapt and change. One is about the tools, the other is about business culture.
So, Facebook now has advertising which is tailored to the user. OK, I’m an attached gay man. What ads do I see?
Back to the drawing board I think, chaps. Unless you think my wedding day should be something really special?
I suppose it’s nice that the 2 billionth photo on Flickr is from Sydney, but does it have to be a picture of that stupid gold-plated dead tree in Chinatown? As an aside, there are now 4.1 billion photos on Facebook. Hat-tip to Peter Black’s Freedom to Differ.
The next time someone says we’re experiencing Australia’s “first Internet election” or our “first YouTube election”, slap them. Slap them very hard.
Our politicians only see the Internet and the emerging social media as a different kind of TV. YouTube is a place to post commercials, MySpace and Facebook for media releases. Their use of social media is so clueless that geeks attending PodCamp in Perth this Saturday were laughing.
Far from this being the “first Internet election”, it’s more like the The Last Television Election. Maybe the second-last.
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