Word-whore. I write 'em. I talk 'em. Information, politics, media, and the cybers. I drink. I use bad words. All publication is a political act. All communication is propaganda. All art is pornography. All business is personal. All hail Eris! Vive les poissons rouges sauvages!
Today, 7 May, is International Fake British Accent Day. Apparently. Should I slag it the way I slagged International Talk Like a Pirate Day? Or should I slip into a well-oiled Received Pronunciation, old chap?
Mind you, my birthday on Friday is tagged as “International Be Sexually Inappropriate With Your Friends Day”. Apparently. Should I…? Oh, never mind.
What does “family friendly” mean? Merlin Mann, who writes at 43 Folders, explains it well: “I don’t mind people saying something is ‘not appropriate for kids,’ but declaring it’s not ‘family friendly’ is passive-aggressive bullshit. Almost anything can be ‘family friendly’ if your family is awesome and you’re not a normative dick.”
…were right about job-hopping. In the big chair:
Major companies no longer value long service by their workers… The poll of 32 national and international firms found that when defining a high-performing worker, 69 per cent rated “length of service” as least important or not even applicable…
“If you turn the clock back 10 or 15 years, length of service would have been seen as a significant attribute of high performance,” Mr Tipper [Jeremy Tipper, business development director of recruitment firm Alexander Mann Solutions] told AAP on Tuesday.
“The reason for that is they had a great deal of knowledge… about the organisation and a good understanding of what’s happening in the marketplace.
“Today, because information is so much more freely available because of technology, that ‘information is power’ probably doesn’t exist to the same extent.”
Mr Tipper said the new breed of workers was less “risk averse” — they were more prepared to change jobs and they were more aware of the value and portability of their skills.
Hat-tip to the Snarky Platypus. He even wrote the headline. He also has his own blog, but is too goddam lazy to post there. We must convince him to fix this.
I just stumbled across this quote about depression by Antonio Savoradin: “Depression, probably the most obvious condition leading to suicide, is a prison filled with repeat offenders, and the crime of melancholia has a startling recidivism rate. But it is not a prison in which rights are respected, nor is humane treatment the standard fare. Rather, the jailer is a fickle torturer who punishes his charges without mercy. The depressed person inhabits a cell with a tiny window and iron bars, is beaten, burned, electrocuted, and flayed by the guards, left shivering and in pain, while relatives and friends may visit, blind to both the unbearable wounds he suffers and to the bars which hold him. Bewildered, they cannot understand why he doesn’t rise and walk through the empty doorway; they do not understand his pain; and they may inflict guilt or further torture by sneering at his condition or offering pointless advice (‘What’s the matter with you? Just leave!’) which only exacerbates his suffering. Because they do not see the bars, the walls, the jailer, the prison grounds, they cannot take his pain seriously. It is an enigma to them. They can give him little, if any, comfort.” Hat-tip to Andrew Barnett.
“Television, the drug of the nation / Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation,” rapped American poet and musician Michael Franti of the Disposable Heroes of Hipocrisy Hiphoprisyâ€, now of Spearhead. Could this literally be true?
I’ve just read the most amazing speech, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus by Clay Shirky, which you can also watch on Blip.tv. It begins:
A British historian [argued] that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing — there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders — a lot of things we like — didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
Shirky goes on to argue that when WWII ended, we suddenly had to cope with another social surplus: all that leisure time thanks to a 5-day working week and all those new-fangled gadgets which made household chores a breeze. So what did we do? We slothed in front of the TV. For a generation.
As we turn off our TVs and connect to each other, this cognitive surplus is creating things like Wikipedia. An estimated 100 million hours of work has gone into it. Yet this is but a drop in the ocean…
Continue reading “I came for the gin, I stayed for the social revolution”
Will Sydney see an outburst of manic behaviour today? I’ve written about The Sydney Effect before. Today is the first sunny day after 13 days of continuous cloud and plenty of rain. Were we more depressed than usual? Perhaps. Will we be manic? Let’s see.