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!
Website age verification dropped, business registers modernisation program dumped after spending billions, Centrelink bad, furore at the OAIC, fixes for the gig economy, and more.
Continue reading “Digital developments from Canberra 51”
I don’t quite understand my week of Monday 10 to Sunday 16 April 2017. It also contained quite a bit of alcohol. Which has both good and bad points.
Most of the week’s achievements are not ready to be made public, or are personal matters that never will be, which so the list below look silly. I’m not sure that these Weekly Wrap posts even work any more.
Oh well, on with the show…
None.
None, despite what I’d expected to happen.
Monday has been the public holiday for Easter Monday, so I’ve just been doing household things. And writing this.
On Tuesday, I’m working on the SEKRIT editorial project, and sorting out some clients’ loose ends, as well as the shopping and other errands in Katoomba.
Wednesday will see more work on the SEKRIT editorial project, plus some writing for ZDNet, before taking the train down to Sydney. At 1930 AEST I’m doing a spot on ABC Melbourne from the ABC’s Sydney studios. I’ll stay in Sydney overnight.
On Thursday morning I’m covering an event for the Australian Cyber Security Growth Network. I’ll write about that, and do some other things, before heading back up the hill.
Friday through Saturday don’t have anything assigned yet.
Anzac Day is on 25 April, and this year that’s a Tuesday. As is the custom, the Monday beforehand is likely to become another day in a de facto four-day weekend. I might poke at some work, though.
I’m covering the AusCERT Information Security Conference on the Gold Coast from 23 to 26 May; the 5th International Conference on Cybercrime and Computer Forensics (ICCCF) on the Gold Coast from 16 to 18 July, or at least I hope; and the national conference of the Australian Information Security Association (AISA) in Sydney on 10 to 12 October.
[Photo: Ducks of Chinatown, photographed in Haymarket, Sydney, on 20 July 2003. I’m sure it’s totally unrelated to anything that happened this week.]
“The medium is the message”, the sole phrase that seems to remembered of Marshall McLuhan’s work, certainly held true in Friday’s story at The Global Mail, Twitter Tackles Open Government.
The piece is a follow-up to an article published on Thursday, Why So Secretive?, by OpenAustralia founders Katherine Szuminska and Matthew Landauer — a stinging attack which alleges that Australia’s Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) is “unlawfully obstructing over 100 Freedom of Information (FOI) requests from the general public in an attempt to maintain secrecy”.
Friday’s article centres on a subsequent discussion on Twitter between DIAC national communications manager and “avid tweeter”, as The Global Mail quaintly describes him, Sandi Logan.
In 2013, isn’t it just a bit retro to draw attention to someone using Twitter a bit? Particularly when it’s their job to respond to public comment?
Anyway, here’s what I tried to post as a comment at The Global Mail just now, only to be told: “Your comment was unable to be posted at this time. We apologise for the inconvenience.”
The medium truly is the message. The first of Logan’s statements quoted in this story contains 68 words of substantive content, counting the URLs as one word each, and 48 of those are a direct quote from legislation.
Anywhere else this would be a “brief statement”, perhaps even a “terse statement” if the journalist was wanting to pre-judge Logan’s mood on the readers’ behalf — but I was once taught not to do that because it’s editorialising.
But because Logan’s words are spread across four tweets, it becomes a “flurry”. Really?
The Macquarie Dictionary gloss for “flurry”, skipping over the literal weather-related ones, is: “3. commotion; sudden excitement or confusion; nervous hurry.”
Logan’s entire conversation reads to me as a perfectly level-headed conversation with critics. Certainly his initial comment is one simple, coherent paragraph, spread across four tweets only because the limits of the medium demand it.
Now that I’m blogging this, I’ll add my usual gripe about the headline.
“Twitter Tackles Open Government”? No, the San Francisco-based company did no such thing. Nor did the abstract communications network that operates via their servers. People tackled a DIAC staffer. And as far as I can see, all but one of the people quoted was a journalist. The medium through which that happened is hardly relevant.
A handful of journalists and sprinkling of public policy advocates is hardly representative of Twitter users as a whole. If we analysed the level of Twitter discussion about DIAC that night, in comparison with the global firehose of tweets, I doubt that we’d even see a prostate-corked dribble.
Still, a more accurate headline, such as “A few journalists question a media adviser”, would detract somewhat from the “power to the people” theme.
The icing on the cake for me is that the article is about demands for DIAC to be more transparent, and that commenters at The Global Mail are advised that “you have a lot more credibility when you use your full name”, and yet it’s bylined… “By Staff”.
Goose, gander etc, folks.
[Disclosure: I know Katherine Szuminska and Matthew Landauer, and have had dinner and drinks with them on numerous occasions. For what it’s worth, I generally support their calls for more government transparency. Browsing through what I’ve written previously will soon reveal my attitude towards the government’s asylum-seeker policies.]
A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets and in the media and so on and so forth.
None.
Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.
[Photo: Old bar sign at the Town Hall Hotel, Newtown. Gender roles were a little different back then.]
A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets.
[Photo: “Paddy Maguire’s Hotel“, at the corner of George and Hay Streets, Haymarket, Sydney, taken from a bus window on 23 July 2010.]
I’m in Crikey today, writing about yesterday’s Public Sphere forum Government 2.0: Policy and Practice and the launch of the Rudd government’s new Government 2.0 Taskforce. My article, free for all to read, is Government 2.0 Taskforce: first a logo design contest.