More archiving of the archived Internet
Not unlike Yahoo’s Timecapsule, BBC points to a British initiative to use a mass blog to record ‘everyday life’ on October 17th. We used to only come together to commemorate the past or yell at the present, now we can supplement that in mass attempts to pre-figure how we will be seen in the future. “Dear future Internet…”
It all started in 2001 when Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian journalist living in Canada, published a how-to-blog guide in Farsi (Persian). By doing this he started what can be considered as one of the most thriving sub-cultures in the blogosphere. Iranians love blogging and this is not strange if you realise that about 70% of Iran’s population is under 30 years of age and highly educated. However, it is remarkable considering the fact that freedom of speech in Iran is non existent. (more…)
Structurally, the printed press is a medium that operates as a monologue, isolating producer and the reader. Feedback and interaction are extremely limited, demand elaborate procedures, and only in the rarest cases lead to corrections. Once an edition has been printed it cannot be corrected; at best it can be pulped. The control circuit in the case of literary criticism is extremely cumbersome and elitist. It excludes the public on principle.
One of my favourite philosophical themes is the the notion of nation, and how nations are created. Some argue they have been around forever, but currently the academic consensus rests on the idea that the concept of nation, or nationhood, was created during the Industrial Revolution partly as a kind of parasitical response to the faltering position of religion.
Benedict Anderson (right) is a guy who wrote a fairly optimistic and fascinating book on this subject called “Imagined Communities”.
In the rest of the post I will attempt to describe the position of weblogs within Mr. Anderson’s discourse.
On the left you can see the prison that philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed in the 19th century. In this design the prison cells are being build in a circle around a centre in which the guard resides. The guard can look at all prison cells, because the guardhouse has glass all around. All prison cells are lit for 24 hours and the guardhouse is darkened, so the prisoner knows the guard might watch him at any time, but he doesn’t know when he is being watched. Therefore the strength of this type of prison is that the prisoner does not know when he is being watched, which has a disciplining effect because the prisoner will feel that he has to behave correctly at all time.
‘Twas only a matter of time ‘fore we addressed the issue of censorship, methinks. Here’s a fairly amusing video (song) about it. Apparently there are quite a few sites who don’t like the FCC:
National Coalition Against Censorship
Fire the FCC
FreePress.net
The latter site links to sites such as SaveTheInternet and Stop Big Media. Hooray for internet revolutionaries!
Yahoo! launched a new subpage called Timecapsule at timecapsule.yahoo.com. Although not very popular in the Netherlands, a timecapsule can be put in the ground with some stuff you think are important to you at that time, you dig it up fifty years later and you can look back at all those memories.
Jonathan Harris, the man and artist behind Yahoo! Timecapsule, thought this would be a great idea to try out on the web. And so we now have a digital timecapsule. Accessible to the whole world to put in their messages of Faith, Sorrow, Fun, Anger and lots more. In a personal note on the website, Harris notices: “Yahoo! Time Capsule sets out to collect a portrait of the world – a single global image composed of millions of individual contributions. This time capsule is defined not by the few items a curator decides to include, but by the items submitted by every human on earth who wishes to participate.”
Commonism is a word coined by Tom DeWeese. He is the president of an American rightwing think tank and wrote an article on the dangers of commonism in 2000.
Communism, we’re told, is dead. Welcome to the new era of Commonism.
When the walls around the Soviet Union fell a decade ago, once-proud nations that had been swallowed up by the Soviet empire emerged as a new “democracy movement.” In truth, the “death” of Soviet-style Communism allowed the movement to free itself from its negative baggage. As long as the title “Communist” was not hung around their neck to raise Western fears, the ideas of International Socialism could move forward unhindered. The world has responded in almost thunderous support. Commonism was born.
The distinctive feature of Commonism is its intention to transform private intellectual property and nationally controlled natural resources into common property in the name of the “common heritage of mankind.” The ideology of Commonism is based on political concepts and spiritual values such as global commons, global village, global spirituality, equalitarianism, democratism, disarmament, environmentalism, interdependence, interconnectedness, and participation in world peace.
Commonism is a political ideology containing both a doctrine and a device for its expansion. Commonism advances the idea that problems cross national and local boundaries. In that way, natural and political boundaries are conveniently overcome (overthrown?) through treaties, legislation and policy statements, all explained as necessary for improvement of the common good. Source
As we can read, commonism is used in a negative manner to describe the socialist ideas of making everything common, a thorn in the eye (batavism) of liberal Americans. Famous examples of commonists would be Koffie Anan, Benedict Anderson and John Lennon:
-At the bottom of this post, you can find interesting links which explain the meaning of commonism-
We have received a question from Mieke Gerritsen, who has made a beautiful graphic design with the word “Commonism” on it. She has made this design and wondered if the word “Commonism” is already being used in one way or another.
Well to answer this in a new media kind of way: the best way to find out whether a word already exist is to use the word as a search string in google. When I typed commonism in google, I received 9110 results. The strange thing is, however, that this morning I searched at google.nl as well and I received nearly 9500 results, so apparently the search machine has been updated and broken links have been removed?
Seems like some diets work in Hollywood! Link
My presentation is on the Motorola-sponsored research “Generation here: exploring the impact of 3G mobile phone technology on global communications”. It talks about the key developments in the field of mobile phone technology of the third generation. Between 2004-2006 a few researchers, writers and journalists travelled the world to observe communities and interview people on their attitudes towards 3G.
To our surprise the term shocklog, a wellknown term in the Netherlands, was nowhere to be found on the rest of the World Wide Web. We wanted that to change, so we -The Masters of Media- coined the term on a new English Wikipedia entry. So what are those infamous shocklogs about?
A shocklog is a weblog that usually contains controversial, critical, surprising and/or appalling content. Below is our initial entry, but of course the discussion rages on at Wikipedia.
Shocklogs are weblogs that use shock and slander to sling mud at current affairs, public individuals, institutions and so on. Authors of shocklogs usually comment on an item in a very provoking and insulting way, often resulting in even more seriously offensive comments, such as threats of rape and murder.
In a day and age when ‘top down’ messages are getting rejected, satirized, shunned, blogbashed and demonized, how come this thinspiration stuff is so popular? It’s something that has been puzzling me for a while. It’s based on my assumption that weighing less than 90 pounds and having a streamlined body has been promoted by the fashion and modelling industries for quite a while now. If the Big Media are blaring on about beauty id
eals, isn’t it logical that in our grassroots online world resistance pockets would pop up? To mind comes Sir Mix a Lot – Baby Got Back. Yes, there are always supporters of the ‘main ideology’ but you’d think that on the internet, of all places, resistance to this would be mostly commonplace.
Unless of course there is some kind of strong conviction despite Big Fashion Support for these beauty ideals – maybe that the male population supports the ideal, providing an extra incentive for the girls to hunt down isolated pockets of fat.
The world truly became upside down once Dove launched their campaign for real beauty. WTF? Now big corporations are doing what The Multitude™ should have been doing?
If there are any thinspiration supporters reading this, could you please enlighten me?
Recently Second Life has been suffering from “destructive, malicious activity”. Read the blogpost about it here at the Second Life blog: Security and Second Life. If they want to make a model of the real world, there should be tough Scarfaces and criminals right? Your world, your imagination right? Or maybe not?
A remark by Michael just came back to me: Did you already start that career as Second Life bum?
My presentation on Marshall McLuhan’s The Galaxy Reconfigured from his 1962 book The Gutenberg Galaxy. As an introduction, here is a quote from a great interview with him from Playboy Magazine in 1969. The whole interview can be found here: www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/mcluhanplayboy.htm
PLAYBOY: You seem to be contending that practically every aspect of modern life is a direct consequence of Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press.MCLUHAN: Every aspect of Western mechanical culture was shaped by print technology, but the modern age is the age of the electric media, which forge environments and cultures antithetical to the mechanical consumer society derived from print. Print tore man out of his traditional cultural matrix while showing him how to pile individual upon individual into a massive agglomeration of national and industrial power, and the typographic trance of the West has endured until today, when the electronic media are at last demesmerizing us. The Gutenberg Galaxy is being eclipsed by the constellation of Marconi.
Download The Galaxy Reconfigured
In my presentation about Guy Debord’s article Theory of the Dérive I would like to argue that the current trend of Urban Exploring is based on the dérive, but that it differs from it on the following levels:
- The accent lies on normally inaccessible place whereas the dérive is usually based on accessible places.
- The accent on normally inaccessible places has the consequence of it often becoming an illegal practice. The dérive is in that sense quite innocent.
- In Urban Exploring there is a big emphasis on recording the urban exploration by filming or photographing it.
THE UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM IS PROUD TO PRESENT THE MASTERS OF MEDIA WEBLOG:
This e-book contains 32 pages and can be found here.
Spannerworks is a company in the UK that provides search engine optimisation, and paid search and social media optimisation. Therefore this company has written a short e-book to explain to people in media, marketing and communications what social media is.
And that is exactly what it does: it gives an overview of what social media is and what kind of social media exist (such as blogs, wikis, social networks, podcasts and folksonomies).
In the Masters of Media class we’ve been trying out Writely.com for a couple of assignments in the past weeks. Not so long ago the online word processor was acquired by Google. The idea is very promising: “Share documents instantly & collaborate in realtime.” So we decided to take it for a test-drive, but so far all attempts have failed to create one united, democratic post. Here is my view on why the Web 2.0 application falls short on the collaborative aspects, and causes more frustration than collaboration.
Update: Writely was just renamed and integrated into Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
“Gatewatching” is a fairly expanded study on collaborative publishing of online news. Bruns describes the practice of journalistic gatekeeping which refers to a regime of control over what content is allowed to emerge from production processes in the media. The alternative for the traditional gatekeeping is provided by gatewatching, which is defined as “the observation of the output gates of news publications and other sources, in order to identify important material as it becomes available.” Gatewatching enables many users to participate in the publishing of online news.
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The complete title is: An Army of Davids. How markets and technology empower ordinary people to beat big media, big government and other Goliaths.
Glenn Reynolds is a professor in Law at the University of Tennessee. He is a well-known blogger and his blog can be found here: http://www.instapundit.com/ . His main interest are advanced technologies and individual liberty.
I found the book “An Army of Davids” rather difficult to read, because I missed a structure in the book. Before reading the book I read the summary of the book on the cover and that did not provide enough help to guide me through the book. A lot of chapters had nothing to do with empowering the common guy, in my opinion. And that made it hard to read.
Just finished reading 130 pages of “Bloggen is zo 2004” written by Sjoerd van der Helm, concerning a content analysis of Life- and Shocklogs. It’s a well written overview of the Dutch blogosphere and touches upon subject of journalism and self-therapy. Sjoerd also discusses commercialization, re-mediation and future prospects.
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