Games as tools @ cinekid

With: Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, Friedrich Kirschner and Daniel van Gils.
The lecture was meant as an introduction to the workshop given by Mediamatic on games as tools, but also as an inspirational talk to all involved/ interested in film making and new media.
First to talk was Friedrich Kirschner (zeitbrand.net and moviesandbox.org), with an introduction to his framework of comparing game-play.

In traditional board-games like RISK, the rules of the game are quite straight-forward (world domination) and the game-play is limited to the game-space (in this case, the actual cardboard)., So the limits of your ‘adventures’ and fantasy lay within these boarders, where games like LEGO offer a lot more game-play possibilities by taking away the limited games-pace. Since Friedrich experiences the well-known problem that he ran out of Lego-pieces, a form of abstraction was used in order to create more stories (a one-piece as a persona etc.).
Now the rules of the game are made by the player’s own perception of reality;
In comparing these two forms of gaming, Friedrich phrases:
simulated play (RISK) vs. creative play (LEGO).

This introduction is followed by a schedule (which I unfortunately do not have visualized) on game-play, where elements like AI, rules, assets, human input, physics engine combined are ‘making’ the game.
In mmorpg‘s, for instance, the AI function is already eliminated, because now, the computer does not create and manage the rules anymore, the players do.
Now in this case, we do not have to follow the rule again that guys with handkerchiefs and black suits are bad guys, and army-boys are the good ones; we can now question these rules, stop shooting each other and e.g. start dancing within the game.
Also, when I see my screen as a camera viewpoint, I can start making movies of us dancing and share these videos (birth of Machinima).
When people started doing this, some of them also discovered the possibilities of modifying the engines of games like Unreal and Quake run on.
Now, is this still game-play, or is it more?

MovieSandbox
Where this modifying of game engines is quite a task, Kirschner developed an open-source tool that lets you interface with game engines in order to create your own movies very easy. He shows this by creating a character within Unreal that talks when Friedrich talks in the microphone (lip-syncing) within a couple of mouse-clicks. Also, he is making the very important link to physical computing, where he demonstrated (amongst other things) a WII-mode to draw 2d and 3d within MovieSandbox.
Taking it even a step further, the tool is also networked, so one can imagine working collectively over the network on movies, characters or levels, using their own physical input device, combining real-world assets (like a picture of you, or a your room etc.) directly into the game!
The nice thing is that all this ‘intelligence’ is already embedded within the game engine; the tool is merely an interface to these possibilities; making them useful without having to be a c-programmer.
This will give the user lots of options for ‘creative play’.

Daniel van Gils
Is also experimenting with using games for more than gaming. Having a game-design background as well as a programming background, he realized that a game engine is a very stable piece of software that can be used more a lot more cool things than merely gaming. Think of museum installations, performances, VJ-ing, but also interactive documentary making.
Daniel also creates his own open-source interface software for a game engine (Quake 4 and Doom 3- compatible).
Since games are event-based, this provides an interesting way to interact with the game engine by e.g. a midi-input tool.
The main power of using a game as tool for Daniel is to create quick prototypes and cross-media experiments

Amongst more recent performances, Daniel did a gig on DEAF, and made a interactive documentary with children for VPRO’s villalive.

Both Friedrich and Daniel will guide the games as tools workshop organized by Mediamatic for the Cinekid festival in order to let movie-and documentary makers have some experience with the power of new media, creating not only concepts, but also working prototypes/ proof-of-principles of these concepts.

<update> I checked the internet archive for blog.google.com and saw it used to redirect to http://www.blogger.com – why the change?</update>

It is well known that Google, which depends on every link it indexes to recommend search results, has a certain ‘vulnerability’ that blogs expose. Bloggers are professional-amateur-pointers. They publish frequently, they link a lot, and then they syndicate others’ links. Affectionately put, they give link love. But does Google love them back? (Note the URL in the screenshot below)

So blog.google.com is, well, Google. Is this a Freudian glitch?

Last week I mentioned the weird relationship between blogs, Google and pingback spam, but discussion of the larger issue goes further back. The person who first put this in clear terms for me was Mary Hodder, who talked about moving from a static Web, with sites updated infrequently, toward a ‘live’ or dynamic Web. The problem for Google is that rapid linking makes their search returns erratic, most famously with Google Bombs. The search engine may do some tweaking á la PageRank, or look to assuage the effect of blogs through the NoFollow html tag. They may try to segregate the Web by putting ‘Blogs’ here and ‘Everything Else’ here. But even that gets messy, and perhaps the problem is reaching critical mass. Maybe http://blog.google.com is trying to tell http://www.google.com something.

According to Wikipedia, collaboration is a structured, recursive process where two or more people work together towards a common goal – typically an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature – by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus.
Important in the description is the ‘fact’ that collaboration does not require leadership because without, a better result is achieved because of decentralization and egalitarianism. Who else knows this better than the source itself? Wikipedia is a big collaboration between people who add their knowledge to ‘the free encyclopedia’. People work together on an entry with the same goal, to share their knowledge with the rest of the world. An other form of collaboration is open source software. Someone writes an application and makes the code public. Now others can use this code and change or improve the original application.
It seems like collaboration is the new word of Web 2.0. But is this new web really that collaborative? Isn’t this just what we want to see? One big collaboration between all the different users of the internet, who share their knowledge and help each other, without looking who is the real person behind a nickname or avatar. It would be a nice vision, but unfortunately it isn’t true. For example Wikipedia. It is possible for every user to contribute, but it is just a really small group of people that actually do contribute. Read for example this article about a power user, who is one of the few people who add a lot to Wikipedia. So there is a small group of users who make most of the entries. Not really the perfect example of a collaborative project if you ask me. Even one of the founders of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, thinks it isn’t really collaborative:

“But, he insisted, the truth was rather different: Wikipedia was actually written by “a community … a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers” where “I know all of them and they all know each other”. Really, “it’s much like any traditional organization.”

But if Wikipedia, one of the most promising collaborative projects, isn’t real, does it exist in other forms on Web 2.0?
Can applications like Last Fm be considered collaborative? Last fm is a social-music-share-website where users can collectively build the world’s largest social music platform and share their taste with each other. When you like a song you can ‘recommend’ it or ‘love’ it. Other users that like the same song can listen to the other songs you like. So people are helping each other to find music they like to listen to. Or take for example del.icio.us. This is a social bookmarking site were people can store their bookmarks and share them with other people.
But is this really what the collaborative web is about? Share your taste in music, favorite bookmarks or knowledge? Can this ‘power’ not be used for greater things?
There are a lot of programs that make collaboration easier. For example Google Docs. [click here for an explaination video about Google docs] Users can upload a document and send a secured link to other users they’d like to see and work on the document. All the users can see changes right away. So this means no more multiple versions of one document and getting confused over what is the latest version. According to my own experiences, it really works. During a project that took several months we had to keep track of all the things we did and had to work on an accompanying document together. We used Google Docs to do this and it saved us a lot of emails and even traveling-time to work together. Skype also contributed to the process. Thanks to having chat conversations and calls we could talk about the project without being together. During the period we used Delicious to save url’s.
Is this maybe what is meant with the collaborative web 2.0? Maybe it aren’t the ‘greater things’ that make the collaborative web for what it is. It are the small things that make life online easier.

A few articles on the subject that are worth reading:
The Wikification of knowledge
Why Wikipedia isn’t like Linux
Wikipedia reputation and the Wemedia Project
Who writes Wikipedia?
A contributor to Wikipedia has his fictional side
Participation Inequality
Real web 2.0: Wikipedia, champion of user-generated content
Web 2.0 conference preview: Tools that make the collaborative web work for you

As a new media student I always find it interesting to look at different social and cultural fields and environments in witch new media applications are being used. This weeks assignment in our Masters of Media class was to describe a personal situation in which cooperation between different actors was a key element. This social dynamic could occur both online or offline. I chose to write about my football team. A group of guys that play together every week, hoping to score a good result. The football team makes an interesting case because in the last year a lot of communication tools around the team changed and the influence of new media applications is appearing quickly. This makes my football team a good example of a social event that formerly only took place in an offline environment but is more and more starting to use tools from an online environment to function.

The first example of a situation in which a new media application is handling a solution for a problem occurring in our football team is apparent when looking at the planning of our team weekend. Every year, me and the rest of the boys come together for a weekend of extensive physical training in a bungalow park somewhere in the ‘hoge veluwe’. Because of our busy schedules it is always hard to pick a date for this (within the team) immense popular event. Because everybody wants to come and we don’t want to let down anybody it is near to impossible to pick a date for the weekend.
Because the organisers of the weekend have to take in account a lot of different peoples agendas its impossible to not disappoint at least one or two of the players. The last couple of years the team mates that organised the weekend did a lot off talking, calling, mailing and hustling around to set a date for the weekend. Because most of the players feel a huge social commitment to the team and the all-for-one spirit within the team is really high nobody wants to miss this event.

This year Wibi (one of the players from our team that resembles famous Dutch piano player Wibi Suryadi) suggested to use the online date planner datumprikker.nl. With this tool it would be easy to pick a date for the weekend. Every team member has to fill out a list with available dates and pick the date(s) that would suit him best. In doing so the tool in its turn forms a list of dates that are most suitable for the team. This is the easiest and quickest way to pick a date for the event that is convenient for the largest possible group of players. Within 5 minutes a list is created that works democratically and seems fair to all the players. This lists saved us a lot of heated discussions in the dressing room.

The second problem that occurred within the team and which is solved with the help of a internet tool is the registration of absent players. Every weekend there are some people within the team that have responsibilities elsewhere. Reasons for absence can vary from celebrating your stepmothers 46th birthday to having planned a day at ‘ponnypark slagharen’ with the family and everything in between. Because our team for a long time didn’t have a natural leader players would just call other players randomly to make notice of their absence. This lead to a large ineffective web of miscommunication and misunderstanding around the question witch players will be available on Saturday. Although there are a lot of friends and supporters that don’t mind filling in an empty spot in the team every now and then the last season it did occur once that there where only 10 players on the pitch.

The ingenious Wibi solved this problem by registering the team to the internet site teamers.nl. This site is an easy to use web application that links different members of a group. It is designed especially for sport teams and serves as a planning schedule. Before each new game we get a notice that the game is added to the system and we’re supposed to fill out if we will be playing, not playing or just visiting. In this way every team member is well informed about the amount of players that are going to be there.

Next to these two applications the team also has its own hyve on hyves.nl. Where the team members can leave their ‘krabbels’ concerning the game or just joke around a little bit. Within the last two years our team transformed from a strictly offline engagement to a multiple accessible offline environment. The web tools used serve as a easy to use environment to solve the problems occurring both on and off the pitch.
Because of these new tools you are insured to never walk alone…
football with the boys 2.0

I am proud to announce that I have joined the Blog Herald. The Blog Herald has been blogging about the blogosphere since 2003 and has since become an established source in the blogosphere. I have been reading the Blog Herald for a while now and was absolutely thrilled when they asked me to write for them. I will be joining an excellent team of bloggers including Lorelle VanFossen, Tony Hung, Chris Garrett, (founder & ex-Blog Herald/now TechCrunch-blogger) Duncan Riley and more.

I will be blogging about blogging and blog software from an “academic” point of view. My first series of posts will be related to my upcoming thesis on Blog Software and the Act of Blogging.

You are welcome to read and comment on my first post at the Blog Herald: “Rethinking the Blog as Database“

On October 1st Geert Lovink posted a previous blogpost about the spinplant on the Nettime mailinglist. This was the beginning of what turned out to become a sprawling discussion. This is a summary of the original post, the discussion and the remaining questions.

Wikipedia’s ‘alertness’ was tested by posting an article about a fantasy-plant, the spinplant. The article was removed in less than two hours, which means that the system is working pretty well when it comes to removing fake articles. But the article was removed because the Wikipedia editor in question couldn’t find anything about the spinplant using Google. The question posed was whether Google was being given too much authority. Jos Horikx corrected the question: it should be whether a research of hits via Google is enough to judge the truth of an article on Wikipedia. He argued that an article on Wikipedia should, as a rule, be supported by its own resources in the first place. Patrice Riemens agreed with him, encouraging the use of Wikipedia and Google as useful instruments, but not to see them as solid fundaments for knowledge.

More reactions inspired Hendrik-Jan Grievink to write down his take on knowledge and its increasing fragmentation through the use of Wikipedia and Google. He also mentions the distinction between a literary culture and a culture of images. Grievink says that in a culture shaped by images, we have to search for knowledge whereas in a culture dominated by the written word one must ask for knowledge. Andreas Jabobs reacted to this statement, saying that knowledge and images are not comparable. He argued that knowledge no longer gets ‘stored’ in human memory. Active knowledge is lost due to the increased use of images as a collection of knowledge. But Grievink responds that he does not equate knowledge and image, he only points at the fact that images are taken more and more as bearers of knowledge.

Theo Ploeg wonders whether Jacobs sees a difference between contact with reality via language on the one hand and image on the other. After this he continues with the connection between the existence of things and persons and their presence on the www.

As a reaction to this whole discussion the first real spinplant is born on the web. Elout made a spinplant in Sculptypaint, an opensource 3Dmodel creation tool. These models can be imported to for example Secondlife.

And Grievink reacts with a dictionary-discription of the spinplant [in Dutch]:

spin·plant (de ~)
1 fictieve plantensoort, ontdekt door Laura van der Vlies
2 neologisme dat nog wacht op indexering door GoogleNu maar water geven en wachten tot het woord “spinplant” uitgroeit tot een volwaardige internet meme, wellicht dat zij dan over enige tijd tot het Google-lexicon behoort. En dan komt het met de spinplant in Wikipedia ook wel goed! Heeft Laura via een omweg toch nog een bevredigend resultaat van haar experiment. Kan ze haar volgende onderzoek mee starten. Dat vereist wel wat medewerking van ons: een blogje hier, een onderzoekje daar, lezinkje zo, filmpje zus. Zo doen we dat: kennisproductie in de mediasfeer. Overigens, wanneer we deze status bereiken met dit virtuele stukje flora dan is de spinplant uiteraard geen spinplant meer, maar een officieel erkend woord der Nederlandse Taal. Wie was Van Dale ook alweer? Dat zal nog wel even duren, tot die tijd blijft de spinplant gewoon een spinplant!

De Spinplant is dood, leve de spinplant!

The discussion continued when one of the Masters of Media contributers, Michael Stevenson, reacted with a blogpost titled ‘Making the spinplant relevant: more from Friedrich Nietzsche‘. With this post he tried, with some help from Nietzsche, to change the terms of the debate, (jokingly?) asking whether truth is really ‘prior’ to relevance at all. He has asked readers to help make the spinplant more relevant by linking to the non-existing Spinplant article on Wikipedia [http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinplant] and to two pages that were made to make the spinplant visible on the World Wide Web.

• spinplant [http://www.lauravdv.nl/spinplant.html] and;
• spinplant [http://home.student.uva.nl/laurina.vandervlies/spinplant.html]

This post brought up more discussion, but also some confusion. Readers of the blogpost thought the aim was to put the spinplant back on Wikipedia again. But that isn’t the case. It is only to show the relationship between web-truth and relevance.

In any case, the story about the spinplant is not over yet.

1. Use spell check & punctuation (Firefox and Chrome both have a built-in spell-checker but look out for “save and continue editing”). WordPress also has a built-in option to proofread writing (the ABC button).
2. Start with an abstract of about 60 words. When your post is on the front page or in one of the archives only the first 60 words will be shown. Alternatively, your first 60 words should draw in readers as well as reflect the topic of your post.
3. Try to add a relevant image or visualisation to your post (but make sure that images do not break the design). When you use an image in your blog post, it will be automatically added to the abstract and displayed on the front page. If your blog post contains multiple images you can control which image is shown on the front page by setting a “Featured Image” in the right sidebar.
4. Please be aware of copyright and only use images that you are sure you may use. See the image guideline below to find suitable images that you can use.
5. Only write in English, unless it is a Dutch topic (possible compromise: do English ‘optional excerpt’ – scroll down below ‘write post’, with note – [rest of article in Dutch])
6. Try to have a very clear, explicit title. The title should draw in readers as well as be descriptive of the contents of the blog post. When thinking of a title please remember that the blog is not only read by humans, but also by search engines. In other words, try to include relevant keywords in your title that reflect the article. Additionally, an ideal title is also “shareable” on Facebook and Twitter. If you share a blog post from the MoM blog using the Tweet button it will automatically create a tweet that contains the blog post title + blog title + link to the blog post. A good tweetable blog post title has a maximum of 98 characters.
7. Use a consistent structure. Please use paragraphs and paragraph titles and an accompanying structure of argumentation (introduction/excerpt, argument, conclusion) where possible.
8. Please select a category for your post and add suitable tags.
9. Copying and pasting from MS Word (or most other programs) messes up formatting. The best way of getting rid of formatting is to use a simple text editor first (Windows: Wordpad, Mac: Text Editor)
10. Accompany your posts with references, sources, and links. For academic references you can use the footnote plugin functionality, see below. Use blockquotes for long citations.
11. We should avoid becoming a link dump. If you have an interesting link or video that you would like to post and share, also describe why it is interesting for our blog. We prefer critical, descriptive posts.
12. Do not swear or use offensive language (to me this one seems obvious, but I’m open to contrary arguments).
13. Keep our blog ‘alive’. It’s always nice to see a lively blog, so try discussing others’ posts by commenting on them, or referring to them in your own posts. Also comment on blogs that link back to your blog post, as displayed in the trackback list!
14. Please refrain from using the “Insert Read More tag” in posts as it is better for our RSS feed to display full posts.
15. Pour yourself a nice cup of coffee or tea!

How-To

• How to left align an image in the text:
  Use Align left in the editor. Or: add

  style=’float:left’

  to the <img> tag.

• How to right align an image in the text:
  Use Align right in the editor. Or: add

  style=’float:right’

  to the <img> tag

• How to resize an image:
  Insert/upload an image. Click on the edit image icon and change the size in display setting (custom size). Or: add

  width=”10%”

  or add

  width=”x px”

  to the <img> tag. This will scale your image.

• How to do footnotes: open and close the footnote like below, and it will be generated automatically. You can copy paste neatly formatted citations directly from Zotero (Copy Bibliography) into the double brackets:

((your footnote text here))

example ((Yom-Tov, Elad, Susan Dumais, and Qi Guo. 2013. “Promoting Civil Discourse Through Search Engine Diversity.” Social Science Computer Review, November, 0894439313506838. doi:10.1177/0894439313506838.))

• Multiple authors: when you want to add a second author to a post, go to write/edit post. At the bottom there is a section called ‘Authors’. Fill in the name of the second author. Save the post. Repeat this step for each additional author.
• How to update a blogpost:
  

  <update> this is my update text – Michael (added: 10/10/07) </update>

Image guideline

You can find free to use images in various places, including:

• Creative Commons Search, a great meta-search engine to find suitable images.
• Google Images> Tools > Usage Rights. How-to.

Something droll, courtesy of xkcd.com

In response the feeble democratic situation in Myanmar, social activists, students and Buddhist monks gathered to stand up against the totalitarian regime of the Burmese government. The most important source for reports on the situation comes from the blogging community in Myanmar.

So perhaps it is not the demonstrations themselves that stirred up the international community, but the coverage fed by the local blogosphere. Local bloggers are trying to bypass the censorship filters, by using highly interpretive blog-posts:

…

全国僧侣、全国人民必须清醒地认识到，不坚决地制止这场动乱，将国无宁日。这场斗争事关缅甸振兴和国家建设的成败，事关国家民族的前途。

…

All the monks and the people shall realize that if we do not stop the unrest resolutely, there will be no peace in the country. This battle is concerned with the revitalization of Myanmar and the success of nation-building. It is vital to the future of the nation.

If the words Myanmar and Monks are replaced with China and Students the real underlying dimension of the message becomes clear. But as the government tightens their censorship control, bloggers have to find other techniques to get their message across. In an attempt to shut down the resistance community completely the government took the liberty of shutting down one of the major ISP’s, under the motto of ‘maintenance.’ All other communications sources are either shutdown, or heavily monitored.

In what seems to be a hopeless situation, support came from the international blogging community, in the form of a global support to bring back internet, and in the long run democracy, in Myanmar. Free-Burma now has over 14.000 subscribers who support the cause against the military regime.

The collaboration in this particular case is twofold, first is the local writers who express their concerns about their country and showing the world that the Burmese situation is a major problem. Their community is seen as a big threat by the government, as it shows in their reaction to filter and shut down the internet from keeping negative publicity coming out. But by doing that, they triggered the international blogging community to start writing about the case, and defending the Burmese bloggers. By trying to control, it just spiralled out of control for the government.

It might be speculative to say that the FreeBurma initiative had something do to with this, but as it turns out, Reuters just reported that internet accessibility is restored in Myanmar, it’s only a small step forward, but as shown above, the collaborative actions of an international crowd create a snowball effect that attracts worldwide attention.

FreeBurma Twitter feed

This weeks assignment in our Masters of Media class was to take a quote from Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche’s work and try to analyze a new media object using this quote. Because I personally wasn’t familiar with Nietzsche I started searching the web hoping to find an appropriate quote to use in this post. When looking for quotes I found that they weren’t hard to find in Nietzsche’s case. Nietzsche was known for his fondness for aphorism in the many critiques he wrote on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy, and science. This distinctive style of using aphorisms intrigued me. According to The Oxford English Dictionary an aphorism is a short pithy sentences that contain a truth of general import. When reading about aphorisms I couldn’t help making a connection between these short sentences Nietzsche uses to trigger his readers and the way people collect little bits and pieces of information while surfing the Internet and using web 2.0. That’s why I chose not to take one single quote from Nietzsche butt look at the role aphorisms in general ‘could’ take in new forms of media and the Internet.

Nietzsche uses rhetorical violence to overthrow and seduce the readers of his work. Logic, according to Nietzsche, is subordinate to the rhetoric; it is part of a much broader strength field that in the human communication leads to persuasion and convincing others. For this persuasion and to convince other people with his ideas Nietzsche uses a lot of aphorisms. “The period from 1878 to 1886 can be seen as a aphoristic period.” (translated from Dutch wikipedia) I will first try to draw a picture of how an aphorism works and then I will debate how it could be used as a tool on the Internet and web 2.0.

Next to the English Dictionary translation I also found the following definition of Aphorism in a text from Murray S. Davis:

“The finest thoughts in the fewest words.”

By using an aphorism to define what an aphorism is the author gives a good insight in how aphorisms work. Originally the word descends from the Greek word aphorizein witch means ‘define’. In form, aphorisms are always terse and trenchant, demonstrating maximum comprehension in minimum expression (Davis). In other words: By using aphorisms authors try to persuade and convince their readers by using short and catchy sentences. By reading these aphorisms readers are able to quickly grasp the meaning of the point the author tries to make. Aphorisms give readers a quick and basic idea of what the author is trying to say and challenges the reader to think about the authors ‘content’.

When we look at the way information is collected on the Internet the aphorism has some aspects that could make it serve as a good tool to help internet users. Because some of an aphorisms characteristics are similar to the specific demands internet users look for in the tools that help them filter certain content. In Davis article “APHORISMS AND CLICHÉS: The Generation and Dissipation of Conceptual Charisma” he points out that a thoughtful aphorist could be seen as someone who helps out his readers by already taking the readers notes from an article. Even the best of articles are filled with superfluous words, when read a reader points out the highlights. The aphorist saves readers this trouble by already pointing out these highlights for them.

“Each aphorism swings the mind from outside to inside a topic, whereas a category of aphorisms swings it from side to side across their common topic—stimulating the mind to fill in the empty conceptual space between points of clarity.” (Davis)

The functions an aphorism could be compared with the functions of tagging or using abstracts while searching for information on the web. On a lot of Internet sites the content is being organized by using short tags or abstracts of the whole to make searching the databases and archives easier. The way tags and especially abstracts work resembles the way the aphorism could work. Although aphorisms do not have some of the specific functions that tagging has such as linking tags from different sites it could in my opinion help organise and structure some of the (especially scientific) databases on the internet. In some cases using tags to store your content might be a little superficial. The complexity of a theory could be impossible to capture in a couple of twinge words. In these cases authors normally start using abstracts to summarize their articles. “Most abstracts, however, are merely carelessly written afterthoughts rather than carefully conceived forethoughts.”(Davis) For a short introduction into an article a list of aphorisms could serve as more off a trigger than an abstract. It draws peoples attention because of the catchy way it’s formulated and the way it challenges its readers.

When we look at the role abstracts take in modern day web searching, and the large amount of people that read these abstracts, I find it strange that many authors putt seemingly little thought in these abstracts. A well written, though through, stylish aphoristic abstract could become more influential than the article it abstracts. A good example of an article abstract constructed from aphorisms could be found in Davis introduction to his text. I will now show the first three sentences to give a brief idea of how a collection of aphorisms looks:

“We chase the interesting, which continually eludes us; we are chased by boredom, which continually catches us.

The first criterion by which people judge anything they encounter, even before deciding whether it is true or false, is whether it is interesting or boring.

The truth of a theory is not even the main criterion of its acceptance, for an interesting falsehood will attract more followers than a boring truth..” (Davis, 1999)

Although this introduction does not cover the entire content of the article it does give a clear view into the authors thinking process. It challenges the reader to think about how truth is being constructed. Evoking this ‘challenge’ in my opinion can be seen as a tool capable of gasping a readers attention. When we look at the way the internet and the media is structured it seems more and more imminent to get people’s attention, or….to speak in a aphorism:

“News is only news when it’s on the news.”

The importance of drawing peoples attention is bigger than ever in our modern world of mass media. “Science dominates the world view of our high technology-based civilization, but it is the fight for attention which dominates its everyday culture”. (Franck pp.3). According to Davis “the aphoristic form is well suited to the discontinuities of postmodern society. Its shortness can help postmodern audiences fill their many small splinters of empty time. Its conciseness can make aphorisms appropriate for the “sound bites” that fill postmodern media’s brief time slots for news. Its modularity can adapt aphorisms to postmodern culture’s collage, in which items originally invented for one purpose are frequently used for another, for ‘a truth of general import’ can be easily transported between contexts.” (Davis, 1999) In a world where attention is becoming a new sort of commodity it is important to develop new tools to attract this attention. Aphorisms could serve as one of these tools.

The aphorism is known for it’s ability to challenge people into thinking about the short statement that is made within this catchy sentence. In today’s postmodern society it could be capable of serving as a trigger to seduce people into reading certain articles of texts. The aphorism, in a postmodern society that according to Franck is dominated by a fight for attention, could serve as an inspiration tool to sparkle this attention. It could provide that little bit of ‘in depth interest’ that the shallow internet environment at first glance sometimes misses.

Georg Franck, ‘Introduction to The Economy of Attention’, in: Georg Franck, Die Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit, München: Hanser 1998
Murray S.Davis, ‘Aphorisms and clichés: The Generation and Dissipation of Conceptual Charisma’, in: Annual Review of Sociology, Vol.25, pp. 245-269, Augustus1999
Dutch wikipedia on Nietzsche: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche

A few days ago I read a remarkable story in the paper about the readers of an infamous and rebelious website/blog called Geenstijl that was able to mess with the election of the best Dutch slogan ever that was initiated by het Genootschap Voor Reclame (GVR). Because Geenstijl mobilised a great amount of people to vote for their pick of the 20 pre-nominated slogans, the slogan ‘Wij van Wc-eend adviseren Wc-eend’ (‘We at Toilet-Duck advise Toilet Duck’) turned out as the winner with 46% of the 12,500 votes.

This wasn’t the first time the website and its readers were able to mess with online ‘democratic’ polls, elections or contests. Two months ago Geenstijl has intervened in an opportunity for dutch people to come up with a subject for a new informative add by Stichting Ideële Reclame (SIRE). Even though this time Geenstijl did not succeed in their ‘trick’, the idea of the promotion of sausage with a picture in it did lead the contest for a short while.

The first time Geenstijl has showed its co-operative ‘muscles’ and has their members to mess up a contest, was a contest initiated by Dorito’s crips. People were able to name their own flavour and vote for names other people had come up with. Naturally Geenstijl named their flavour Geenstijl, the members of the website did the rest and so for 1.5 years GeenStijl-crisps could be bought in all supermarkets in Holland.

What do we call this phenomenom of en masse teasing behaviour and where did it originate and is there an international term? I have checked the Geenstijl site and ofcourse everybody is very proud to have taken part in the Toilet Duck election, but nobody has realy coined a term for an action like this. On de Volkskrant blog they call it a joke, and on several other websites it is simply called an evil campaign. The only relevant term that is provided on the Geenstijl website is the word they use for members of their site; they are called ‘reaguurders’. Also when I search for early non-Dutch comparitive examples I am not able to find anything. This might be due to the fact that in Holland a relatively small group of people that is into messing with polls, contests etc. is not so widely scattered as for example the online community of bored and rebelious people in the U.S. So is this a typical Dutch thing or are there non-Dutch examples of this phenomenom?

Although I think the ‘en masse voting for (against) something’ is in this case done in a very funny way, the question rises why do people take the effort to co-operate for weird meaningless causes? Geenstijl says it starts these actions because it wants to indicate that online-votings are not reliable and that online-votings are too easy to manipulate. When we look at the background of Geenstijl and the general content on the site, this explanation seems a bit hypocritical; in the past they showed that they never have a purpose or mission (besides making money) unless they are asked for one.

And what the actual reasoning of the voting group of members concerns; my innitial thought is that for the first time the power of the ‘mass’ becomes visible in a very concrete (and in this case childish) way; Geenstijl members and participants can actually see their immidiate power on screen and ofcourse when others are complaining about it, it becomes even more fun. In other words: Geenstijl readers love to feel the force of co-operating with the only reason of gaining as much negative attention as possible. The media ad to this sense since all big newspapers have written about it on-and offline and cases like this have even been broadcasted on TV.

There is not much that can be done in order to avoid or fight the meaningless use of co-operation by Geenstijl. We can only sit back and watch (maybe laugh about) actions like the vote for the not so good Toilet Duck slogan. Since everybody is allowed to vote; it is a democratic election and Geenstijl has the full right to do what it does. I haven’t seen any lawsuits concerning matters like this, but when more important election get disturbed by rebellious blogreaders, this might change in the near future.

<update> I bumped into a term called “troll” today and it strongly reminded me of this post. I checked out the term on Wikipedia and the general definition sounds: ‘a Troll is someone who intentionally posts controversial or contrary messages in an on-line community such as an on-line discussion forum with the intention of baiting users into an argumentative response’. It seems to me that the behaviour described above is almost the same as that of ‘trolls’ with the only difference that in this case ‘trolls’ co-operate with eachother. Pieter-Paul (added: 05/10/07)  <\update>

Is decision-making on the internet more democratic, less hierarchical than in the ‘real world’? Is structure needed in collaboration? In the ‘real world’ there is a general consensus about this: In any kind of management, be it the board of a huge multinational or a small town party council, there’s always a chairman, a treasurer and a secretary. Next to that there are usually others with different responsibilities. All these people have different talents on base of which they have been atributed their task. The chairman is a good leader, the treasurer has got a reliable financial instinct and the secretay is very good at writing down things other people say and going through the mail. then there are the people that are not on the board, depending on them, hoping they will make the right decision.
These boards or committees have an executive task: making decisions, achieving a goal. Others which are not on the board may also have a voice but the last say is always theirs. If they don’t work together well enough they will not achieve their task and others will take over where they failed. Depending on the circumstances (political party or big multinational) this may or may not be a democratic process but there is clarity about the responsiblity.

In the ‘other world’, internet, the game seems to be played somewhat differently. web 2.0 has made it possible for people to contribute and share their opinions, arts, everything with the rest of the world. These people may be very talented and intelligent or the other way around, but the important thing is that they can put themselves ‘out there’. This sharing in itself is not a way of working together to achieve a similar goal, accept perhaps the most general of general goals: distribute and share information with everyone anytime.
There are obviously other collaborations on the internet which are more practical, like raising money for a political party. Matters of importance can also be found online and usually concern financial matters on the stock market which become more important everyday and can affect a lot of people. Decision-making on these serious topics, however, is not something done by the big mass. this is in general impossible because with so many people, a consensus can never be achieved, too many different interests are at stake. There, like in the real world, certain people make it work and make lots and lots of money. Who they are, why they are where they are and how they make their decisions is unclear.

It may look as though people have seized the power in the world of internet but the real decisions are still made by the elite. Google decides what you can find, Wikipedia decides what you can know just as our government decides how much taxes we have to pay and our publishing houses decide what we are allowed to read. Not much has changed now that we have a new medium when it comes to decision-making accept for the fact that it is easier for the rest of the people to ventilate their opinion. Let’s just hope they are being heard. The downside is that there is less openness about who this elite is, and, more alarming, even that it exists. It is an illusion to believe that everyone has an equal say on the internet when it comes to important matters and until there comes more openness about the web’s elite, what exactly they are responsible for and how they function, I prefer the more honest method of the real world.

Of course, we all know Second life, any many writings already exist. Mostly on how incredible and promising this open-source-collaborative online community-building actually is.
To see in what ways these terms hold any value nowadays, I logged into Second Life after a long, long time. Shocking experience…

Instead of the usual whatever-take on these ‘do you agree’ buttons, I actually started to read it, because obviously, Second Life is not your free-roam-around 3d chat-room anymore. Somebody introduced some rules.
As Christoph Spehr notes, in current societies, especially within capitalism, there are always certain parties that create the rules of the kitchen and, since it is in their power, they will uphold this rules by any means (since it is the reliance on these rules that keeps them in the drivers seat).

kitchen
In the kitchen of Second Life, I came across the following rules:

In the three guiding steps by Christoph Spehr, the first one already conflicts with the kitchen rules:

There are three aspects that have to be taken into account if you want to build a free cooperation. The first is that all rules in this cooperation can be questioned by everybody, there are no holy rules that people cannot question or reject or bargain and negotiate about .

So, in this digital utopia of society-creating, I cannot have a discourse about the rules? I found this quite a disappointment; while having this great opportunity to learn about human-society processes, the way to cooperative knowledge is shut. Why?

Because even utopias have back doors and secret agendas. In this case the picture shows a no-entry zone.

It’s very important that the concept of free cooperation does not dictate special ways of structuring societies or any other levels of the social

and

You also have to develop forms of getting independent and forms of articulation, critical articulation, of reclaiming public space.

Where is the reclaiming of public space in Second Life? Why are (capitalist) rules of kitchen not under attack? I guess this is due to the fact that this public space has no value but economic. Its not about social capital, its about nihilistic (ab)use of this digital space, turning it into the same everyday as analogue life (except for the tele-porting, that is).

Although this all seems rather disappointing and the LindenLab policy seems rather patronizing, of course some of these standards were needed to create possibilities for social interaction and (hopefully) some collaborative work, an yes, the chatting is fun (for half an hour) and the interface does allow you to respond to social actions very adequately. I would have liked it better though if the sets of rules and limitations was created through and/ or by the citizens of second life, not by an institutional ‘outside’.
To finish with one more (very nice) quote by Spehr:

Everything that people do together is a kind of cooperation because they share work and they use the work and the experience and the bodily existence of others – also historical and direct and indirect ways. And though there are two extremes, free cooperations and forced cooperations, most of what we know in most societies is forced cooperation.

Architects and the ‘urban and rural planning’ have to deal with the implementation of special facilities to meet disabled people and to comply with legislations. Where do webdevelopers meet the disabled in building the virtuel infrastructure? What are the legislations concerning internet accessibility? Are there guidelines in the Netherlands? How about these issues concerning other (underdeveloped) countries?

Yesterday, I was reading an article on Bruce Sexton, who is suing Target to make its website accessible for blind users. This issue is getting more and more attention, which is great, because publicity get’s more people thinking about the issue of accessibility. If you also want to nose around this area, I have listed some interesting sites.:

1. Disability:
   • Disability in Australia: Exposing a social apartheid, Gerard Goggin
   • Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media, Gerard Goggin
2. Accessibility:
   • Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance
   • Digital divide: Flew, Lister et al.
   • www.olpc.org (Emer Beamer)
   • www.webaim.org
   • www.hivos.nl
   • http://www.iicd.org
   • www.accessibility.nl
   • www.drempelvrij.nl
   • www.nfb.org
3. Agency:
   • Protocol, Alexander Galloway
4. Usability:
   • www.usability.gov

Recently we at Masters of Media have been creating a bit of a stir when it comes to the moderation of new Wikipedia entries, and the premises it builds upon. As we have seen, the existence or public relevance of a certain subject has in certain cases been contested by a simple Google search. Conclusions were drawn pretty much at the same moment: We can’t have Google decide whether or not our entry should be deleted. Apart from valid criticism, part of this reaction seems to be fueled by a general negative stance towards Google. Its slogan “Don’t Be Evil” has lately been questioned in the light of China’s censorship and the prolonged storage of user data. By combining Google’s alleged evilness with Nietzsche’s views on the slave-morality, I hope to provide a critical view on the subject.

Slave morality refers to the externalizing of the causes of ones (perceived) inferiority. This external other is regarded as “evil”, whereas those instances that make the oppressed feel less inferior or promote their position in society are regarded as “good”. Now how does this morality apply to an institution as Google, as soon as it receives the predicate ‘evil’?

It is safe to say that the common Google user probably does not think in terms of good and evil. He would perhaps complain about not finding the information he was looking for, or on the other hand praise the search engine for its efficiency. To criticize Google would mean having basic knowledge of its ideals, practices and internals: A black box makes an easy scapegoat, but at the same time shields itself from the educated critic. However, there is much to Google that is not out in the open. Far from being an open system, it represents an ideal; a promise for universal and instant data archival and retrieval, cast into a convenient interface. What lies beneath the surface is an invisible, pervasive force. In losing control over its presence, a fundamental sense of insecurity arises.

This insecurity works on a multitude of levels. First, we perceive Google’s pervasiveness as a breach of security. It not only intrudes our sense of privacy, it also threatens our identity. Why is this so frightening? By subscribing to all kinds of services as Gmail, YouTube and Hyves (Orkut, anyone?), we lent our identity to a second party, so to speak. At the time it seemed like the natural thing to do, perhaps even a safe act in all its naivety. Immersed in an environment which claimed to encourage decentralization and individualism, no-one really was to blame. Temporarily freed from the structures of everyday life we set back and relaxed, only to find out our borrowed identities were being gathered and reclaimed by centralized forces. As with Microsoft – the former Face of Evil – the irony reigns in our relationship to Google. We attach ourselves voluntarily to their strings. Searching for Evil in the womb of Evil itself, the dependency proves hard to shake off.

Now does criticizing Google equal subjecting to the masses of the weak? When we say: “Google is Evil”, do we admit to our suffering? There is no easy answer to this issue, primarily because it is a battleground where philosophy, psychology and technology collide. Before pursuing this path we should perhaps first ask ourselves:

Are we really oppressed?

One of the great things about web 2.0 is making free phone calls to friends all over the world. Just turn on one of the programs that offer this service, make sure your friend is online too, and make the call. And it’s also possible to call for a lot less the amount that you used to, to a regular phone or mobile phone.
According to my own preferences I really like to use Skype. It’s easy, free, and almost all my friends use it too. But after some articles I read about Skype having a backdoor and not being all that safe, I decided to look for an alternative to call and talk with my friends for free. To my surprise there are loads of other programs out there that offer the same service.

Some examples:
Gizmo project
Google talk
iChat
Jajah
VoIPbuster
SightSpeed
WengoPhone

And on a rainy afternoon, I decided to just try some of them, to find out what’s the difference, and more important, which one is a good alternative for Skype?

* VoIPbuster: Their slogan sounds promising: If you like Skype, you will love the Voipbuster. As a Mac user I’m redirected to another page to download the program, Windows users are probably their most common users. The website is in Dutch, with some English explainations on it. Looking at the website the Voipbuster all of a sudden doesn’t sound so promising anymore. But don’t judge the book by its cover. After making an account you are redirected to the page to buy ‘credits’. So this isn’t a free service! Or is it? The website is really messy and it is even not clear how to download the program for Mac users. I have an account now but no program. After five minutes of going through the site I decided this isn’t my program for sure.

* Gizmo Project: Getting started is really easy. Just download the program and register. The program itself looks a lot like Skype again. A messenger service with group chat, easy to call people and not really something new. But according to the website there is a lot more to explore with Gizmo that i haven’t seen yet. Call recordings, map of the location of the caller and sound effects. It looks promising but I’m not convinced. It looks like a lot of extras that are unnecessary. Nice but not for me.

* Jajah: When you first enter the site it looks like you only have to fill in two telephone numbers and you can call right away. Maybe that’s the case, but only when you have a landline, which I don’t. So, I have to find another way to use Jajah. After viewing the demo and clicking around I found out this isn’t really such a good service. It’s only free when you use a landline and your friend is a Jajah user too. Otherwise you have to pay. And it’s not cheaper than using your regular phone. When I call with my mobile via Jajah to another mobile number in the Netherlands, it still costs me 29.6 cents. So Jajah,…. Nonoh!

* WengoPhone: Opensource software to make free pc to pc video and voice calls. The software is really easy to download and install afterwards. The interface looks almost exactly like Skype. It also has an option to send sms messages. Unfortunately I couldn’t test the application because there is not an option for a try-out call and I have no contacts yet. So far this seems like a good alternative for Skype.

* SightSpeed: The application took very long to download.
And no, that wasn’t my connection. After the installation you have to change some settings and than the program is ready to use. The program doesn’t look so flashy like Skype. But it works really well. There is even an option to record video mails and messages to put on your blog. When you make a call you can record the call. The only disadvantages are the advertisements during a call and the fact that there isn’t an option to chat. But for making just phone calls this is my favorite! But now I have to convince other people to use the program too.

After trying five I quit. Sightspeed is really nice, but not a lot of people use the program. So either way I have to convince people to start using the program or just stick with the old one. Skype may have a backdoor, it’s still the most userfriendly way to call other people over the internet.

Google, Apple, Yahoo others of the technological part of the economy, suffered big losses on the stock market yesterday (de Volkskrant, 12/10/07). Whereas in the begining of the week their stock value went up they were now influenced by a report by JPMorgan, an important american financial services firm. In the report they lowered the sales estimate for Baidu.com.
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The masters of media blog is redesigned and updated! Since the beginning of this semester the masters of media v 2.0 have been posting on this blog. A new group of masters also needs a fresh new look. In this post you can read about the new features, as well as an evaluation of the collaborative process during the redesign of the blog.

Getting started
The past couple of weeks we collaboratively brainstormed and negotiated about the redesign of this blog. Most of the masters took on a task such as making a proposal for the design, linklist, tag cloud, navigation, and looking into new plugins and the new features of the WordPress 2.3 update. After this initial research we came together in a meeting with both master classes to vote on important decisions. In this group decision process we decided on some main issues for the redesign of this blog. After online/offline discussions Maarten’s layout proposal was voted on as best suitable. These group discussions turned out to be very productive for decisions on the general structure and reorganization. But once we got to implementing and refining the design group decision-making didn’t turn out to be as effective. During implementation of the new design, Erik came across some decisions that needed to be made more collectively. Group decision in class was not as productive on these specific issues that needed more close attention. Erik, Esther, Roos, and first year MoM blogger Anne got together on a Monday to work the whole evening on refinement and implementation of the design.

Redesign and implementation
The group of four turned out to be a good number for working effectively on these problems. One of the foremost issues addressed was the proposed header of the blog. Although the Japanese people with cell phone taking a picture of our new MoM logo was very funny when it was proposed in class, it was not very “masters of media.” We needed something more “new media,” something more geeky, something we would blog about. In sync, Roos and Anne came up with the idea to use a QR-code of our blog URL as the image of our header. A nice extra of the QR-code logo is that it is great for hiding easter eggs. One is implemented, I’m sure others will follow soon. Besides some designer pixel frenzy and the proper implementation of these ideas we had to call it a night at around midnight.

Today Erik, Roos and Esther came together again to finish the blog for publication. The design was tweaked and some very nice plugins were added. The new most popular posts listing shows the most popular posts last month. Besides being a very nice addition in the side menu, this plugin also provides some nice stats at the backend. Since we wanted to write a post about this collaborative process collectively, we needed a new plugin that makes it possible to write a multiple-author post. This plugin automatically adds authors to the post when a post is edited and makes collaborative posts possible.

To do
Although we are very happy with the result of the blog so far, it is a blog and some important work still needs to be done. Always. We now have 403 posts, 837 comments, and 404 tags.

• The tag cloud now represents a selection of the most used tags overall but needs some cleaning up (can be done at “manage tags”).
• Although we collectively decided on a tag cloud and no categories, the discussion on a combination of tags and categories for navigation purposes might need to be addressed again. Navigation is not clear now and after all, a 404 on tags hints we need categories as well. An interesting analysis on the use of tags and categories can be read at Problogger. The tag cloud can use some redesign and might only list tags of the last x days.
• A new cleaned up link list needs to be composed and put online.
• We got a calendar, do we want it on the new blog and in what form?
• Since we now have a QR-code that can serve as a logo on t-shirts and coffee mugs, and since we have been collecting cool quotes in the past couple of months, the Cafepress section of our blog will be updated soon.
• Look out for bugs and report them.

Nietzsche on Wikipedia:

Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind.

It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

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For everyone who is into New Media, Culture and Design (or just one or two of these…) there are videos online of Virtueel Platform and HKU’s previous (Un)common Ground expert meeting which was held during Picnic ’07. Topics range from Brazilian government computer recycling in a very original way in the MetaReclicagem project, to the Home Health Horoscope where a family is observed by sensors and based on this information they get a horoscope everyday at their breakfast table. Check out full coverage, including video presentations of project initiators, here: (Un)common Ground full coverage.

In an attempt to grasp and theorize all that is happening in the new media landscape, one method can be to project a philosophers’ philosophy onto a new media phenomenon and see what happens.

Amongst the many theories and quotes Nietzsche got famous for, the interesting thing is to look at the context of these quotes in comparison to the context of what is called ‘new media’.
Some obvious ones bear to mind in relation to, for instance, internet and hypertext:

Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

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The Citizen Lab has just released “Everyone’s Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship for Citizens Worldwide” (pdf). This guide is intended for the non-technical user, providing tips and strategies on how to by-pass content filters worldwide. It is now in English but they are busy making translations into multiple languages.

This guide is released as part of a wider effort to identify and document Internet filtering and surveillance, and to promote and inform wider public dialogue about such practices. The OpenNet Initiative is a collaborative partnership of four leading academic institutions: the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme, University of Cambridge, and the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University.

If you want to stay up to date on current internet censorship research and news, have a look at the internet censorship explorer blog.

In this little machinima movie, Valve shows of their new rendering style in the upcoming game Team Fortress 2. The cool thing about it is that it almost looks like a genuine Pixar short. But everything you see is rendered in real-time, which looks amazing if you ask me. The videoclip also illustrates some highly recognizable multiplayer scenario’s like having a huge map with a small amount of players, and the highly unappreciated art of camping. Enjoy :)

Nietzsche’s criticism of the mass culture emerged along with the rise of popular literature, journalism, and the modern press. With the explosive rise of weblogs, mobile devices, and online video, traditional journalism has been contested and challenged by a new model of journalism called citizen journalism. With Nietzsche’s critique of mass society in mind, can we actually consider citizen journalism as the upsurge of strong individuals whose works transcend their present condition and liberate them from authority, custom morality, or even religion?

Nietzsche saw mass culture as central to modern social reproduction processes and as a distinctive feature of modern societies, yet he has also become a major source of critiques of mass society and culture. Nietzsche considered massification as one of the forces of decadence, leading to the eradication of individuality, and creating herd societies and mediocrity. Mass society prevents the creation and dissemination of a genuine culture and strong individuals.
According to Nietzsche, journalistic culture as part of the mass culture would gradually substitute true culture:

The journalist, the master of the moment, is a slave to the present, the ways of thinking and fashion. He writes about artists and thinkers and slowly takes their place, destroying their work. But, while the journalist lives off the moment, thanks to the genius of other men, the great works of artists emanate the desire to survive and surpass time though the power of their creations. (Nietzsche 1870-1873)

My first impulse to a media object led me to Skoeps.nl, an acclaimed citizen journalistic website where people can upload their photographs of notable and news-worthy events. Skoeps is extending its activities to a selective few foreign countries and to my surprise they will be launching a website in China and other African countries. After a quick scan, I came across two websites; Global Voices Online and Afrikanieuws.nl.

Global Voices Online is a non-profit global citizens’ media project founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman’s Center for Internet and Society. Global Voices seeks to aggregate, curate, and amplify the global conversation online- shining light on places and people mainstream media may not be reporting.

Global Voices Online covers many countries and nations. When selecting a specific country, a tag cloud appears in which China seems to be the most popular of all. When compared to China’s mainstream news sources, such as the People’s daily, the news headlines (especially those concerning recent events in Burma) in Global Voices Online take on a more critical stance and enables a much wider stream of comments. The articles on Myanmar in the People’s Daily report the “brighter” aspects of the recent activities and progress. Another point worth noting is that the top 5 most popular topics includes politics; governance; history human rights, Freedom of Speech, and Arts & Culture.

Afrikanieuws.nl as an extension of Skoeps’ international activities aims to inform people about the multiple facets of the continent. There’s a discrepancy between Skoeps’ activities in the Netherlands and those in Africa. Whereas in the Netherlands, posting a picture is underlain by probably profit-driven motivations (You get a share of the revenue when your picture makes it to a (front) page in the newspaper/magazine), Africanieuws.nl enables local people to capture events and happenings (or even history) that the local authorities would suppress. Providing these citizen journalists with mobile phones is a way to give these people a voice and the opportunity to be heard within and outside of Africa. So maybe mobile phones might function as a tool to liberate men from oppression on their way to discover (and uncover) the truth.