Will Tiger Woods finally talk to the police? Who will replace Oprah? (Not that Oprah can ever be replaced, of course.) And will Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the couple who crashed President Barack Obama’s first state dinner, command the hundreds of thousands of dollars they want for an exclusive television interview? Can Levi Johnston, father of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s grandson, get his wish to be a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars”?

The chatter that passes for news, the gossip that is peddled by the windbags on the airwaves, the noise that drowns out rational discourse, and the timidity and cowardice of what is left of the newspaper industry reflect our flight into collective insanity. We stand on the cusp of one of the most seismic and disturbing dislocations in human history, one that is radically reconfiguring our economy as it is the environment, and our obsessions revolve around the trivial and the absurd.

What really matters in our lives-the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the steady deterioration of the dollar, the mounting foreclosures, the climbing unemployment, the melting of the polar ice caps and the awful reality that once the billions in stimulus money run out next year we will be bereft and broke-doesn’t fit into the cheerful happy talk that we mainline into our brains. We are enraptured by the revels of a dying civilization. Once reality shatters the airy edifice, we will scream and yell like petulant children to be rescued, saved and restored to comfort and complacency. There will be no shortage of demagogues, including buffoons like Sarah Palin, who will oblige. We will either wake up to face our stark new limitations, to retreat from imperial projects and discover a new simplicity, as well as a new humility, or we will stumble blindly toward catastrophe and neofeudalism.

Celebrity worship has banished the real from public discourse. And the adulation of celebrity is pervasive. The frenzy around political messiahs, or the devotion of millions of viewers to Oprah, is all part of the yearning to see ourselves in those we worship. We seek to be like them. We seek to make them like us. If Jesus and “The Purpose Driven Life” won’t make us a celebrity, then Tony Robbins or positive psychologists or reality television will. We are waiting for our cue to walk onstage and be admired and envied, to become known and celebrated. Nothing else in life counts.

We yearn to stand before the camera, to be noticed and admired. We build pages on social networking sites devoted to presenting our image to the world. We seek to control how others think of us. We define our worth solely by our visibility. We live in a world where not to be seen, in some sense, is to not exist. We pay lifestyle advisers to help us look and feel like celebrities, to build around us the set for the movie of our own life. Martha Stewart constructed her financial empire, when she wasn’t engaged in insider trading, telling women how to create a set design for the perfect home. The realities within the home, the actual family relationships, are never addressed. Appearances make everything whole. Plastic surgeons, fitness gurus, diet doctors, therapists, life coaches, interior designers and fashion consultants all, in essence, promise to make us happy, to make us celebrities. And happiness comes, we are assured, with how we look, with the acquisition of wealth and power, or at least the appearance of it. Glossy magazines like Town & Country cater to the absurd pretensions of the very rich to be celebrities. They are photographed in expensive designer clothing inside the lavishly decorated set pieces that are their homes. The route to happiness is bound up in how skillfully we present ourselves to the world. We not only have to conform to the dictates of this manufactured vision, but we also have to project an unrelenting optimism and happiness. Hedonism and wealth are openly worshiped on Wall Street as well as on shows such as “The Hills,” “Gossip Girl,” “Sex and the City,” “My Super Sweet 16″ and “The Real Housewives of (whatever bourgeois burg happens to be in vogue).”

The American oligarchy-1 percent of whom control more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined-are the characters we most envy and watch on television. They live and play in multimillion-dollar mansions. They marry models or professional athletes. They are chauffeured in stretch limos. They rush from fashion shows to movie premieres to fabulous resorts. They have surgically enhanced, perfect bodies and are draped in designer clothes that cost more than some people make in a year. This glittering life is held before us like a beacon. This life, we are told, is the most desirable, the most gratifying. And this is the life we want. Greed is good, we believe, because one day through our acquisitions we will become the elite. So let the rest of the bastards suffer.

The working class, comprising tens of millions of struggling Americans, are locked out of television’s gated community. They are mocked, even as they are tantalized, by the lives of excess they watch on the screen in their living rooms. Almost none of us will ever attain these lives of wealth and power. Yet we are told that if we want it badly enough, if we believe sufficiently in ourselves, we too can have everything. We are left, when we cannot adopt these impossible lifestyles as our own, with feelings of inferiority and worthlessness. We have failed where others have succeeded.

We consume these countless lies daily. We believe the false promises that if we spend more money, if we buy this brand or that product, if we vote for this candidate, we will be respected, envied, powerful, loved and protected. The flamboyant lives of celebrities and the outrageous characters on television, movies, professional wrestling and sensational talk shows are peddled to us, promising to fill up the emptiness in our own lives. Celebrity culture encourages everyone to think of themselves as potential celebrities, as possessing unique if unacknowledged gifts. Faith in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important than reality. Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as an impediment to success, a form of negativity. The New Age mysticism and pop psychology of television personalities and evangelical pastors, along with the array of self-help best-sellers penned by motivational speakers, psychiatrists and business tycoons, peddle this fantasy. Reality is condemned in these popular belief systems as the work of Satan, as defeatist, as negativity or as inhibiting our inner essence and power. Those who question, those who doubt, those who are critical, those who are able to confront reality, along with those who grasp the hollowness and danger of celebrity culture, are condemned for their pessimism or intellectualism.

The illusionists who shape our culture, and who profit from our incredulity, hold up the gilded cult of Us. Popular expressions of religious belief, personal empowerment, corporatism, political participation and self-definition argue that all of us are special, entitled and unique. All of us, by tapping into our inner reserves of personal will and undiscovered talent, by visualizing what we want, can achieve, and deserve to achieve, happiness, fame and success. This relentless message cuts across ideological lines. This mantra has seeped into every aspect of our lives. We are all entitled to everything. And because of this self-absorption, and deep self-delusion, we have become a country of child-like adults who speak and think in the inane gibberish of popular culture.

Celebrities who come from humble backgrounds are held up as proof that anyone can be adored by the world. These celebrities, like saints, are examples that the impossible is always possible. Our fantasies of belonging, of fame, of success and of fulfillment are projected onto celebrities. These fantasies are stoked by the legions of those who amplify the culture of illusion, who persuade us that the shadows are real. The juxtaposition of the impossible illusions inspired by celebrity culture and our “insignificant” individual achievements, however, is leading to an explosive frustration, anger, insecurity and invalidation. It is fostering a self-perpetuating cycle that drives the frustrated, alienated individual with even greater desperation and hunger away from reality, back toward the empty promises of those who seduce us, who tell us what we want to hear. The worse things get, the more we beg for fantasy. We ingest these lies until our faith and our money run out. And when we fall into despair we medicate ourselves, as if the happiness we have failed to find in the hollow game is our deficiency. And, of course, we are told it is.

I spent two years traveling the country to write a book on the Christian right called “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” I visited former manufacturing towns where for many the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. Many have lost hope. Fear and instability have plunged the working class into profound personal and economic despair, and, not surprisingly, into the arms of demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian right who offer a belief in magic, miracles and the fiction of a utopian Christian nation. Unless we rapidly re-enfranchise these dispossessed workers, insert them back into the economy, unless we give them hope, these demagogues will rise up to take power. Time is running out. The poor can dine out only so long on illusions. Once they grasp that they have been betrayed, once they match the bleak reality of their future with the fantasies they are fed, once their homes are foreclosed and they realize that the jobs they lost are never coming back, they will react with a fury and vengeance that will snuff out the remains of our anemic democracy and usher in a new dark age.

Source: Chris Hedges © 2009 TruthDig.com / http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/11/30-7

asdfasfdsadf asfsaf

I’m reading a book about Buddhism, and one of the principles that is explained is the idea (sometimes labeled appropriately as a paradox) of “non-action.” Actions, according to this principle, are only genuine or meaningful if they issue from a complete lack of caring for the result. This seems paradoxical. How could action be distinguished from a spasm or mere movement without an underlying intention? This philosophical difficulty is not the subject of this post though.

There is another sense of this principle however, which I is aimed I think at the desire to always act. To solve a problem by confronting it directly rather than trying to contest it obliquely. Sometimes inaction may be the best response to a problem.

I think media coverage of certain events exemplifies a possible application of this principle. My example is Sarah Palin. The conservative literati has nothing, as far as I can tell, very good to say about her. They are afraid of her shallow populism and her cynical rejection of the importance of policy analysis or managerial experience. Yet she grows. She gains adherence and more detractors, and then the media covers the controversy. The cycle repeats over and over. Some accuse the media of a soap opera journalism, and the media defends itself by claiming that there is a really story here that needs covering.

I wish conservative writers and the greater media would adopt a principle of non action. By not covering Palin’s every move, the media would discover that there is no story to be covered and that interest in her doings is like a mist that burns off at the first hint of the morning sun. Conservative intellectuals would find that she poses no threat to the party’s future. I consider this an interpretation of the adage that “no news is good news.” Sometimes the best way to enhance public knowledge is, paradoxically, non coverage.

I attended the IASI World Congress earlier this year (March 2009). My presentation to the Congress was recorded. Although I do try to link to other people’s presentations in this talk and address members of the audience I do hope this video gives a feel for how my ideas about sharing in sport are developing and how they form the basis of my response to the David Crawford report and my fascination with Public Sphere.

This is the SlideShare presentation that I used at the presentation.

Anyone who did not see the roots and subsequent growth of the present crisis or who did not have the courage repeatedly to speak out in good time lacks either the competence or the integrity for a management position in banking.

And now there’s a T-shirt to prove it. Hiney shirts at CafePress

Founs in H1N1: It’s Pronounced “Hiney”

Wim Wenders closing speech – I’m talking about us, Europeans!

Closing speech by Wim Wenders, President of the European Film Academy, during the European Culture Forum.

The speech was read out by EFA director Ms Döring, and is available for download as a PDF on the European Commission website.

The think tank took place under the patronage of the President of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, who actually joined us on that occasion and took a very active and very outspoken part in it.

and Erkan’s rounup of interesting things from the web:

A new type of activism is being born,

Is activism dead – or is it blooming? Some look at the G20 demos or student occupations and see a vibrant youthful movement, taking on the injustices of the day. Others look at the same gatherings and see only a confused bedraggled crowd, a mere shadow of 1960s mobilisations.

Fans and Fears of ‘Lecture Capture’

DENVER — If professors record their lectures and put them online, will students still come to class?

That question came up in two different sessions at the 2009 Educause Conference here on Friday. And in both cases, the panelists cited research indicating that students’ likelihood of skipping class has no correlation with whether a professor decides to capture her lecture and post it the Web.

via: Venn diagram of mythical creatures

Somatic surveillance: corporeal control through information networks

from Social Science Open Access Repository by Monahan, Torin; Wall, Tyler

The politics of paranoia: paranoid positioning and conspiratorial narratives in the surveillance society

from Social Science Open Access Repository by Harper, David

Science fiction as a predictor of the present

Tin House, a literary magazine, asked me to introduce the current science fiction issue with an overview of the field. I wrote them an essay called “Radical Presentism,” about the way that science fiction reflects the present more than the future.

Love of Shopping is Not a Gene: exposing junk science and ideology in Darwinian Psychology

Anne Innis Dagg’s “Love of Shopping” is Not a Gene is a scathing, entertaining and extremely accessible geneticist’s critique of “Darwinian Psychology” — that is, the “science” of ascribing human behavior to genetic inevitability. Dagg, a biologist/geneticist at the University of Waterloo, identifies Darwinian Psychology as a nexus of ideological pseudoscience cooked to justify political agendas about the inevitability of social inequality, especially racial and sexual inequality.

How networked public spheres die

The Internet has often been praised for allowing new, fluid and hard-to-control public spaces to emerge. Often, these new public spaces would help to bring attention to stories/developments that may go unnoticed otherwise.

This has certainly been the case in Russia, where the vast majority of journalists had to tone down their criticism of the government for fear of being fired or worse. LiveJournal, by far the most influential blogging platform in the country, allowed dissidents to express their views, share news that didn’t make it to the mainstream media, or bring public attention to important activist campaigns that needed funding or participants.

New Report Debunks Common Myths about Energy
Source: Pacific Research Institute

The Pacific Research Institute, a free market think tank based in San Francisco, released a new report debunking the common myths about energy in America. Top Ten Energy Myths, by Thomas Tanton, senior fellow in Energy Studies, confronts ten popular myths about America’s energy sources, uses, and risks.

A Chennai-based Indian agency brings us a series of anti-smoking posters that compares smoking related deaths to those caused by guns, drugs, poison, etc. Another example of images speaking louder than the statistics themselves.found at So Much More

A reluctant and fearful West

found in Week in Review: November 15, 2009

Oxford Names “Unfriend” as Word of the Year

And here’s how Oxford  defines the Word of the Year:

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

Wow! It looks like the folks at Oxford did a lot of “unfriending” of their Facebook friends this year that they decide to name “unfriend” as Word of the Year.

                Danah Boyd examines the phenomenon of mediated public life, what kind of characteristics it has and how it is different from traditional public life. Today’s youth engaging in public life through social networks sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Bebo. In his article Boyd examines “social dynamics of mediated public life” in order to understand the role of technology in shaping public life.

                The emergence of technology has changed the relationship between ‘public’ and ‘private’ these terms should not be considered in “binary oppositions” to one another, but rather as overlapping notions.   According to Boyd social interaction and information distribution practices has changed dramatically, which is directly correlated to new social technologies. However, the majority of adults do not see the significance of these shifts.

                Boyd discuses the structure and functionality of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. He is saying that people (he mostly speaks about teenagers) all over the world are joining these sites. Users generate profiles which represent themselves using “text, images, video, audio, links, quizzes and surveys.” Boyd highlights three key features of social networking sites such as profiles, friends lists and commenting feature (“Testimonials, Comments, The Wall”). According Fogg Facebook became even more powerful when it launched Facebook platform that allowed 3^rd party developers to build in their features into Facebook, new features allowed users to share music and photos, voice interaction online, less than in a year 3^rd party developers have created over 6000 apps and attracted millions of users. Facebook platform made for the first time MIP (Mass Interpersonal Persuasion) possible (Fogg 2).       

                Let’s go back friends feature. It is crucial to see the difference between friends in real life vs. friends in social networking sites, Boyd is saying that this group does not have close ties but rather this feature (friends) “allows participants to articulate their imagined audience- or why they see being a part of their world within the site”.

                Social networking sites can be seen as “mediated publics”- it can be characterized as the type of environment where “people can gather publicly through mediating technology” (Boyd). Mediated publics have similar functions to unmediated publics, however social networking websites should be examined as another form of public sphere which has its unique characteristics:

1. Persistence- the conversations are not erased, but stay on the web for a long time and can be accessed at any moment by users.    
2. Searchability- the conversations and activity can be searched and tracked which is more difficult in unmediated publics.
3. Replicability- the conversation can be copied into different places which makes a very difficult to determine if the content was slightly altered.    
4. Invisible audiences – the audience is might not be present at the moment a person was expressing him or herself it became possible with the other three characteristics.     

The imagined audience of friends is a key concept of rules and structure changes in the alternative public sphere. In mediated publics physical environment cannot determine what is appropriate and what is not. It is impossible “to speak to all people across all space and all time” (Boyd). That is why we often have to imagine our audience and direct the speech to them; however the actual audience is different. In other words mediated public life have several complications in its architecture: lack of context and the other one is the phenomenon of scale. Potentially internet has the ability to reach millions of people; however in reality the most people remain invisible unless something happens such as embarrassing videos which were directed to a small audience, get enormous popularity and spread with incredible speed.

                The functions of Replicability and Searchability has lead to a situation where “conversations spread and context collapse” (Boyd) In other words we can easily search and find conversations, however they will be lacking the context because it could be only a part of conversation moreover it could be doctored.  The function of searchability makes people easily trackable, but the common logic is why anybody would need to do this. The question is should we create the surveillance for the mediated publics which is based on traditional form public unmediated life? Boyd is saying that the invisible audience has a lot of access to personal profiles, for example employers will try to uncover ‘true personality’ of their future employees. The users often assume that they are invisible because nobody cares about them; however this assumption is wrong, we do not know who our imagined audience is. The function of persistence of mediated publics can reveal a lot of personal information and conversations, journalists will often use the internet for their sources and it is even possible to destroy somebody’s public persona. The architecture of social networking sites can be seen as database where the personal information, profiles, images are separate pieces of data. Mediated publics have all characteristics of database and that is why such function as searchability and replicability became possible.     

                The next part of Boyd’s essay addressed to educators who should acknowledge how mediated public life is shifting the lives of youth. Educator should take into consideration next aspects:

1. Youth want to hang out with their friends in youth space
2. The internet mirrors and magnifies all aspects of social life
3. There are no truth, only conversations             

Then Boyd discusses an educator’s role and that they should guide their students through conversations but not through the assertion of power. In order to participate in conversations with the students educators should prepare themselves: create a profile, use text, images and songs to build their online identity, not to serf for their students, but if they invite them (educators) as a friend to accept it (it is a sign of respect) and etc.  Boyd sees very important to acknowledge this new phenomenon of mediated public life which became possible with the emergence of social networking technologies. It is still unclear how it should be regulated, but it is very important for the users to understand the characteristics of new public sphere (Persistence, Searchability, Replicability, Invisible audiences) which make online persona visible and traceable.

Some months ago I was listening to a discussion on radio. An economist was required in an atmosphere of good humour to admit that he might not be impartial, that he might have an interest, that his views might be conditioned by personal circumstances. The suspicion? Well, that was the source of the humour. He had to come clean on his relationship to Mary O’Rourke, the popular Fianna Fáil politician; he admitted to being her nephew! Perhaps this was going too far but it is generally commendable that people who take part in public discussion be open and explicit about possible determinants of their views. We consider it normal, for example, to ask a member of a TV studio audience who offers an opinion, if he or she is a member of a political party. There is however one, glaring, secretive exception.

The topic which dominates political discussion in Ireland today is incomes policy, how much people can be paid in these straitened times. This breaks down into two themes: reducing wages to competitive levels and reducing public sector pay to reflect a greatly reduced tax take.

Many of those targeted for pay cuts say that they cannot afford any further reduction in pay. Most of those talking in the media about policy enjoy salaries that are multiples of the average wage. Unlike party membership or having a political auntie, salary is kept secret or not considered a possible determinant of argument, a vested interest. There has always been a quiet and polite reluctance to divulge or discuss a person’s income, the matter being considered strictly private. The history of political communication, democratization and progress itself can be traced through issues being dragged out of the private realm into the light of politics. It is time that public debate took another intrusive step.

Consider how newspapers frequently place a person’s age in brackets or how TV identifies, describes and classifies a contributor with an informative caption under their picture. Now, consider a debate about pay in which contributors’ incomes appeared in brackets and in captions. If Josephine Bloggs, Economist with A, Professor of B, Economics Editor at C, Director of D or CEO of E, appeared to argue pay policy with her salary clearly shown, a more open, honest debate could take place.

Introduction

In 1974 Raymond Williams wrote an essay about the impact of television on society, “Television: Technology and Cultural Form.” In it, he expressed concern that while television had the ability to offer “extreme social choices” and could potentially lead to a “more educated and participatory democracy,” it also has the ability to further limit and regionalize the way we think and interact with one another to the few choices offered to us by large corporations and institutions.

In today’s reading, “The Lo(n)g Revolution: the Blogosphere as an alternative Public Sphere?”, Anna Notaro begins with this excerpt from Williams’ article in order to put her own into context. While Williams’ assertions are seemingly out-of-date, they can be reapplied to the technology of today, which is the Internet. Her goal for this essay is to explore the political implications of the Internet and she wonders whether the Internet will remain a delimited public arena in which intellectual exchange freely flows between ordinary people, or become highly monitored and limited by potentially anti-democratic values. She concentrates on the “blogosphere” in particular (a term coined by William Quick in 2001 to refer to the “intellectual cyperspace” that bloggers inhabit), and its role in relation to “the intersection between technological change and a reformulation of the public sphere.”

Notaro goes on to explain Williams’ idea from his 1961 article “The Long Revolution,” that there are three long, simultaneous revolutions occurring—the democratic revolution, the industrial (technological) revolution, and the cultural revolution. Williams had an optimistic view of these revolutions, arguing that the public’s desire to govern themselves was directly related to the development of industrial organization (or in more modern terms, the development of new technologies), and that the cultural revolution then, reflected the public’s desire to allow everyone to actively learn and participate in culture as opposed to a small group of people. The link between these three revolutions is less obvious today, and Notaro wonders whether it is possible to continue to be optimistic about this relationship. Is this democratic desire still relevant in a time when large companies are all fighting to be the ultimate controllers of our consumption?

Habermas’s Public Sphere

Notaro next explores Jurgen Habermas’s idea of the public sphere, and how much of it has changed or remained the same in today’s technological world. Habermas’s idea, in “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere written in 1962,” was that in 18th century Europe, the public sphere emerged as a forum for critical discussion amongst the public, which would allow for the free sharing of ideas, ultimately serving as a check to state power. In the more modern times of the Internet, the public sphere has evolved. Notaro is skeptical about applying a concept that was formulated in a different media world to the current media environment, especially due to one aspect of Habermas’s idea of the public sphere—discussion strictly as a form of rational debate, ignoring any sort of emotive language that could be used in a free flow of ideas. He believed that everyone should have “a common interest in truth, no matter their status.”

This idea has been critiqued due to its narrow-minded nature. Modern theorists argue that this idea implies a “public” only open to the elite and educated, while more realistically in today’s technological world, there are many publics that include anyone and everyone, in the form of list-servs, chat rooms, blogs, and gaming communities. Many media scholars seek to discard Habermas’s view of the public sphere completely. Others believe that there are still modern implications of his theory. Notaro is hesitant to discard Harbermas’s idea of the public sphere as being completely irrelevant to the modern media world, however she argues that even if it can be applied, Habermas’s public is only a small component of the numerous publics that exist on the Internet today.

Internet and Electronic Democracy

Many scholars believe that computer-mediated communication opens the doors for democratic progress by enabling widespread discussion and the ability to make each and every voice heard. Rheingold, one scholar, among many others, who believes in this newfound democracy, strongly believes that technology, “if properly understood and defended by enough citizens, does have democratizing potential in the way that alphabets and printing presses had democratizing potential.” These scholars see the Internet as a utopian, electronic agora (public forum of ancient Greece). In line, to some extent, with Habermas’s public sphere, blogs and news groups engage people in discussions of public and political relevance, promoting a more widespread democracy.

However, there are also many media scholars who lack this optimistic view of an electronic democracy. Benjamin Barber conjured three different scenarios of what could happen with the relationship between technology and democracy: the Pangloss scenario, the Pandora scenario, and the Jeffersonian scenario. The Pangloss scenario refers to the ability of technology to serve corporate agendas. The Pandora scenario refers to the idea of the government utilizing technologies in order to control the public and create an “invisible tyranny” which takes away freedoms and limits privacy. The Jeffersonian scenario is refreshingly optimistic compared to the first two, and refers to a society in which the government and its citizens use technology in order to promote active participation in democracy online and elsewhere.

Backtracking for a moment, Barber’s Pandora scenario directly ties in to the second reading of the day, “Scroogled” by Cory Doctorow. In this highly imagined story, a Google employee comes back from a long vacation in Mexico to find that the Department of Homeland Security, along with the entire American government, has partnered with Google to gain access to the search histories of citizens in order to monitor their actions online as a way to eliminate any sort of threats to the security of the nation. I won’t get into too many details of the story, but the main character, Greg, is interrogated by the DHS on his way home for some completely innocent, yet seemingly threatening searches he made while he was away. His friend and fellow Google employee, Maya, explains to him exactly what happened while he was gone and informs him that once the government gain access to a person’s Google identity, it monitors it forever. There is no more privacy whatsoever. Maya tells Greg she has created a software capable of completely wiping out and masking online identities so that the government can no longer track them. Chaos ensues, and by the end of the story, the software is used by Google as a form of political corruption, in order to erase the questionable histories of certain political candidates.

This whole scenario seems completely fantastical, but at the same time it is unsettling to realize that this sort of government control is completely possible with today’s technology. This story, combined with many of the ideas I will discuss shortly, brings up my own questions about the democratic value of the Internet as well as ties back to questions of freedom in the use of the computer due to interfaces. But I will come back to that at the end.

Now, back to Barber’s last scenario (Jeffersonian), which envisions a more democratic society. This scenario again reflects people’s tendency to think that new technology allows for some democratic utopia to form. Rheingold, while he advocates this utopia, still realizes that the Internet can be easily commodified and while it seems like the Internet allows the public to break free from traditional media’s monopoly over their attention, in reality it is just another means for companies and the government influence public discourse. Carl Boggs is one scholar who seriously doubts the Internet’s democratic capabilities, saying that it does not in fact “empower ordinary people,” but rather “the global village…operates at the expense of real communities.”

At the end of this section Notaro leaves us with a paradox: the online public sphere will always lack a certain democratic value due to the inequality and irrationality of certain online discourse, but at the same time, the Internet draws in many different people, enables many new connections and allows for democratic discussion. She concludes that our understanding of democracy and the Internet need to be reworked and continuously developed on a “glocal” scale, and that this democracy is worth fighting for in order to protect ourselves from media conglomerates.

The Blogosphere

Notaro briefly outlines the development of weblogs by referring to Rebecca Blood’s Weblogs: a history and perspective (2000). Blogs began as a way to discuss specific scholarly topics to a more personal diary, that transformed consumers into creators of information.

Blood stresses the importance of blogs today in a world where we are exposed to so much information so frequently that it is difficult to stop and reflect on any given piece of information anymore. She claims that modern blogs are one remedy. Notaro notes that since Blood’s article in 2000, blogs—both directly political in nature and simply reflective—have contributed to national and international political dialogue, especially after September 11th. One example she gives is that of Salam Pax from Baghdad. He wrote a blog about the mood of the city as it awaited the U.S. bombing, which created a buzz around the world. These random, unprofessional blogs have begun to have a real impact on the journalistic world. Notaro argues that bloggers and journalists are all part of the same family of writers, and that all blogs have some journalistic aspect, whether or not they live up to professional standards.

Notaro then defines the blogosphere. She explains how blogs are collective in nature and foster ongoing active participation—through comments—by tons of people anywhere in the world. The computer language is a common one that eliminates certain political and cultural divisions between different regions of the world. She says that this transcendence of physical and cultural borders “presents a case of interactivity in a local/global public sphere that may re-energize democratic values.” Despite this, Notaro questions the novelty of such a public sphere. She thinks that perhaps the idea of ordinary people discussing in the public sphere is old news, and connects it back to Habermas’s idea of the public sphere emerging way back in the 18th century.

Andrew Baoill sets out to find this connection between Habermas and the blogosphere. He identified three factors of Habermas’s theories: inclusivity, disregard of external rank, and rational debate. He claims that while the blogosphere is somewhat inclusive in that anyone can start a blog, it cannot help but favor certain blogs over others, failing to disregard rank. Further, the fact that there are so many blogs out there, very few of them will be given a chance for rational discussion. Therefore, the blogosphere does not live up to Habermas’s ideal public sphere. Notaro concludes that the blogosphere is just a “constellation of intellectual space” where people can freely express themselves, as they feel necessary, without much order to it.

One problem is that because there is so much information out there, people begin to filter out only the things they want to hear without listening to what other people have to say. It creates “echo chambers” where the individual becomes important and the public sphere begins to decline. This divide between the individual and the public is becoming more and more apparent.

Notaro then describes a report done by the Hansard Society, which assessed the state of political blogging in the UK. These are some of the findings:

• Blogging has the potential to significantly impact on political engagement and political processes as they provide an opportunity for alternative informal voices to enter into the political debate without a great deal of cost or effort.

• Blogging breaks down the barriers between public and privates spaces and allows elected representatives to put across their individuality and personality.

• The availability of low-cost, low maintenance authoring software means blogs are far easier to construct and update than conventional websites.

• The most appealing blogs are those which provide genuine debate between bloggers and visitors to the blog. Blogs that do not offer this facility give visitors little reason to return.

• At the moment, political blogging is still regarded as the pursuit of internet connoisseurs rather than ordinary members of the public. While our jury found blogs easy to navigate, they found the tone of content unappealing.

• Blogging has the potential to be of enormous benefit to MPs and other elected representatives who use it as a listening post rather than another tool to broadcast their ideas, achievements or party dogma.

Notaro notes a paradox in these findings: while politicians are needed in order to represent the diversity of the public, blogs wind up eliminating the need of individuals to be spoken for by someone else. This feeling of individualism provides a great sense of democracy in that individuals no longer feel the need to have their opinions represented by others, but instead people want to express their own opinions for themselves. Notaro celebrates the death of one ideology and the birth of a “digital nation” full of individuals. She calls them Digital Citizens. 

I would like to connect parts of this reading back to our discussion of the desktop interface. In my last post on the reading by Steven Johnson, I mentioned that the original desktop released by Apple was considered revolutionary in that it enabled the ordinary person to be able to use the computer and “understand” its functions. Apple advertised the interface as providing a sort of freedom, which would allow people to have an equal understanding and ability to use the computer. We discussed, however, that in reality this understanding is false and that while we think we are being given choices and freedom within the interface, we are actually being completely influenced by the designs of the interface designers and only know and understand what they allow us to. This ties back to the skepticism of scholars like Benjamin Barber about the true freedom that the Internet allows us. Perhaps we believe that we have complete freedom on the web, but in reality the Internet is filled with advertisements and agenda of all sorts, so that the content we see is in fact regulated to some extent, whether we realize it or not. Do you think that the Internet is limiting or is it truly free? Further, do you think that something like “Scroogled,” where we literally have no freedom whatsoever, could actually happen? Are we heading in that direction?

This weeks readings were Anna Notaro’s “The Lo(n)g Revolution: the Blogosphere as an alternative Public Sphere?” and Cory Doctorow’s Google fiction “Scroogled.”

In “The Lo(n)g Revolution: the Blogosphere as an alternative Public Sphere?” Anna Notaro suggests during this period of never-ending technological advances and the expansiveness of Internet, that we are entering a time where the blogosphere is not just an alternative but, instead, is the new public sphere. Notaro reminds us, however, that we are often clouded by a naïve excitement in the hope that the internet will be an ideal agent for social change and “true” democracy, but we must wait to see if it will live up to its potential.

So how do blogs play a key role in this idea of public discourse, professionalism, and political communication?

In “The Long Revolution”, Raymond Williams explains that new social cultures exist at the intersection of the democratic revolution, the industrial revolution, and the cultural revolution. For Williams, these obvious examples of change prove the benefit in fighting for a “human order.” In other words, we must not take our current situations for granted but rather, must act on our convictions.

Similarly, Habermas introduces the idea of the “public sphere” and its influence on ideas in  “Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere.” He argues that “the greatest contribution to the development of the public sphere was the emergence of its institutional base, the organizational structures that allowed these ‘webs of social development’ to exist. It links the growth of an urban culture, as the new arena of public life, to a new infrastructure for social communication.”

At the base of the public sphere are the webs of social development where we can exchange information and opinions. With the invention of the Internet, blogs, and chat rooms, the public sphere has become accessible to all people. The difference, according to Notaro, is that the Internet has introduced many publics so people have the ability to choose their communities, their peers, and their public.

However, with this new individual power that the Web provides, we must question to role of traditional democracy in relation to our new media environments. Many scholars claim that the blogosphere and the net promote “democratic progress,” and citizens can interact with each other as equals. Habermas cites this as an ideal society or, agora, where “the discussion among citizens issues were made topical and took shape.”

Benjamin Barber further explores the relationship between mediated communication and the democratic system. He presents three potential scenarios: The Pangloss scenario where technology merely caters to a corporate agenda, the Pandora scenario in which the government uses new technology for power and repression, and the ideal Jeffersonian scenario where governments and citizens adjust technology to promote participation and democracy.

Notaro uses Rebecca Blood’s history of blogs to highlight the core of her discussion. Blood explains that blogs evolved from forums where people commented on particular subjects or scholarly articles into “personal diaries” where anyone can express his or her feelings and opinions to the Internet public. Blogs have created a public sphere that transforms the consumers of information into the creators of information.

One problem with these Web bases public spheres is, rather than exposing ourselves to new ideas, we simply “tailor our electronic environment to hear our own views reinforced over and over again. Blogs could thus become some sort of ‘echo chambers’ where people end up listening only to their own opinions.

Notaro goes on to discuss the political implications of the blogosphere. She introduces the Hansard Society, “an independent non-partisan organization working to promote effective parliamentary democracy” that set out to study  “how democratic institutions can adapt to the information age.” Their report was released in July 2004 and some of the key findings were:

• Blogging has the potential to significantly impact on political engagement and political processes as they provide an opportunity for alternative informal voices to enter into the political debate without a great deal of cost or effort.
• Blogging breaks down the barriers between public and privates spaces and allows elected representatives to put across their individuality and personality.
• The availability of low-cost, low maintenance authoring software means blogs are far easier to construct and update than conventional websites.
• The most appealing blogs are those which provide genuine debate between bloggers and visitors to the blog. Blogs that do not offer this facility give visitors little reason to return.
• At the moment, political blogging is still regarded as the pursuit of internet connoisseurs rather than ordinary members of the public. While our jury found blogs easy to navigate, they found the tone of content unappealing.
• Blogging has the potential to be of enormous benefit to MPs and other elected representatives who use it as a listening post rather than another tool to broadcast their ideas, achievements or party dogma

Looking at these results, Notaro concludes that because the blogosphere removes the barriers between private and public spaces, it acts as a “vehicle for self-presentation. [B]logs diminish people’s need to be spoken for by others.” In theory, this increased accessibility paves the way for a more democratic society in which the citizens take a significant and active role.”

In that same vein, in an essay that appeared in Wired, Jon Katz notes:

• Where freedom is rarely mentioned in mainstream media anymore, it is ferociously defended – and exercised daily – on the Net.
• Where our existing information systems seek to choke the flow of information through taboos, costs, and restrictions, the new digital world celebrates the right of the individual to speak and be heard – one of the cornerstone ideas behind American media and democracy.
• Where our existing political institutions are viewed as remote and unresponsive, this online culture offers the means for individuals to have a genuine say in the decisions that affect their lives.
• Where conventional politics is suffused with ideology, the digital world is obsessed with facts.
• Where our current political system is irrational, awash in hypocritical god-and-values talk, the Digital Nation points the way toward a more rational, less dogmatic approach to politics.
• The world’s information is being liberated, and so, as a consequence, are we.

Ultimately, the Internet allows people to do things they couldn’t do before from allowing them to experiment with their sexual identities without being humiliated, allow researchers the ability to get the newest data in hours, give people the opportunity to express themselves without having their views filtered through journalists, and push agendas they see important. This brings to mind Clay Shirky’s points on collective action. The blogosphere gives collective action a home.

In some of her closing words, Notaro says, these days, we lead two lives: “On one side we exist as individuals, made up of flesh and bones, on the other we are ‘digital persons’, whose lives enfold on the Net.” This idea of ‘digital people’ speaks to Cory Doctorow’s fiction story “Scroogled.”

Doctorow’s story addresses the threat of loss of privacy on the Web–an all too real topic in today’s society.  Doctorow illuminates the severity of this threat by telling the story of a former Google employees US customs experience. In the story, Google plays an instrumental role in Immigration security as, “we are now Googled at the border.” By using Google ads, the government determines whether or not a person going through customs might be a threat to national security.

“Every time you visited a page with Google ads on it, or used Google maps or Google mail–even if you sent mail to a Gmail account–the company diligently collected your info. Recently, the site’s search-optimization software had begun using the data to tailor Web searches to individual users. It proved to be a revolutionary tool for advertisers. An authoritarian government would have other purposes in mind.”

We spend so much time online that Google probably knows us better than our best friend. The main character, Greg, thought to himself what he put into that search bar “was likely more revealing than what he told his shrink.” Many of us Google things and participate in searches under the assumption that we are doing it in the privacy of our own homes, but each click is tracked and clicks add up and can reveal a lot about you. More and more, we are becoming ‘digital persons’ and each digital person has a file. Greg hadn’t quite realized how much of him had migrated onto the Web and worked its way into Google’s server farms. They had his entire online identity.

This story brings to mind many questions about power, access, and privacy. Is it ethical for Google to be handing over our personal information to benefit advertisers? Is it ethical for Google to give our information to governments in the interest of national security? What kind of access do Google employees have to our information since Maya (Greg’s Google friend) said she would look at users profiles?

There is a quote towards the end of the story that may seem a little exaggeratory to some:

“My parents left east Germany in 65′. The used to tell me about the Stasi. The secret police would put everything about you in your file, if you told an unpatriotc joke, whatever. Whether they meant it or not, what Google has created is no different.”

Does Google know too much? What can we do about it? Do we care enough to do anything about it?

In Australian public life, there’s a range of Christian voices — Danny Nalliah, George Pell, plus a constant trickle of centre-right politicians trying to put in a good word.  The problem is, few of these voices resonate with me as a Christian.

It’s good news that the Centre for Public Christianity provides a thoughtful, credible and articulate Christian voice.  It’s headed up by two of Australia’s best Christian thinkers, Greg Clarke and John Dickson.  Case in point: their roundup on Joe Hockey’s recent comments about the Bible.

Check out their videos and articles and, if you like what you see, why not e-mail ABC’s Q&A to suggest Greg Clarke and John Dickson as panellists — both to represent Australian Christians and to provide a coherent Christian perspective on Australian public issues.

Disclaimer:
I love paris
I am here for 2 days on business
In the last 3 days I had 2 red-eyes
Tel-aviv to boston and boston to paris (way too short)
My plane landed far from the terminal. waited for a bus. rain. coat is in the suitcase. cold.

It is now 23:30
I am sitting at ‘les deux magot‘
Just ate a chevre chaud on toast and am drinking mouton cadet

————-

Has paris lost its charm?
CDG was once an architectural masterpiece, with fantastic understanding of flow, moving lots of people in style to far away, romantic places. It had vision, and lumiere, the lighting was jet-age
It is now a dark, decaying structure where people wait in long lines, bump into each other, exits are too tight, the place is dark and resembles orly, a terminal of a developing world

Bonjour paris

I order a double espresso machiatto and a croissant
Who says I can not speak french?

The coffee is out of a machine, the croissant is with abricot
I ask for the original croissant beurre

Both coffee and croissant are not as good as in israel
What happened in 30 years?
Well, israel has become a coffee empire and the croissant is mass produced, not by a artisan boulanger with love
It is stale.
Is paris stale? Has it lost its charm?

The tour montparnasse is old, still erect, still out of place
La couple is not full of artists. Modiglianni is dead

Has paris lost its charm?
The closhard are not french, they are homeless immigrants
Globalization

It’s not you, it’s me
Have I lost my charm?
I am not as youthful as 30 years ago
Have I ever had charm?

Well paris sure did; and it does
The museums are full of art
The streets are alive, with the sound of music
Hausmann did a good job. A very good job.
The light falls on the city with grace
Some stores (gap, mcDo excluded) are breathtaking
I walk into a book store
Fall in love with the smell, the paper, the books
Liberte,Egalite, Fraternite
velolib, still world leaders in smart mass transit
From here, israel looks like an isolated place in another world
One without justice, or values
Complex

Paris is still desirable and expensive
The art in the streets and museums still take the wind out of me
The grey skies add ambiance
The shoes are still exquisite
The cafes still have plastic straw chairs on the sidewalks, chairs side by side, overlooking a couple walking hand in hand, stopping for a kiss

The restaurants still have simplicity, authenticity and  produce with appellation controlee

Has paris lost its charm?
The girls are sexy, and have not lost their french
The students of the latin quarter still have round glasses
The waiters still wear papillon and give you good advice if you speak french
There are people from 50 countries on the streets, mostly smiling and highly satisfied with their latest purchase, hidden in beautiful shopping bags, from boutique shops that have been around since 1817
The invalide shines when the sun comes out
The sacre coeur is still beautifully kitsch
The Swedish lady sitting next to me smiles

Has paris lost its charm?
It like a high-school sweetheart you see after 30 years
Not the same, has had better days, but still your heart misses a beat
Once loved, always in love

Less of a post than a last minute pointer to some great work by artist Jamie Allen. The Wunderbar festival has been happening over the past week all over the city, but Jamie’s piece From Here On Out is a particular highlight.  Less about the hidden architecture of the city, and perhaps more to do with imagined and potential ones based on the city’s histories, it plays with the idea of augmented realities on mobile devices by layering animation on top of images of the city as you walk around it.  Opportunities to do the walk end on the 15th November, but I imagine documentation will remain online, and the software is available to download somewhere (I’ll get onto finding it).  I’ll be doing the walk today and be writing about it afterward.  Check out the site for more information.

just saw the movie revolutionary road for the 2nd time, and i think it is better than i remembered.

my friend Moshe says movies should be watched twice. the first time is to get the plot out of the way. especially for us israelis who spend most of the time looking at the subtitles at the bottom of the frame.

kate winslet is becoming one of my favorite actresses.

mike shannon, was nominated for best supporting actor  because of this scene. seems a bit of an underrated actor. expect great things from him.

check out this scene. extremely powerful

i love it when ‘the truth’ comes out.

it is there. we all know it. we do not forget its existence. we just live every day to hide it. deeper. then, it pops out. when you least expect it.

i believe most people like the truth in small doses. the beauty of this scene is that it comes in large portions. ’super-size’. a bit too much to swallow.dreams are crushed.

the price people pay to live within expectations of others.

Source

I am attending the National Elite Sports Council (NESC)’s Forum in Canberra next week. In addition to the Forum web site there is a Ning site for the Forum. A link to the conference program can be found here.

I have the opportunity to present on Day Two of the Forum and I have been thinking for a while about what to say. After my first draft I started again and late this week had my thoughts focused by Charles Leadbeater’s work. I have posted the draft and the presentation on SlideShare.

This is the presentation I hope to use as the framework for my talk.

I am using more Creative Commons images from Flickr in my presentations. Just searching for the images is transforming how I think. I have been thinking about presentation style too and am fascinated about how I might mash the Night Air, Garrison Keillor’s Radio Program and the Bush Telegraph for this Forum.

I hope to blog during the Forum. I am mindful of a recent post by Graham Attwell in sharing ideas live. Graham observed:

I am all for openness, open education, open discussions, open knowledge and a culture of sharing. Yet as digital identities become ever more important, it is critical that we have the rights and the tools to manage that identity and that social network providers appreciate and support those rights and make it easy for individuals to understand how they can mange both privacy and openness. This is an issue which will not go away.

This is a news item about the Forum.

I am living in a city that one could say is profoundly defined by its absences. A huge section of its heart is missing, and in its place is an intestinal creep of a shopping mall built in the early 1970s over the site of terraces and streets built in 1824. It is currently hemorrhaging from its south-westerly point over the site of an old market and now-demolished Georgian terraces.  Cheap looking and indecently high, this new development will house yet another gigantic department store, dwarfing the tiny businesses on the opposite side of the street and eventually running them into the ground, creating more streets that are beginning to house spectral impressions of commerce; more absences.  We are becoming passive observers watching the city self-regulate itself, and a city where traditional notions of psychogeography become more difficult to practice.  In other words this architectural monolithicism of Newcastle’s redevelopment begins to skewer the ability to view the present through the prism of the past.  It denies us free movement across the city, and equally as importantly, by the leveling of entire quarters of buildings and streets and passageways and alleys and nooks and crannies, it denies the vertical descent through the past – and the tendancy for gothic imagination – that is so critical to some aspects of psychogeography (Coverley) – this is nothing new in Newcastle, the city’s topography is already a rather odd and dislocated one, with a north/south motorway ripping straight through cutting off the mainly residential east from the city centre – so it becomes increasingly difficult to envision how to undermine/suspend the everyday when the urban centres we live in aren’t necessarily in a state of decay anymore, aren’t abandoned and imbued – as the situationists implied – with hidden wonders and visions to be drawn out, but are developments of enormous featureless, windowless and subjugating blocks that force us unsurprisingly into a total non-negotiation with the urban.  Places like Eldon Square in Newcastle, and more recently, Liverpool One, and Belfast’s Victoria Square demonstrate an aspiration towards a technocratic revisionism, whereby whole  quarters of city centres are bulldozed to create new spaces of what Kenneth Frampton calls ‘absolute placelessness’, where sites’ prehistories are expunged forever, and the potential for a transformation/evolution across time erased completely.  The notion of urban regeneration through the cultivation of a site has been mostly disregarded, and new buildings tend to no longer embody the the layers of local histories that give us our individual senses of place.  In fact, they tend to look so absolutely identical that Belfast, Liverpool and Newcastle become the same city centre.  (As Kenneth Frampton puts it, ‘Through this layering into the site the idiosyncrasies of places find their expression without falling into sentimentality’).   The ability to read a site is significantly weakened and it becomes very difficult to reconstitute a place by way of local histories, poetry, and imagination when standing in front of an impotent concrete slab. Opportunities for finding new ways of apprehending and interrogating our environment are diminishing.  Architecture in this case is absolutely defining how we operate, and, contrary to utopian claims of architects and developers that new architecture can allow for new practices of living to evolve, is simply serving to accommodate consumerism.  These are oppressively determinate spaces that cannot tolerate any user-defined appropriation for fear of unpredictability or destabilization, for fear of undermining established social relations.  Architecture can perhaps only overcome this through the creation of fluid spaces that are open and indeterminate enough to allow for some sort of collective interpretation that is itself always open to reconfiguration.  Predefined mainstream social relations can then be destabilized and put up for subversion – as they should always be.

As we are being shunted further from the histories and narratives of the cities we live in, physical place seems to become less and less important to how we constitute our notions of the self (this isn’t necessarily a bad thing).  The ability to sense a place as a place-through-time is neutralized and undermined by the demolition of buildings (and pathways) inscribed with many many layers and impressions of use in favour of the construction of sprawling ‘placeless’ spaces which, by their design, are devoid of any capacity to embody the prehistory of the area.  These constructions erase the traces and imprints of the people and populations from the constitutions of cities.  They are designed to house the large retail chains familiar to every city, which dislocates one from apprehending any traces of locational identity.  It is  perhaps unsurprising then that most of us walk our cities with a rather cynical detachment.  The indistinguishable nature of modern city centre spaces (as well as suburban areas) intensifies this alienation, and almost completely hampers old surrealist and situationist strategies of designating specific areas of cities as harbours of emotional effects to which one would consciously expose oneself as a means to transcend the everyday.  However in the past one didn’t necessarily need to psychologically differentiate between areas in a city in order to create a semi-fictional playground of locational identities, as the seeping rationalization of urban assemblages that had built up over hundreds of years hadn’t quite taken hold – cities were aggregations of intense social/cultural differences and particulars.

Where current (urban) site-specific art can be situated in light of this is therefore, as Miwon Kwon suggests, as work that seeks to re-imagine difference, rather than, as early site specific art was, work that exploited difference that was apparent.  However, this is also problematic. [More to come!]

Howard Horowitz's Manhattan poem, 1997

Perhaps one interesting tributary from this – which has been beautifully documented by Katharine Harmon in You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination – is how we literally map our imagination onto places, and how we create our own personal contours of our experience.  What is it that drives this compulsion to create associative imaginary maps of our landscapes?  It certainly seems like the more introverted sibling of the situationist/surrealist wanderers, where information and imagination collide to form maps that are perhaps less about navigation than cultural representation, demonstrating that each person’s image of their surroundings is radically different from the next, however, as Harmon’s book illustrates, maps of the imagination were being made many many centuries before the flâneurs stalked the streets of Paris and documented their wanderings, or Debord and his cohorts began their situationist re-imaginings of the city.

Road map of Austria in shape of a heart, Nina Katchadourian, 1997