NetDynam 2.0

having grown up in sydney and enjoyed the 80′s public art of the BUGAUP group – who altered billboard ads to make them both humorous and critical of their products (mainly tobacco and alcohol – see: www.bugaup.org/) – i am now still interested in the idea of ‘culture jamming’ and what www.adbusters.org/ calls the ‘mental environment’ and how it’s shaped by various forms of the media (‘publicity’ as john berger used to refer to it. see for example his TV series and little book “ways of seeing”, now so out-of-date in its language and images as to be retro in flavour).
[sorry about that sentence - not a good 'lead' at all!]
those intent on engaging with the practices of the big corporations on their home turf have recently turned to the video ad campaign, posting clips on youtube, where these days lots of people hope to claim a little bit of the global fame from video popularity. but big corporations have their little ways of removing negative portrayals, as greenpeace has found with nestle, who managed to get this one pulled from youtube – thanks perhaps to being bigger than china wrt google?

Have a break? from Greenpeace UK on Vimeo.

almost a year had gone by since the precious boy-cat died before i began to look at cats again with a view to adoption. eventually my desires for the royal tortie mackeral tabby type were put aside and i just took home two from the possible bunch i was introduced to at the RSPCA shelter for cats and dogs out at yagoona. they were busy out there on both saturday and sunday. but i could not choose on the saturday, and indeed left there with my hands against my cheeks in the horror of it all. too many cats all looking keen to come and stay with me. indeed, too much choice is not conducive to feeling fine – what if i make the wrong choice? the horror of being the ~selector~ when some are passed over in favour of others. so i needed to sleep on it all and go back the next day.

i tried to avoid selecting a pair that looked like creepy and precious, but now i have them home, i feel i have failed miserably in reaching that goal. meanwhile i have had bad dreams in which i have left creepy and precious in the care of someone else while we leave them permanently, but we do not get far when i burst into tears and insist we go back and get them….

it’s the link to the me that has gone.

but now our lives are a little less sedate since millie and willow have arrived. millie is older and wiser and a little nonchalent – except when she pounces on willow and makes her cry out. willow is a ratbag little tabby monster who wants to get into everything, climb everything, and eat all on her plate. they may need be called princess and punksie before long.

here they are in a rare moment of recumbancy:

Gather round people let me tell you a story
An eight year long story of power and pride
British Lord Vestey and Vincent Lingiarri
Were opposite men on opposite sides

Vestey was fat with money and muscle< Beef was his business, broad was his door
Vincent was lean and spoke very little<
He had no bank balance, hard dirt was his floor

From little things big things grow

From little things big things grow

Gurindji were working for nothing but rations
Where once they had gathered the wealth of the land< Daily the pressure got tighter and tighter
Gurindju decided they must make a stand

They picked up their swags and started off walkin
At Wattie Creek they sat themselves down
Now it don’t sound like much but it sure got tongues talking
Back at the homestead and then in the town

From little things big things grow
From little things big things grow

Vestey man said I’ll double your wages
Seven quid a week you’ll have in your hand
Vincent said uhuh we’re not talking about wages
We’re sitting right here till we get our land
Vestey man roared and Vestey man thundered
You don’t stand the chance of a cinder in snow
Vince said if we fall others are rising

From little things big things grow
From little things big things grow

Then Vincent Lingiarri boarded an aeroplane
Landed in Sydney, big city of lights
And daily he went round softly speaking his story
To all kinds of men from all walks of life

And Vincent sat down with big politicians
This affair they told him is a matter of state
Let us sort it out, your people are hungry
Vincent said no thanks, we know how to wait

From little things big things grow
From little things big things grow

Then Vincent Lingiarri returned in an aeroplane
Back to his country once more to sit down
And he told his people let the stars keep on turning
We have friends in the south, in the cities and towns

Eight years went by, eight long years of waiting
Till one day a tall stranger appeared in the land
And he came with lawyers and he came with great ceremony
And through Vincent’s fingers poured a handful of sand

From little things big things grow

From little things big things grow

That was the story of Vincent Lingairri
But this is the story of something much more
How power and privilege can not move a people
Who know where they stand and stand in the law

From little things big things grow
From little things big things grow
From little things big things grow
From little things big things grow

former PM gough whitlam with vincent lingiari



I turned off Google Buzz for several reasons. The most important reason is that social apps such as Buzz and Facebook aren’t compelling in any awesome way for me. It could be said that I indulge Facebook. I spend less than an hour ‘there’ in a given week. It is not the best way, using the internet, to communicate with me. Basically, I can take it or leave it. Although reconnecting with old friends has been rewarding, real connection makes demands Facebook doesn’t support.

On the other hand, I like Facebook’s gallery feature, and, I like the feature that allows for publicizing blog posts, (where the feed automatically posts slugs from blog postings across my two personal blogs, and netdynam. Facebook would add more value if I leveraged it more in that direction. But, I do not.

So, Google Buzz, doesn’t trip my undeveloped social app triggers at all. It’s more intrusive in being tied into gmail, and, as it happened, I was forced to deprecate gmail its HTML interface because–in the aftermath of Buzz’s rollout, I discovered add-on java broke Gmail’s java as far as its advanced interface goes on OSX Tiger. between Tiger’s awful java implementation and Google’s hellish support, I was stuck.

I’m on Myspace-Musicians too. (Kamelmauz) Ugh.

A netydnam colleague emailed an interesting article from The New York Review of Books,

In the World of Facebook, by Charles Petersen; reviewing two books, The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal (by Ben Mezrich) Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (by Julia Angwin).

The article’s second paragraph:

What is “social networking”? For all the vagueness of the term, which now seems to encompass everything we do with other people online, it is usually associated with three basic activities: the creation of a personal Web page, or “profile,” that will serve as a surrogate home for the self; a trip to a kind of virtual agora, where, along with amusedly studying passersby, you can take a stroll through the ghost town of acquaintanceships past, looking up every person who’s crossed your path and whose name you can remember; and finally, a chance to remove the digital barrier and reveal yourself to the unsuspecting subjects of your gaze by, as we have learned to put it with the Internet’s peculiar eagerness for deforming our language, “friending” them, i.e., requesting that you be connected online in some way.

If I wanted to look up the author, Charles Peterson, on Facebook, I would be unable to do so. His name is too common. It’s interesting: if you have a unique name you’re much more accessible on Facebook.

The article is fascinating and worth reading in its entirety. Still, here’s a Netdynamics-worthy clip:

But Facebook doesn’t want to simply branch out onto a few more Web pages; the site hopes, in a somewhat sinister but potentially very useful (and profitable) way, to begin following us around the entire Web. This is the ambition of “Facebook Connect,” a special service that members may activate, and that has enabled many popular Web sites, such as Netflix, YouTube, and the Huffington Post, to tie activity elsewhere on the Internet back to Facebook profiles. If you leave a response on a Huffington Post story, for instance, it can, via Facebook Connect, automatically be shared with your friends on Facebook; subsequent responses by Facebook friends could eventually appear both on your Facebook page and on the original Huffington Post story.

If Facebook Connect is widely adopted—and the service has been quite successful so far, with Yahoo and even MySpace signing up—we may begin to see changes to many of our basic assumptions about the Internet. Once a commenter knows that a vitriolic statement will be shared with a large and personal social circle—appearing more like a letter to a small-town newspaper than an anonymous outburst—the typically venomous atmosphere of online comments, for example, may well diminish.

‘Aggression‘ mitigation? Sure. It would be hard to conceptualize a Facebook driven by users identified by handles or nicks. Meanwhile, Buzz uses your address book–at the least. I haven’t investigated Buzz of course, yet I recognize it’s a slightly different experiment.