NetDynam 2.0

[a slightly rant-like post, with inspiration from some of our more outlandish and nauseating local public speakers and spruikers, e.g. alan bond, piers ackerman, miranda devine, and andrew bolt ]

recently i lamented on the list that the majority of us in the land of oz were not likely to put up much complaint other than complaint itself when government and/or big business threaten to take over our lives or encroach on civil liberties, our so-called ‘rights’ to privacy and so on. i mean in the light of “the threat of terrorism” (now that “communism” does not hold us all in its thrall of scaredydom), the previous govt here put sniffer dogs on the streets. they also prevented people from publicly expressing their disapproval of bush coming to town, spending many of our tax dollars on enormous surveillance cameras in downtown sydney – for our own protection of course. meanwhile, people line up at hospitals to be seen, and the river systems on which we all depend for something we can’t do without are being sucked dry… for me, govt promises of “we will cut taxes” has a hollow ring to it, when they spend the taxes i would willingly give, on items that do not benefit anyone except those who have enough income to avoid paying what they should in the first place… and i say the ability to control and survey the media, and other means of public and private communication does not benefit the public in any way.
to me, there will always be criminals – but it depends on who makes the laws as to who or what acts are deemed as ‘criminal’. i would rather put up with petty criminals and burglars (which btw i may not need to put up with if 1) smack was supplied by govt, 2) poor or unemployed people were given a place to live and a living income, and 3) advertisers were not paid as much by rich companies to entice us to desire and think we need more crap in order to make us feel better about ourselves) than the big corporate criminals and government criminals who sometimes indirectly are allowed to get away with murder, or at least a whole pile of booty earned off the back of their poor gullible workers who dutifully complain when their company cannot employ them anymore since they cannot make enough profit off them to enable their profligate and eminently enviable lifestyles to continue in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed.

but then those with the wherewithal – either in brains, aesthetic skills, or financial backing – are occasionally called upon to show their cards. and right on cue, after me saying we are not about to do anything down here.. well one of us has flown the coop to do his crowing, over to europe and various bunkers (such as iceland) i don’t doubt… julian assange thinks it about time to release a whole pile of documents to the media. just to see what they will make of it. naturally, he didn’t give them to the SMH (sydney morning herald), but the SMH had to get in on some of the act, and have posted a mashed-up video with some editorial comment by the ed. see this video article from today’s SMH for example for the local take on the matter.

but probably better to check out the guardian UK who have a video of assange defending his decision to release the documents.

here is thewikileaks link posted previously on netdynam – but i’m guessing maybe you won’t be able to get a service there for a while…

and now, today, dick smith, notable self-proclained capitalist, entrepreneur and start-up businessman responsible for dick smith electronics stores nationwide…. uses his spare cash for amusing (to me) advertisements in the local murdoch press…

it’s on another matter, content-wise, but it is another approach to the “what’s to be done” lament i often intone…

i’ve been doing some tutoring at the university of new south wales this semester, courtesy of P who now works there in the department of ‘english, media and the performing arts’ (empa! empa!). so many young people these days want to be media journalists or contributors to the media, but i ask, where are the jobs?
anyway, that is not the university’s look-out. if people want to undertake a course in media studies and journalism, then, given the room, they will accept all comers – and the more popular the course, the higher the marks they can demand for entry requirements. but then, exam marks mean little these days with the higher school certificate being pretty much understood by coaching companies everywhere, even some of the high schools themselves… so you do not get a necessarily brighter more engaged type of student, rather, you tend to get those who have been trained to achieve high marks in exams.
be that as it may, the cohort seems to be comprised pretty evenly of serious scholars of media journalism, and some young people who thought it might be a good thing to take at uni. notably, they all write pretty well too.
anyway, right now, it’s time for them to be putting the finishing touches to their first minor assignment, a “human interest story” complete with appropriate/complementary and self-taken photo. earlier this semester, they were asked to make a trial posting so that if they were unfamiliar with the technology of blogs, they could get some figuring-out done before this, their first assessed work, was due. by tomorrow night, all of the posts should have been made, and then we have the task of making some sort of feedback and grading of them all….
they are all aware that this stuff is on the open internet, and some of the issues surrounding their stories, photos and interviews concern privacy and identity – will their subjects want their faces on the internet, or want their names cited, especially if the story concerns somewhat intimate details of their lives? and, i wonder whether any of the stories will captivate my interest from the beginning – something i tried to stress to them: the photo and opening lead sentence has to grab the reader’s attention, has to make them want to read on to answer questions the lead and photo poses for them.
so, anyone is welcome to take a look at the “analysing media communication” blog – and if anything strikes you as needing comment, please feel free to do so! i’m sure some of them would appreciate some outside commentary on what they are trying to do.

political cum parody half hour weekly on the national broadcaster has occasionlly left me with nothing to say, i mean left me thinking. beyond their pieces. sometimes i was not sure whether we were viewing something serious or another parody. this week is the last show for the season, who knows, maybe they’ll not return. a pity.
the blog site has links to all their shows i believe and excerpts of stories they’ve run. the usual invitations to comment, and requests for tips and videos to be sent in – some of which are aired on the tv program, and then archived on the site.
last week they reported on the breaking story of one of the recent wikileaks leaks, and the blog features related stories, including a telephone interview (and transcript) with the founder and mystery man, julian assange. together with suelette dreyfus, they wrote “underground” – originally published in 2003 now available from project gutenberg – about the hacker community in australia in the 80s and 90s. some say the main character in the book is a thinly disguised julian assange, since dates and places seem to match.
as for wikileaks itself, we find out there various forms of information that big corporations and the military do not want to have on public display. and indeed we can see that even cryptome.org (and the inimitable john young… or well, maybe he does have his imitators) has met its match in microsoft in the last couple of months when the site was shaken down after cryptome dared to publish microsoft’s (and others such as paypal and ebay) offer to sell you information on whoever you might want to find out about…. wikileaks calls it ‘spying’, but i spose microsoft might consider this information would be available only to the most revered of institutions and for the best of reasons.
all in all, i’m a big fan of the low-budget, down home reporting style of hungry beast. i was about to embed a video of one of my fave skits, but back on the site i read this response to a comment:

Hi Nick, Due to our licensing agreement with the ABC, all HUNGRY BEAST video content on the website is Geo-Blocked. This means videos can only be viewed within Australia. Cheers, HB

however, you may be able to see it on youtube… although lately there’s been some funny buggers over there too… if anyone is watching ‘over there’ let me know if you’re able to see the vid below… mind you, there are a few intertextual references to australian identities which might make some of the jokes hard to fathom.

the xplosion of information on the internet means high signal-noise ratio. we need filtering mechanisms – friends, trusted sources, or our own motivation to check it out for ourselves. as my mother told me: ‘question everything’.
but even our friends and large media outlets have limited time and resources. things need to posted as soon as received, otherwise it’s not current – 48 hours after posting to youtube, you gotta get your vid 50,000 hits to get up there on the daily most-watched, otherwise you go down to the weekly most watched according to dan ackerman greenburg.

so how much can you believe what you read or hear?
what is the value of an ‘independent voice’ too, and how far does independence stretch nowadays? i mean, we have clay shirkey on TED extolling the virtues of groups and amateur input being co-ordinated via the internet and by virtue of self-organising systems, while we have others such as the horrible andrew keen (no i will not be drawn into linking anything to do with this charlatan on this site, but he is an eye opener. also, colbert’s interview with him on the colbert report was rather amusing) arguing that the amateurism promoted by the internet is ruining journalism and also, well, yes, honest profit-making – which, as we all know, makes the world go round. and will probably not cost us jobs, but will cost us a habitable earth itself into the bargain.

meantime, a small experiment seemed in order over at hungry beast:




…and bugger off murdochs of the world – leave our BBC’s and ABCs alone!…

uh, for those of you not comprehending this outburst, i recommend an update via the following video – made by the BBC, so it must not have an ‘independent’ view of this issue anyway, according to james murdoch. james equates state management of media news gathering and dissemination with lack of plurality, and unfair ‘land-grabbing’ of the media commons.
he claims that the only way for an independent media to survive is through profit… the BBC does not make a profit and thus it unfairly takes away the profit of commercial media enterprises by being too good… and free… duh. but of course, he neglects to mention that if anything is run by the state it is not free, it is a community resource. as people protesting againt universal health care in the USA must also believe….




if the BBC is so popular, then why shouldn’t it be used as a standard? i mean, does popularity necessarily mean lack of independence, or that news and other programming it delivers will be slanted or ‘biased’?
for those on the right, this seems to be the case, i.e. anything run by the state they believe must necessarily produce programming that is skewed in favour of what the government of the day does.

in fact, the problem with the ABC here in oz is that conservative governments so much fear the ‘independence’ of this state-run organisation, that they regularly reduce its funding, cut back positions and instal new heads of departments. it is only the more middle of the road governments (i cannot class the present labor govt as left by any stretch of the imagination) who do not appear to intervene… but of course, all these media wags at the ABC are lefties anyway, as the right will tell you.
oh, and teachers too for that matter – unless they are kept in order by being employed by… you guessed it! private schools run for the holy profit motive.