NetDynam 2.0

here’s a well-researched and lengthy article examining the issue of privacy, and the legalities surrounding the matter of ‘identity’ in the digital age – starting with instances of employers using online searches to determine whether or not employees should keep their jobs, or even be employed in the first place. alerted to this on the email list by one of our old hands, and well worth the read.

the discussion in the article is based on the fact that we have the ability now to keep permanent records of everything everyone has ever posted or written on the internet. the article also deals with the potential of web3.0 to search and find almost anything anyone might wish to track…using new technologies such as face recognition for example….

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html

recent article in “information week” plays right into my cassandra-like fears, and anxieties about the coming world-order of 1984-type double-speak. the writer, stephen saunders, apparently has some cache somehwre, although i admit having never heard of him.

an iconic australian star passes away, and with him it seems, the country about which colin thiele’s book was written is also dying….



the book, storm boy, was made into a movie in the mid 1970′s. although the story featured a young boy, the main character of the book was the country. in most of the movies and books that i remember from that era,  the notion of ‘trespass’ was an underlying theme. [tom keneally's books are also in that camp - thinking of 'a dutiful daughter' and 'the chant of jimmy blacksmith' for example - and randolph stow's 'merry-go-round in the sea' in particular]. in the movie ‘storm boy’, it is the land, the coorong, which was the constant presence, the actual star.

here’s a short trailer -



the coorong, a large area of land at the end of the great murray-darling river system, a series of lakes and wetlands, deprived of water by european intervention, is dying. what was once a beautiful dry sparkling strange place filled with birdlife, turns into a sad shadow of itself.

the local indignenous people stand by helpless as their ancestral country is ruined by pastoral greed and plain ignorance.



how can we sleep while our beds are burning?

it belongs to them – let’s give it back.

the local xtian lads wrote this back in the 80′s… peter garrett front man for the oils is now being regaled by his own words, hung by his own petard…. meantime, their lyrics still resonate for us [shortly, a treatise on midnight oil and the now member for kingsford, linked to some other traditional views on oz]…

beds are burning…

one of my heroes – or perhaps better, ‘role models’ – showing us how it is to be a domestic goddess…



i dont suppose there is any resemblance – in the 4 characters on stage in this clip – to any persons either living or dead? [i've always coyly hoped to emulate morticia, i admit....]

the dance continues in another of the clips arrayed accross the bottom (thanks to youtube functionality), and of course, afficionados will enjoy the opening theme song there too…which we all could sing, and with which we all learned to snap our fingers…

Shintaro – Akikusa!

Toubei – the mist!

the only chopped up [scenes from my childhood in this one] offering on youtube of “The Samurai”…



….one might say that this explains my fascination with japan, but one might then be wrong…
although it may be that at some deeper level, i have absorbed the lessons of the samurai and the ninja, their codes of behaviour and their night-time practices in the righting of wrongs, these underground robin hoods of the east.

…speaking of…richard green anyone? (the opening song featuring in many episodes of our lives)

so that, when i hit japan for the first time, so many years ago now (just over 30 years ago to be precise) some subterreanean identification may have been raised in my psyche… such that i suddenly recognised – while not recognising the source of the recognition – that this was one of my real ‘homes’. thus causing me to spend the following ten years figuring out ways of getting back there to rediscover my roots.

well, at least to try to figure out what made the place tick.

of course, that can never be pinned down, but, what does happen is that in some strange way, one is after a while able to slot in, to relax and feel in place, to feel comfortable in another culture while not actually being a part of it. a strange, intoxicating, and satisfying state.

here is the first of a proposed series of TV clips which have somehow figured in my past – and worked in some way to configure my present, so to speak: in this sense, they are “intertextually relevant” for me.

youtube now allows users to rediscover and share clips from the past, and in a way, posting clips on a blog, adding a link to them on your site, sending them on in an email, indicates some affiliation found, and perhaps affiliation sought..

this is the the first segement of the first episode of ‘monkey’ – the english dubbed version released in the late 70s.

the series is based on an old chinese story about the young monk (tripitaka) on his quest for the holy scriptures in gandhara. on the way, he meets many challenges and obstacles  – the biggest challenges are provided by his three helpmates:  representative of the three aspects of himself he needs to both control and incorporate…monkey, sandy (the water demon), and pigsy (the Epicurean)…

One of our crowd, Jay Lemke (see links on ‘online articles’ page) has recently come up with a neologism to describe the hypertext way we now view the world: traversals. Inspirations in his work come from systems theory and eco-social dynamics.

Here’s a taste of the argument he makes, and a link to the complete version on his site:

“I wish to propose here a new class of theoretical object, which I am calling traversals. Traversals are temporal-experiential linkings, sequences, and catenations of meaningful elements that deliberately or accidentally, but radically, cross genre boundaries. A traversal is a traversal across standardized genres, themes, types, practices, or activities that nevertheless creates at least an ephemeral or idiotypical meaning for its human participants, and represents at least a temporarily functional connection or relationship among all its constituent processes and their (human or nonhuman) participants (i.e. actants).

[...]

“The contemporary impulse toward life-by-traversals comes from sources at many levels of social organization. We may speculate that part of our biological survival repertory is a disposition toward new experiential combinations under conditions of severe repetition. When too much of our life simply repeats the same sequences of action, with small variations, again and again, something in our phylogenetic wisdom may impel us not to follow action A with action B yet again, but at least now and then to see how it feels if we follow A with Q or V. This could be a source at the infra-organismic scale of organization. At the organism level, where we define ourselves as whole social beings by our interactions with others and with things (the human and nonhuman partners of our ecosocial being), we value the security and predictability of standardized patterns of inter-activity, but only up to the point of boredom. We are curious and perverse primates. Put us together and we are likely to goad one another to dangerous and improbable forms of behavior; link our diverse individual interests and perversions, and combinatorially, which is to say socially, we create for one another a much larger space of possibilities for action. Each step outside our familiar routines leads us into unknown territory where we cannot know even what we will want next, much less what we will get by acting. We move out into the unpredictable spaces of our relations to our companions, and we move also into spaces mediated by artifacts which bear the traces of others’ choices in other times and places.

“Definitions belong to the end days of theory-building; they are never truly starting points….

Examples are more helpful.”

link to complete essay