discussion

This survey is for bloggers, journalists, expats, analysts, and netizens (That’s about everyone, right?). Please take it. I’m begging you.

Take the survey!

Here are some additional questions for people in Iran:

Click here for more questions

Breaking news? Or simply broken?

I’m a radio addict. Well maybe not addict. I don’t have the discipline for a true addiction. The reason I bring this up, is that I am currently working on a project for a multi-media news organization. To prepare myself, I am reading up on trends in content delivery and journalism. I am also doing a lot of listening. In addition to talking to people about their news gathering habits, I am listening to the radio.

I am going to post some of the findings I find interesting here. Kevin Cowan who works on future platforms for the BBC World Service discussed what they found when they looked at mobile content usage in Russia, the UAe, South Africa and Argentina.

Essentially people use their mobiles for breaking news and sports. Here are some key excerpts:

Lots of competition on the mobile platform (“BBC is a small player…”)

First stop is Google, then maybe on to other sources, BBC, CNN.

“The good thing with Google is that they are an aggregator so they take content from us. People are still getting news from us.”

The BBC has to fight to get heard. (Wow. I thought I had to fight.)

“In the old days it did just used to be BBC and Voice of America and Deutsche Welle… there are numerous ways that people can obtain information.” (He’s talking about the World Service)

The BBC is moving from being a broadcaster to being a content provider. (Hmm… that’s an interesting distinction. I had already conflated the two.)

Mobile phones have a lot of impact since more people have access to mobiles than to the internet. You can dial a number to listen to BBC and get fm quality sound. (That is really great when you’re talking about regions that routinely block outside sources of information.)

Thanks to Richard Sambrook who helped me track down the program online after I heard it while washing dishes.

From Ghana: a coffin shaped like a Nokia Phone

A friend has told me that only old people (like me) still use email. Twitter and texting are the current ways of keeping in touch. There’s a good program from the BBC on the effects of mobile technology on daily life.

I’ve transcribed a few quotes (didn’t get all the names… listen to the whole program here on BBC World Service):

Sunita Singh:
“People sleep with their mobile phones switched on.” She later discusses a scandal in India that occurred when a 17 year-old boy, angry that his girlfriend had broken up with him, distributed video he took when they were having sex. (I know that this has also been a problem in Iran where young men secretly film young women having sex with them and then distribute it. Kamangir writes about this in Persian.)

Narrator:
“The MTV generation that’s wedded to the mobile phone also wants instant gratification …They zap boredom or loneliness wherever they may be.”

Sadie Plant:
“The mobile phone is the first technology that you need to sort of do some kind of public performance with.” (pdf link here)

Genevieve Bell talks about the way that the mobile phone is used as “a kind of social prompt” in S. Korea. People assign rings according to social status thus ensuring that they answer appropriately and preventing social missteps.

Nina Weerakkody talks about the fear that mobiles will allow “upper class women to have affairs with lower class men.”

We also here about mobiles in some parts of the Islamic world that, among other features, bring you the entire Koran in English and Arabic and a live call to prayer from Mecca.

The pope sends out daily sms messages! He got 3 million subscribers in just two months. “A photo of the pope inside the phone may be a holy religious icon.”

At funerals in Ghana, people send streaming video/sound to family that cannot make it in to the country. They also have coffins shaped like mobiles.

(not the latest news, I know. For that go here)

Bruce Conner, RIP

Jesse Walker | July 10, 2008, 8:30am
The great beatnik filmmaker Bruce Conner has died at age 74. No director has surpassed Conner’s ability to assemble preexisting found footage into something entirely new; in experimental movies rangling from his Zapruder-meets-Owsley short Television Assassination to his Devo video Mongoloid to his haunting dream-film Valse Triste, he laid the groundwork for the current explosion of remixes and mash-ups.

Read the rest at Reason

This should not stop you from taking the 5:10 to Dreamland…

Since the first time I saw a Bruce Conner film, I have been haunted by the images he produced. I am sure that I am not the only one. In fact, I am almost sure that the Science fiction writer William Gibson was haunted by Bruce Conner’s films when he wrote the book Pattern Recognition. If he wasn’t, I was.

In her lecture, Merel Mirage spoke about her experience of being surprisingly moved by poem that she heard in Chinese, a language that she did not understand. She went on to explore her response to the poem in a project that is still up on the web after more than a decade. (Think back to when the first visual browsers were being released and Yahoo was a start-up).

This inspired our seminar to speak about art that had elicited a surprisingly strong reaction from us. I was recently surprised by my own response to the Lucien Freud painting ‘Portrait of the Artist’s Mother.’ It made me cry. Surprisingly, I was not alone: two other women were crying with me. I had never seen a painting that made me cry before, even though I had seen paintings that awed me, surprised me or made me laugh.

This is the painting that made me cry:

For new readers: this is a group blog and many of the authors are new to blogging so I thought I would channel Miss Manners and write a post about the etiquette of blogging.

1. Linking

Remember footnotes and bibliographies? Those are the ways that researchers use to pay homage to the source of information or an idea. On the web, those become links which connect one post to another. When writing a post, it is good manners to link to the source of that information. We are using wordpress, so to do that, highlight the piece of text or image that contains at least part of the idea you are quoting, click the link (is it an image of a chain link in the visual editor? I cannot remember) button and paste the link into the pop-up window. It’s easy! Do it.

2. Images

Some images are so widespread on the web that it is hard to determine whether or not it has a copyright. When you can link to the author of the image, do so! Don’t pretend that images that belong to someone else are your own. Link, link, link. I, for instance, know that people are using images that we took of Iran on their own sites without attribution and it upsets me a bit. Please link to us folks… Don’t just use our images.

3. Quoting: Use Blockquotes: b-quote

Readers need to know whether or not the text is the writers or someone else’s. This is so easy: < blockquote > Text here < /blockquote >(Get rid of the spaces between <> and the beginning and end of the text inside.) In wordpress, highlight the text you are quoting and click on the “ (quotation marks) or b-quote button depending on which interface you use.

–
We may need more tips as we go, but this will do as a start.

Inspired by a concept by Hussein Chalayan.

From Xuena He

Omigod, can it be that all of the prohibitions against gossip are wrong? Do we actually need to gossip? Lately, more than one researcher has been looking into the effects of gossip. Take a look at this bit from Kate Fox taken from her article: “Evolution, Alienation and Gossip: The role of mobile telecommunications in the 21st century”

Executive Summary

Gossip is not a trivial pastime: it is essential to human social, psychological and even physical well-being. The mobile phone, by facilitating therapeutic gossip in an alienating and fragmented modern world, has become a vital ’social lifeline’, helping us to re-create the more natural communication patterns of pre-industrial times.

Key findings:
Mobile gossip is good for us

Gossip is the human equivalent of ’social grooming’ among primates, which has been shown to stimulate production of endorphins, relieving stress and boosting the immune system. Two-thirds of all human conversation is gossip, because this ‘vocal grooming’ is essential to our social, psychological and physical well-being. Mobiles facilitate gossip. Mobiles have increased and enhanced this vital therapeutic activity, by allowing us to gossip ‘anytime, anyplace, anywhere’ and to text as well as talk. Mobile gossip is an effective and important new stress-buster.

Harrison’s father kindly reminded me that many of the ideas we were discussing concerning the show Rehab at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau (posts that refer to the show “Ben Laloua / Didier Pascal” and “Leave Britney Alone”) were examined by Marshall McLuhan who was a media theorist, better known as “The High Priest of Pop.” If you have never read anything by McLuhan, well, you probably should. So many artists, filmmakers, theorists, and others interested in media refer to his work implicitly and explicitly. Here are a few links:

Marshall McLuhan: The Medium is the Message (Did you recognize “The Medium is the Message?” how about “The Global Village? which he popularized.)

Lots of McLuhan links

You might remember that Dirk Sijmons mentioned that they use the Martijntje Smits analysis of the impact of new tech on society when they consider solutions to tech issues. Here’s an excerpt from an explanation of that theory:

From Ton’s Interdependent thoughts:

Smits monster theory starts with the notion that a monster is a two-sided being, that within itself unites aspects that seem impossible to unite. (e.g. Frankenstein, with human traits and aspects, but also an artefact built from inanimate parts)

Monsters in this way challenge cultural boundaries. (e.g. genetic modification challenges the distinction between man and animal, cloning challenges the boundaries of natural progenation) At the same time because of that challenge it cannot be dealt with in terms of existing norms within those cultural boundaries, it’s sort of outside the system, which is likely to frustrate debate and discussion. This also creates the space for both fantasies of doom, as well as of imminent paradise, without being constrained by reality.

Smits then goes on to define four forms of dealing with monsters:

killing the monster

adapting the monster

assimilating the monster

embracing the monster

Read more here and in dutch here.