All right, folks.
Apparently, and I may be paraphrasing but, “the age of privacy is dead – despite what Zuckerberg may or may not have said”. Well, that’s according to Michael Arrington, anyway.
Oh, and according to the title, myself and all those of you who also care, are luddites.
Contraire, oh techie blogger.
Yes it may be the era of phone tapping, email exploitation for advertising purposes, and bizarre people who want to show their purchases off to the world via the internets, but I am all for a certain brand of PERSONAL privacy, you know what I’m saying?
The spam in my inbox, targeted advertising and the annoying telesales calls that occur because certain personal information is available to conglomerates are one thing, but a decent amount of discretion in the way I interact with the people in my life that matter, is something entirely different.
Caring about who sees what exchanges on my Facebook wall doesn’t make me ignorant. If you’re going to open your doors to parental figures, Facebook, I want to be able to fine tune what appears to who – something you were really good at prior to this about-face. My boss doesn’t need to see hideous tagged photos because I couldn’t remove them/the person who took them is too dumb to figure out the implications.
Yes, there is the option of just not putting anything personal on your Facebook page, but I joined as a way to keep in touch – in a personal way – with friends, mainly those across continents, and those unable to respond to emails. It grew and matured and threw open its doors…but that doesn’t mean my profile has to throw open mine.
And if someone could make a platform that let me control exactly what information I share, you can bet I’d be there in a second.
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To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(Macbeth; Act V Scene V)
I’ve spent the last week digging my heels into the new year, procrastinating over the moment I’d have to turn to 2009 and take stock of what I’ve done. After all, I mainly spent the year holed up by my beach, drinking tea with too much sugar and eating scones…didn’t I?
Well, that’s what I thought.
So it came as somewhat of a surprise today that 2009 - which I like to name “The Year I Became A Hermit” - actually was a time of…well…quite some action.
After all I weathered a financial hurricane.
Took freelancing steps.
Executed a career volte-face.
Strengthened (and tested) some political beliefs by running a comms campaign during the Euro election.
Saw an advert for an awesome job.
Quaked a bit.
Manned up and applied for said awesome job.
Won it.
Celebrated.
Returned to London.
Got stuck in.
And in between there were the personal ups, the downs, the flights, the pints, the birthdays, the rainy days, the cakes, the dates, and the countless, countless lists that characterise the passing of many a calendar month.
So here’s to 2010. And ringing in a new decade with purpose. And clarity. And champagne, on top of a snowy hill, under a full moon, toasting the twinkling amber lights of the lake district below.*
Happy New Year.
*Actual description of my NYE. Best night yet.
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Your digital footprint.
It may be baby Cons size or it may be a virtual Sasquatch marker…and it’s always there in one form or another. Most smart people have heard the horror stories of those with no spare greymatter getting fired because of a particularly idioten and ill-advised comment , so they steer clear of posting incriminating stuff.
A quick search on the Googs will bring up similar stories dating back to 2007, so this is, of course, nothing new or surprising.
So - answer me this - what were two large companies, Ogilvy and Publicis (both of whom work in some most forms of communications) thinking??
Publicis - I’ve Got a Feeling (that somebody had a truly awful idea)
Ogilvy’s tribute to their namesake - (A song for which There Are No Words)
…
No such thing as bad publicity, eh?
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She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half words whispered low;
As earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.
(Robert Graves)
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Pour Noel, je voudrais…
(Okay, fine, but it sounds so much more poetic in French…)
Dear Santa…For christmas this year, please bring me:
* The ability to see the woods from the trees
* Time with friends and family, close by and not so
* A great book, a mug of the frothiest hot chocolate, a stormy day…
* One perfect, shiny opportunity
* And this Bellman stove-top Milk Steamer
Posts have been few and far-between while I’ve been settling into my new place of work, avec teh awesome Drew, Phil, Dom, Ben and Luke. But things a brewing and bubbling…not least of all a new banner for this lovely site. Which may or may not be pretty similar to the current one.
See, I’m rather fond of my little stick figure up there.
Maybe I’ll give her a Santa hat. Hmm.
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04.11.
Oh, hello.
Have you seen this? It’s written by a pretty awesome dude. He’s called Jed. Hi Jed. And Jed has done something that I’d hoped would have happened earlier, i.e. coaxed me out of my Blog Cave with something a little inflammable. Okay, not inflammable, more a slow burner of the brain, and I’m going to respond.
For all of you who ignored the first link, I politely suggest a clickey-click, otherwise this entire post may or may not be an exercise in pointlessness.
Okay, good.
Politics. And the internet. According to Jed, should never the twain meet, because it’s not the vehicle for change that Jed assumes people assume it is. Well, personally, I’d say of course not, I agree with you there. The internet won’t ever be the place that produces the change people want 100% of the time. Perhaps not even 10% of the time. But it is one of the vehicles that gives a voice to people who perhaps want to attempt to make a change.
Along with, and not restricted to, protests, petitions, Gunpowder, and dressing like your favourite Marvel character whilst ensconcing yourself on Harriet Harman’s roof.
But it seems, we disagree/agree for exactly the same reasons. In Jed’s political internet it’s too crowded. Too many voices, too many opinions. But I personally think it makes a change from the institution of middle aged, middle class, overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly predictable, political commentary that we get in the print press and broadcasting. I personally think at the minute there’s not enough good (clue: that was the operative word) political commentary on the internet yet that’s not affiliated with a national institution, whatever the volume.
Also, on the theme of disparate opinions, I welcome the subtleties and more opinions. Because, quite frankly, nobody in the UK seems to believe that you can have small-c conservative tendencies and small-l liberal tendencies without shoving the fence pole up a certain orifice and declaring yourself a Lib Dem ineffectual. While our US friends are allowed these subtleties in political parties because of the size of their country and inhibiting lack of parties, we in the UK are expected to be quite uniform in belief if you declare yourself one party, or the other, or the other. You’re instantly stereotyped. Why? You can walk from town to town, from county to county and hear discernibly different accents. Why should our political beliefs be any less complex, and why shouldn’t they, more to the point, be expressed if there is a suitable vehicle for expressing it? If you don’t want to hear it, Jed, that’s totally understandable, but you know better than anyone how to fine tune your news feed. No-one has to listen if they don’t want to.
“…trying to reach a common goal will still leave each voice slightly disappointed.”
Sure. But that’s life. You can’t have every cookie in the cookie jar, and we all as adults, know that.
“Decentralisation, distilled into a super-local level would still be too far from our expectations if we’re promised total democracy”
Decentralisation to this extent isn’t “total democracy”, it’s Hobbes’ state of nature. Democracy’s practical application means the majority will always win. There are no two ways about it. My gang is bigger than your gang, is bigger than your opinion, is bigger than… It’s simply the way it works, and the sot is that the losers at least get heard. You’re of the minority opinion? Sweet, we’ve got a seat in the corner for you. It’s delightful. You’re going to love it.
The internet (amongst other things) gives this minority opinion a) a voice and b) the chance to perhaps make themselves a bigger minority and eventually the majority. Tide-turning is slow, but cyclical, as evidenced every decade or so by General Elections in countries of representative democracies.
“Giving power to the people will only result in mass disappointment when that power is given to someone in power.”
Perhaps. But I don’t think too many people are under the illusion that, just because they’re fighting the good fight and utilizing the internet while they do it, they’re ultimately going to win. Even ignoring the internet, and doing it the old school way doesn’t always work, so, personally, I’m going to give more credit to the people who are attempting to mobilize through web 2.0 and assume they understand the fundamental hierarchy and the limitation of tools. Wielding the internet is a type of power, but it’s not absolute and I don’t think people who partake are under the illusion that it is.
After all, it’s not at all different to how people have mobilized in the past except for making it a damn site easier. The printing press and pamphlets got there first. Then came the broadsheets. Now we have twitter. Ease is not equatable to guaranteed outcome – in my view the two are mutually exclusive – and I personally think Jed’s sentence smells suspiciously of inevitability. You’ll only lose, so why clog up my interwebs with your thoughts? Be gone, annoying minority, get back to that chair!
So.
“Is the internet a good vehicle for democracy and ‘the voice of the people’? I don’t think so”
Well, in conclusion, sir, I vote, yea. Politics is, and has always been, about communication. The web is the platform of our generation. Not using it for democratic purpose seems such a waste to me. Yes, it means trying to keep a discerning head. But I think it’s a small price to pay.
That said, I would loveloveLOVE the trolls to leave, but that’s in a perfect world and that’ll never happen. And that’s the sad inevitability of my personal imagined political utopia.
*** Disclaimer – I take some of Jed’s sentences out of order. Jed, if you feel this bastardizes/completely changes your argument then I apologise – I wrote and re-wrote and re-wrote this, and as such everything didn’t exactly end up linear, if y’know what I mean ***
ps: My “comments” sections aren’t playing ball right now, so if you have comments, please do email me at laura.tosney@gmail.com and I’ll put them up in a separate post, or (if it’s okay with you Jed) leave a comment on Jed’s original blog post.
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Just a quick one, because it’s amusing me too much to wait for the moment I might get OneFreeSecond to write a full post. But here’s two fun facts for you.
The Government Change4Life Campaign, supposed to promote healthy diets/living, launched around the beginning of the year and cost them around 85 million (according to my source in the Dept. of Health) to advertise.
Cadbury’s, that er, bastion of vegetable pots and whatnot, has lately tripled its net profit and raised its forecast for the year. According to the Times.
Fantastic.
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First off may I just thank the rock I have been living under for the past, mm, month or so for being a very comfortable – nay, cosy – rock. You made for a nice hiatus, you sweet hiding place, you.
Secondly, can I say OMG MICHAEL JACKSON.
N-n-n-n-n-n-n-noo don’t stop reading there, because I also want to say WHAT THE EFF, MEDIA? Not to denigrate the former man’s musical talent (13 going on 30 would have been nothing without that thriller scene, and every dad dancing at a wedding worships the ground Billy Jean walked on) …but it’s pretty interesting to see that news networks are still so scared of Catholic-esque brimstone and hellfire and “bom-bom-bom-bom” that they avoid anything but a gushing eulogy. Oh, no, wait, I tell a lie. One channel did show the Bashir documentary. That bizarre piece of work that it was. Hardly honest, hard-hitting editorialising, was it?
Then again, maybe my experience of Jackson coverage was different, having been in the US at the time of the news breaking. Was there any neutral coverage in the UK? …Anyone? I could youtube it and get on the Googs, but quite frankly I have more than enough to do today, and just looking at one network’s coverage wouldn’t be enough of a decent cross-section for me.
*cough*geek*cough*.
…Which leads me onto my second topic that I randomly plucked out of thin air: THE 24 HOUR NEWS CYCLE.
I’ve had enough. I’ve had enough until someone figures out how to reinsert the local news into the 24hour rehashing of…the same three topics. I mean (and once again, I was in the US at this point, so we might as well call this the American Edition) for about five days straight all I heard about was Obama crushing a small defenceless fly who only wanted to sit on the head of awesomeness for a bit. Poor thing. It only ever loved him, and look what it got.
And then after that was Mark Sanford’s turn to have his squidge-making letters read out. Constantly. Every day. The reporting of which, by the by, is a whole other blog post I possibly will write, because it the mix of old-fashioned reporting and new-media-backstabbing fascinates me.
Oh but not to worry, because it was interspersed with a little (lot) of Jacko’s death, and I think somewhere in there, there were a couple of civil riots in the world, some plane crashes, some homicides, and Harry Potter.
What’s the world coming to when I have to rely on my Reuters twitter feed for my daily dirge and dismality? That’s not a word, by the by, but I think it should exist.
I love media, I love the news, and I love having access to it when I can’t sleep and I’ve finished my midnight snack of marshmallows and the odd go-ahead biscuit I found in the cupboard…but if it wasn’t for the t’interwebs, I feel I’d literally know all of five things happening in the world, and the rest of the UK, at any one time.
So if the larger news corporations could just make like the BBC and contract out some local journalists to brush their hair and make a 2.50 summation reel of how many angry small business owners there are in their area at the last count, that would be great. Cheers.
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*chhhh*
Apologies for the radio silence, folks. Somehow that sneaky little *bleep* called Time caught me by the toe (like the proverbial tiger in the children’s…with me? No? Great) and …
Alright. You got me. I’ve actually been incredibly lazy. Taken a brain hiatus. Slept a little. Ate a lot. But I’m brewing a few thoughts, and they’ll be with you shortly… promise.
*chhhh*
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SWINE FLU! BRITAIN ORDERS 32M MASKS! AN ENTIRE 2 PEOPLE IN ISOLATION UNIT IN UK HAVE IT! BUT THE DEATH TOLL HITS 152! YOU ONCE VISITED TACO BELL AS A FOUR YEAR OLD, SO YOU’RE PROBABLY NEXT!
Maybe not. But the papers are of course full of dire warnings of global pandemic panic and fetching face mask pictures straight out of Heathrow.
What I find fascinating about the whole deal isn’t so much the flu itself, more the reporting of it. Because of course it’s going to go almost instantly worldwide; look at our travel infrastructure and the word ‘transference’ and y’know, historical things. Like the bubonic plague.
I know sensationalism is a pretty obvious watchword in journalism now, but there seems to be no sense of scale about this. Developed countries shouldn’t be at too much of a risk of anything except some really uncomfortable days in bed and an upping of the blood pressure thanks to the daily papers. We have the medical capacity to handle it, though the first few days might be a tad sketchy on the information side. Also, having mutated to a form passed easily from human to human, the strain is already less virulent. Apparently. Sadly there will always be exceptions to the general rule.
All that said, today’s Insensitivity Quote goes to Ryanair’s über-charming Michael O’Leary.
Frankly, though, I just love the Q&A section in today’s Independent warning that we should remember the “1918 Spanish Flu pandemic started mildly – and went on to kill 20 to 40 million people around the world”.
Guys?
I think the clue might be in the date. Just saying.
Oh-bama, bama, bama…
2nd interesting news reportage of the week is actually far more interesting, so I’m not sure why it’s second in this post, but hey-ho.
Anyone heard the story of the new President’s plane flying low with a military escort over Ground Zero causing Manhattanites to be evacuated from offices and generally fear for their lives? No?
Let me enlighten you.
This blog post from Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab highlights how, through Twitter and social media, with a smidgen of help from concerned citizens (not quite citizen journalism, though) the story went from tweet to news in around…four minutes flat.
Mr Zachary M. Seward (for that is his name) is right, there’s no huge lesson here about reporting in the internet age and yada yada yada, given that the Staten Island reporter saw the planes with his own eyes, and wasn’t just relying on the information of a twitterer. But it is astonishing, and kind of hits home just what sort of capacity there is for journalism in this era. And the implications it inevitably brings.
Personally, I don’t want it to mean the end of the print press…but is that the unavoidable end journalism is heading to in the current economic mindset?
What do you think? Hmm?
Drop me a line or five at laura.tosney@gmail.com and let me know.
EXTRA, EXTRA, READ ALL ABAAAAHT IT!
Hump day treat! (Thanks to @stephauteri for linking this song…I haven’t stopped listening to it since)
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