Post 6, reflection.

writing a blog for assessment is a really good idea because it is totally different to assessment in any other subject, and that makes it kind of exciting. i also like being able to write more closely to how i think and speak, rather than in dense academic writing that can get quite tedious.

although i have, on the whole, enjoyed it more than other assignments, there were times that i found it frustrating.

it’s hard for this assessment to work in regards to getting the balance right between making an actual blog and writing about academic material. i thought that after being told that the assessment was a blog on whatever we wanted it to be about, it was pretty disappointing to realise that we couldn’t really do too much about our own bullshit topics and we had to address the readings more. i spose i should have expected that more, obivously there has to be a pretty heavy academic element, and i spose there is nothing stopping us from working on our blogs seperately to the academic side of things, but it is hard to know what is worthwhile putting on the blog, when i know it obviously isn’t relavent to the subject.

i think it would have been better to have more of an emphasis on our own work, on our own blogging, and then sort of analysing that process in terms of the course material, either with an essay or with weekly reports or something.

that way we could have been more encouraged to focus more on getting our blogs into something we are proud of, rather than academic pieces that feel less relevant, and still get the academic side, kept a little seperate to the blog or sort of along side it. that probably would have been more of a bridge between our blogs and the course, whereas in the current set-up the connection seemed rather tenuous because the actual niche and content of my blog were so far removed from the course. it did kind of feel like this blog is my netcommunications blog, and not my ‘uni wolf’ one.

apart from the actual blog, i have found some of the course material pretty slow but i have found a lot of it really interesting. i think even now i probably tell someone about once a week how the internet is actually physically manifested in computers somewhere and isn’t just in space somewhere which still kind of blows my mind a bit. i found that kind of stuff really interesting, like the evolution of the web, sort of thing.

also the privacy stuff particularly in regards to facebook. i think at least half the people in this subject changed their privacy settings after hearing about the rights that facebook reserves.

what i probably found most interesting is the sorts of media ownerships stuff, which i find really interesting generally. i love sort of bill hicks types conspiracies about the few capitalists who really run the world by owning all the companies who control the media and keep the status quo going. think the internet is an interesting example of the corporate world trying to sort of colonise this new technology and find a way to make money out of it, and stop people from getting things for free with digital reproduction. they havent really gotten there yet but i am interested to see how they do it. i’m sure they will, but i hope the internet stays a bit wild.

i’m not sure how i will do on this blog. hopefully ok. i have made a real effort to do the blog posts close to weekly so that now i don’t have too much work to do at the end of semester, which is a good thought. i probably should have done more blogs that are on topic but i don’t spose they get marked anyway. i guess it looks better.

ultimately i have tried to engage with this subject, and i think i have. i am sort of proud of my blog and that i have done it properly. i showed my friend and he said it ‘looked like a real blog’ so i guess that was nice.

i don’t think i will blog in the future. blogging is fun and can be kind of cathartic but it does feel a lot like yelling into space.

it would be nice if people were more interested in what people have to say. but by that i mean, i wish people would read what i write. i spose i can’t blame them, i probably wouldn’t read their blogs.

anyway…

post 5, comment culture

i think there is a very important distinction to make within the blogging world, or the blogosphere, if you want, that has to be made for this post’s topic to make sense.

the distinction is between professional blogs, or blogs by professionals in their fields, and blogs by anyone. if a blog is by a politician or a professional journalist, it has a significantly greater chance of stimulating widespread debate about, say the war, than someone whose last post was about their cat.

the reason that the vast majority of blogs do not ‘foster public debate’ is not because blogging is not a suitable medium or that people don’t want to. it’s because most people who write blogs are idiots.

this means that most people sort of discount blogs in general as nonsense, because there is no filtering system and anyone can have one. but if you only read the ones that are written by people whose material you would read if it was not on the internet, you would probably find a culture where debate is healthy and encouraged.

the inability for blogs to start public debate is because so few of them actually get read. with the ones that are read, however, an opportunity exists for debate to occur. so if we cut off the 99 percent of blogs that no one reads, that top echalon of blogs that are written by capable writers can contribute to a public sphere idea of debate. in fact, it would be a particularly good public sphere, because they can publish their own work without thought to publishers or advertising issues that might have stayed their hand in, for example, a newspaper.

the idea of a citizen journalism as discussed by Terry Flew in the reader (page 195) is not necessarily in my eyes that everyone needs to talk, it’s just that the type of people who would be writing anyway can distribute their work on their on terms, as citizens, rather than employees.

in this sense, blogs are great for public debate. people can say whatever they want and the debate need not be in comment threads, but in the continued dialogue of people’s thoughts through blogs, just as they would in a newspaper. the idea that all this occurs in a ‘homogenous webcloud’, as Lovink describes is irrelevant, because people only read what they want to read anyway.

the fact that the chance of a comment is nearly zero is irrelevant, as long as these thoughts are out there and getting read, then they are contributing.

…

the idea of moderation of comments is worrying to me and my own policy would be to let all comments appear on my blog, because i am not really afraid of being embarrassed.

but this is worrying because debate is stifled by one side being able to choose which comments challenge their blog and which are inappropriate, so you never will get the full story.

the problem with my niche is that the ‘everyone else is an idiot’ sort of outlook naturally denotes that anyone else’s comments will be treated with disdain and disrespect, and i think that wihtin this niche there is probably more evidence of ridicule and insult than ‘debate’.

my first thought is of that Maddox character who writes ‘the best page in the universe‘ and his approach to comments. he does not allow comments on his posts, and instead has a ‘hate mail’ section, which is basically him replying to ‘criticisms’ of his site. this obviously allows him to select the dumbest hate mail that he can then systematically tear apart on his own terms, and simply not showing it if it doesnt suit him.

this seems extreme (to be fair, it is pretty funny) but at the same time, it’s pretty much the same as the ability to moderate comments. choosing what criticism is allowed on your page seems a bit dodgy and it undermines the public debate aspect of blogging.

in the end it comes down to personal decisions in what you read, which is the same with any medium. all we can hope is that the writers that we respect (the ones that tend to actually get read) have the balls and the ability to approach and present all criticism of their work and treat it in a satisfactory way that contributes to a culture of healthy debate.

post 4-creative commons.

the creative commons project is a great initiative because it shows that people exist who are not willing to accept current ideas that do not fit with current digital technology. this is most pertinant to software, but it makes sense for everything that can be distributed digitally including music, movies and artwork.

marc garcelon talks about the mistakes of today’s intellectual property rights in the reader (pg 289), because they equate ideas with property in the physical sense of the idea of property.

even in 1790, thomas jefferson had the foresight to realise that intellectual property should not be too heavily protected, as the sharing of work encourages artists and creative types to continue producing work and contributes to a better culture. the less that people can capitalise on art and information mean that it will become less corporate.

if we look at the music world as an example, this will lead to a better music scene that has less focus on profits, and more focus on creativity and sharing. the quality of music and the culture would undeniably improve.

the freer movement of information will benefit users (or consumers, if you want), who will have greater access, and it will benefit producers and artists because more people will be reached by their work. it will encourage people to work for the sake of their work and avoid the aim of profits alone.

the only people who will not benefit are corporations who make money by their ownership of ideas, programs and art. this is not such a bad thing because a world in which ideas, programs and art can’t be owned would be a better one, and indeed the ideas, programs and art would be better within such a world.

Stallman, in the reader (pg 307) describes the world of free software, and it makes a lot of sense. the only people really benefitting from heavy licensing laws are corporations who do more to stifle information and creativity than to contribute to it.

real artists and people who are really motivated by a greater benefit to people as a whole will create without financial incentive. the example of the renaissance masters who didnt even sign their work is a perfect example of this attitude that is unfortunately less prevalent in modern times.

i like creative commons because it is distinctly opposed to a neo liberal capitalist wage slave ideology that drives corporations and should be kept as far away from art and information as physically possible. information, software and art should be free. this is perhaps a pretty far-left ideology but i think it makes sense in art which should be free from ownership.

Copyfarleft and Copyjustright talks about property as the ‘enemy of freedom’ which is a nice sort of anarcho-marxist ideology that might be a bit extreme in society but fits well into my conception of intellectual property. that is, that ideas should not be owned by people, and if they should be attributed to people, it should be the creators (whose desire should be to share it anyway) and not the owners who are just corporations who have the money to fund any creative enterprise they see as profitable.

as a result of my opinions, i have chosen to license my work under a “Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License”, which means my work can be reproduced or altered for non commercial purposes (althouth i can’t imagine what commercial purposes could be attributed to my blog) but there must be some link to the website as attribution.

i don’t mind anyone using anything from my blog but i dont think it would be right to profit from it, when the idea of the blog is not to make money in the first place. i said that they should attribute the blog but i’m not really fussed, i just think it’s the polite thing to do.

anyway…

bill hicks

bill hicks is a great example of anti-sociality and a personal hero of mine.

bill died in 1994 but he is still awesome.

he and larry david are essentially the inspiration for this blog and i think he deserves a mention.

may he rest in peace.

i like this clip too.

anyway…

post 3. design.

when i was choosing my design direction i chose black, simple backgrounds because they reflected the subject matter i was producing. when talking about avoiding people, it would be wildly inappropriate to have anything bright or over done. the picture of the wolf at uni and the picture of me giving the camera the finger were choices that i was worried about because i thought it might be too much, but i think that they are dark and simple enough not to detract from the blog itself.

because of the cynical nature of the blog, to have too clean and impressive a design would also be inappropriate. the impressive ‘professional’ looking designs are perhaps a little too corporate looking. Olia Liana’s vernacular web 2,(reader pg 229) talks about the old amateur ‘home pages’ (with the glitter and the starry backgrounds) and i think blogs should be a bit like that. blogs are personal and i found it a bit annoying that i didnt have much control over the format of my blog, and had to choose from set ‘themes’. i think myspace had a good set up where you could chuck in stuff from wherever on the internet. i’m sure that there’s a way to do that on this but wordpress is a bit trickier.

i mentioned corporate looking design before and i didnt really explain it. i don’t really care about modern formalism of web design or avant garde principles or anything like that, but i think if a website (especially like mine) gets too clean and smooth looking, it doesnt really fit the subject matter. my problem with wordpress is that the themes are too well set up and you don’t really get to choose your own style, and you end up having this really nice looking, clean design that could just as easily be the website for a bank or something. that’s great if you want to talk about something appropriate for conservative design, but if you want to write about something edgier then you have to really dig into wordpress to change stuff. even then it seems like you have a different picture in the area that they want you to have a picture, and you cna change the colours a little.

i guess this has become a rant against templates… even though i didn’t really mean it to be.

the wordpress designs are good, but i think a more amateur approach to web design is more appropriate for something as personal as a blog, which i think are effectively the ‘modern’ equivelant of liana’s ‘homepages’.

work sucks chubbies

a customer came up to me at work today and was like, ‘hey man’.

i said hi in my best ‘i just work here’ voice with eyes that say, ‘if i wasn’t getting paid i would break your kneecaps’, but when i looked up i realised that he recognised me.

fucked if i’d know who he was though. three hours into my shift he looked something like this:

who the fuck are you?

needless to say, after hearing that unmistakable tone of recognition i kept walking and didnt look back.

i think i did the right thing.

i dont know who he was and probably never will… i just hope he didnt recognise me from netcomm where he had come across my blog or some shit…

anyway…

post two – sample post. (the stop and chat, an introduction)

hi.

people you don’t want to deal with are relatively easy to avoid. ignoring text messages, putting people in offline facebook chat groups, sitting in the toilets at uni between classes listening to your ipod… these are all easy fixes, and their importance and significance should not be discounted.

ultimately, however, you have to leave the toilet. you have to put yourself at the mercy of the universe, walking from one place to another for the whims of lady chance to subject you to objectionable conversation.

this is where we must make the distinction, we must describe the stop and chat so that it can be identified and subsequently avoided.

as soon as someone says hello and you stop walking, you have been drawn into the stop and chat.

observe.

larry david is a visionary and a hero, a man whose tireless work inspires all of us to question bullshit social etiquette so that we may, together, enter a society closer to total freedom.

larry demonstrates in this clip from Curb Your Enthusiasm, that the key is to keep walking, even if the potential time thief is obviously expecting the stop and chat.

you will feel pressured into stopping. but remember, keep walking.

don’t stop, and don’t chat.

if you are feeling the pressure and can’t muster the strength to give a casual hello without breaking stride, rest assured. there are options.

1. your phone is your best friend.

if you can pre-empt the stop and chat, decisive action must be taken quickly. the first action would be to take your phone out. read texts, pretend to speak to someone, actually call someone do something, and appear engaged. for ideal results, make the call before you are spotted by your target. this provides you with a perfect excuse to keep walking. it even allows you to gesture to your phone in smug apology to the potential pillager of privacy to make it seem like you actually give a shit. or even better, it allows you to appear engaged enough to ignore them altogether, obviously the ultimate outcome.

2. bullshit excuses sound real if sound like you mean them.

picture this scenario:

“hey paul, how did you go with that lit assignment?”

as i walk, “oh yeah it was ok look i have to go i have this thing with that guy you know the lecturer who needs me to help with the printing something about cartridges what about you i have i wish i could chat oh my god ill see you bye!”

perfect.

for best results, appear rushed and hassled. try dropping something to look even more stressed. pity is very underrated.

3. smile

although it seems to go against every natural instinct, being friendly is often the best way to get out painful social interaction. this is particularly true in the instance of the stop and chat.

as someone walks in and tries to engage. smile, greet them with an cheerfully extended ‘heeeeeeeeey’ and as long as you don’t break stride, this can be seen by dickheads who want to talk to you as a satisfactory encounter. you can even through in a douchey kind of cute wave thing if you are feeling confident.

you should note, that this last option is difficult and requires a steely resolve and the knowledge that, no matter what, you will not stop walking. this technique is probably only really to be employed when you are caught unawares and quick thinking is the only thing that lies between you and a conversation that could potential take up to fifteen minutes of your time that could be spent more profitably sitting in the toilets listening to your ipod.

the stop and chat seems easy to avoid, but somehow, people continue to get sucked in, and for that reason it is a good place to start. these techniques are to be practiced and used carefully.

please remember, even though you know how to deal with it, do not go looking for social interaction. these techniques are to be used only when ignoring the opposing party or complete aversion are simply not an option and engagement is imminent.

remember:

don’t. stop. walking.