Posts by Russell Brown
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Up Front: Giving Me Grief, in reply to Rex Widerstrom,
And also, don’'t forget that valium makes your scotch count two times. But you knew that.
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Thanks for coming here, Rex. Glad it helped. Kia kaha.
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Hard News: Hip in the Square, in reply to Luke Williamson,
Thanks for the Tuhoe trial update Russell. I still find this a very curious and slightly disturbing case but hopefully, once it gets under way, we'll see where it's all headed.
I been thinking about the case(s) a lot this week, but I can't see it'll be possible to write properly about it now until after the verdicts.
From Jose's track, we had to remove stuff that had not only been broadcast on the 6pm news, but which the freakin' Prime Minister had said -- because the judge-only decision is under appeal and there might yet be a jury, who we must not influence. Other things came out of the discussion because they might potentially "scandalise the court". Something else was deemed potentially defamatory by our legal advisor. Phew.
One thing that's probably safe to say is that it will eventually be seen that not everyone involved did the same things or had the same motivations and interests.
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Hard News: Hip in the Square, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Since this seems to be the random Friday thread, some words of wisdom from Bill:
He personifies aggressive ignorance.
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Hard News: Hip in the Square, in reply to MikeE,
Suprised re your experience at the bar in Studio, I’ve run a few events there (easter weekender, foreign beggars/freestylers, mampi swift, b complex etc) and they have generally had at least 5 people on the bar + glassys, manager etc in the main room and been pretty damn fast.
Interesting. Because they were so plainly under-resourced that night.
The young barman also seemed woefully inexperienced. I'm always polite (but keen) waiting at the bar, but by the time I'd been standing there 20 minutes and and he was turning around and serving the guy who'd just walked up next to me -- twice! -- I was wondering what the hell was going on.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Christiaan,
Video said to be of a diplomatic car that ran over 20 people in Cairo on the 28th Jan. I don't know what's worse, the video or some of the comments justifying it (warning: some may not want to watch this):
Indeed. I've seen one of these clips and that was upsetting enough. Bastards.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Neil Morrison,
It’s not just knowing where people were but the confidence of knowing that other people also knew. That wouldn’t happen so easily with traditional media, if it happened at all.
I like I how linked to something that illustrated your idea so well without even actually meaning to.
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Wired has a fascinating story on the geeks of Tahrir Square .
What these young people are doing seems important to me. I also find the "how" pretty interesting too.
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One of The Nation's bloggers addresses Gladwell's self-justifying blurt in the New Yorker and produces something much more insightful and interesting than the thing he's critiquing.
The overarching problem here is the false premise, frequently employed in these disputes. No one is arguing that this is the first protest in world history. Very few people think the Internet is an essential prerequisite to revolution. Instead, they're exploring whether the web and networked communications open up new and effective ways for citizens to converse and organize each other in repressive societies. (Access to mobile phones and text-messaging, for example, may have helped young people organize in Egypt and Tunisia in a different way than landlines or websites.) We can engage these issues without taking anything away from the French Revolution. Now, whether people "always" communicate grievances in authoritarian societies—a dubious claim—is less important to foreign policy than what comes of those communications.
And:
Which brings us to another presumption in Gladwell's post : the subjective and potentially indulgent judgment about what is "interesting." Here, I have a little sympathy with his annoyance. Some people are interested in what moves people: first principles and anger points and all that; others are interested in how political action works: collecting petition signatures, party committee elections; and others fixate on technology or media: how an iPhone works, why an article is the most e-mailed. Since the media have more control over public discourse than other groups, by definition, they can skew debates to disproportionately cover their favorite topics, which include itself. This tendency is partially checked by new media, which add criticism and alternative topics to the mix. If there's a blind spot here, however, it is in the areas of media and technology, which are overemphasized by both new and old media. (Pew has data on this trend.)
I can get behind this article.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to giovanni tiso,
Which was actually quite dispiriting: it was like we had found a way to make it about us and so suddenly it was important, and there was nothing about all the other dimensions of the story, nor any sense of history or subtlety about the media phenomenon itself.
Fair enough. I gave a couple of talks last year in which which I argued that the critics of the grand claims for social media’s role in Iran also made the mistake of thinking it was all about us. ie: it wasn’t about what you found if you searched for the #IranElection hashtag, which was, yes, a lot of hand-wringing western internet users (my slide read “#IranElection wasn’t about us”).
The story was more the small but significant role that Twitter played inside the country, and in communicating with the rest of the world – for the relatively mundane reason that the mullahs hadn’t worked out how to block it effectively. Which isn’t the same thing as a “Twitter revolution”.
Oops, I said it. Please shoot me if I use that phrase again …