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Annotated Digital Culture Links: April 24th 2009
Links for April 23rd 2009 through April 24th 2009:
- A little cynicism about the Susan Boyle phenomenon [Just TV] – Some useful points to think about in terms of the dramatic rise (or spread) of Susan Boyle, the Britain’s Got Talent competitor who has taken the internet by storm. Mittell asks why so few people are allowing for the possibility that Boyle’s appearance was more manufactured than it appeared – this is reality tv, after all!
- calling a customer a brat: twitter and the distinctions between public and private [jill/txt] – A cautionary tale: in Norway a teenager wrote on Twitter, complaining he couldn’t legally purchase a song in Norway which was available in the US. A Warner Brothers’ representative in Norway saw the tweet, and twittered back a response which basically called the teenager a brat and suggested (sarcastically) that he should just pirate it. The exchange was widely linked to, Warner Brothers had to issue a public apology. Jill notes this is a clear case of folks on Twitter not clearly understanding that it’s public space: “… if the record company exec had been talking to a journalist rather than firing off 140 characters from his sofa he would almost certainly not have called a would-be customer a brat. He would have moderated his tone and choice of words according to his awareness that he would be quoted.”
- Oprah effect: 43% jump in Twitter traffic – Technology Live [USATODAY.com] – “Oprah Winfrey’s effect on book sales when she supports a new title is legendary. She may have even contributed to the election of the nation’s first black president with her endorsement of Barack Obama. So what happened in Twitterland after Winfrey started Tweeting, and used her TV show as a platform to announce her online Twitter presence? According to market tracker Hitwise, traffic to Twitter went up 43% in a before and after survey of the Oprah Effect. Additionally, on April 17th, the day of Winfrey’s first Tweets, 37% of visits to Twitter.com were new visitors, Hitwise says. By comparison, Hitwise says Facebook’s ratio of new visitors in March were 8%.”
Annotated Digital Culture Links: April 21st 2009
Links for April 17th 2009 through April 21st 2009:
- Courts throw Facebook at digital navel gazers [WA Today] – “Const Robert Hogan claimed he was just playing around outside a nightclub when an off-duty military commando bit his face so hard that he drew blood and a five-centimetre gash. A judge ultimately punished his assailant with a suspended jail sentence but not before Constable Hogan’s private life was tendered to court as evidence, courtesy of his Facebook site. … These digital collections are so convincing to a jury, fed a constant diet of television forensics, that a Sydney University law professor, Mark Findlay, believes it is leading to cases being increasingly won on circumstantial evidence. “You are going to see a trend in trials away from oral evidence to documentary trials,” Professor Findlay said. Such a trend was concerning because documentary evidence was easier to fabricate than that provided by a witness, he said. Juries were also less likely to doubt the quality of the information. For example, they do not doubt that a text belongs to the owner of the mobile phone.”
- Telstra cracks down on Twitter, Facebook mischief [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – “Telstra is the first major Australian company to tell its employees how to behave on social media like Twitter, Facebook and Myspace …. there’s a decidedly old-fashioned flavour to its “3 Rs” document. It’s not reading, writing and arithmetic in this case though – Telstra employees are implored to observe responsibility, respect and representation. The guidelines tell employees who are using social media for personal use – a far more common and risky situation for the company – to include a disclaimer if they talk about Telstra. They say if someone plans to comment regularly about the company then they should post a permanent disclaimer but if they post infrequently they should use one on a case-by-case basis. A disclaimer would be similar to those attached to company emails, with words to the effect of “the views in this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Telstra”. The guidelines are backed up with the threat of disciplinary action.”
- With Oprah Onboard, Twitter Grows [NYTimes.com] – “One small message from Oprah, one giant leap for Twitter. On Friday morning, Twitter received the blessing of Oprah Winfrey, one of Middle America’s most influential tastemakers, when Ms. Winfrey tapped out her inaugural message using the microblogging service as the cameras of her talk show cameras rolled. “HI TWITTERS,” Ms. Winfrey wrote, using all capital letters in the Internet equivalent of shouting. “THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY.”” (Good to see Shaq calling her out for using caps! And how can Twitter remain kewl now? :P)
- House, FB: A Consideration of Convergence Marketing [Jacqueline Vickery / Flow 9.11] – Fascinating look at how the death of a character on House in the US was followed by a seemingly real commemoration page on Facebook. After a thoughtful article, Vickery notes: “Once users were on Facebook however, Fox was provided with an instant demographic snapshot of House viewers – their gender, age, location, sexuality, and probably even their political and religious affiliations (since all of this information is privileged as “basic demographics” at the top of a Facebook profile). It is important to note that this snapshot is of course limiting and limited (by those with computers, internet access, and maybe a higher level of fan motivation), but nonetheless extremely valuable to Fox.”
Annotated Digital Culture Links: April 17th 2009
Links for April 14th 2009 through April 17th 2009:
- Digging up dirt: Facebook spies for hire [The Age] – “Large companies and government departments are employing a new Sydney-based company to dig up dirt on staff by spying on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and YouTube posts. SR7 specialises in “online risk and reputation management” and claims to be the only company in Australia that actively monitors social networking sites on behalf of companies. It was formed about eight months ago in response to the growing trend for people to take conversations they would have traditionally had with mates at the pub on to their social network profiles. Few people realise these seemingly private sites are still public spaces. If controversial posts leak to the media, it can lead to brands suffering immense damage to their reputations. SR7 director James Griffin said business was booming following recent public relations disasters sparked by the stupid social network behaviour of a few rogue employees.” (The golden rule: if it’s online, presume it’s public!)
- Twitter activist goes into hiding [The Age] – “The woman behind the mass protests which rocked the capital of Moldova last week has gone into hiding after the so-called “Twitter Revolution” forced a recount of the general election. Natalia Morar, 25, a Moldovan who has already been banned from Russia for opposing the Kremlin, feared arrest after organising a flash mob which ended with 20,000 people storming the parliament building. Protests began after a conversation between Ms Morar and six friends in a cafe in Chisinau, Moldova’s tiny capital, on Monday, April 6, the day after the parliamentary elections. The elections brought a larger-than-expected victory for the incumbent Communist Party. Suspecting vote-rigging, “we decided to organise a flash mob for the same day using Twitter, as well as networking sites and SMS,” …With no recent history of mass protests in Moldova, “we expected at the most a couple of hundred friends, friends of friends, and colleagues”, she said. “When we went to the square, there were 20,000 people””
- Twitter Gets the Oprah Treatment [Bits Blog – NYTimes.com] – “It is the universal sign of a new idea going mainstream: Oprah Winfrey is bestowing her endorsement on Twitter. The woman who can single-handedly send a new product or book flying off the shelves has just joined Twitter.” I can’t wait for Oprah’s tweet of the month … 😛
- Disney Templates is Today’s BIG Thing – APR 07, 2009 [Video] – “Looks like the Disney Vault has a purpose after all – to keep us from realizing how similar our favorite classic Disney movies truly are. According to this video, Disney only ever made one movie, and they’ve been tracing it ever since.” [Via]
Annotated Digital Culture Links: April 9th 2009
Links for April 6th 2009 through April 9th 2009:
- on url shorteners [joshua’s blog] – “… URL shorteners are bad for the rest of us. The worst problem is that shortening services add another layer of indirection to an already creaky system. A regular hyperlink implicates a browser, its DNS resolver, the publisher’s DNS server, and the publisher’s website. With a shortening service, you’re adding something that acts like a third DNS resolver, except one that is assembled out of unvetted PHP and MySQL, without the benevolent oversight of luminaries like Dan Kaminsky and St. Postel. There are three other parties in the ecosystem of a link: the publisher (the site the link points to), the transit (places where that shortened link is used, such as Twitter or Typepad), and the clicker (the person who ultimately follows the shortened links). Each is harmed to some extent by URL shortening.” (While I understand URL shortening for Twitter, I think they tend to obscure the actual destination and make evaluating a link very difficult!)
- Facebook Blocks All Pirate Bay Links [TorrentFreak] – “… [in] March The Pirate Bay added new functionality to reach out to millions of Facebook users. Just over a week later and the world’s largest social networking site has blocked all links to torrents on the world’s largest and most infamous BitTorrent tracker. It was less than two weeks ago when The Pirate Bay implemented a new feature making it easier for site users to post links to torrents on their Facebook profile… The entertainment industries were not happy with the new feature, but since The Pirate Bay is not exclusively used to spread copyrighted material, there wasn’t much they could do about it. Facebook users responded positively and many began posting torrent links in their profile. This integration of the world’s largest tracker and the world’s largest social networking site generated hundreds of news articles and excitement. But it wasn’t to last. This morning Facebook … blocked not only the feature, but all links to Pirate Bay’s torrents.”
- Flutter: The New Twitter [YouTube] – When the 140 characters of Twitter get too much, the nanoblogging revolution of Flutter might be right for you! 😉
Annotated Digital Culture Links: March 30th 2009
Links for March 25th 2009 through March 30th 2009:
- Vintage DHARMA ads.[Flickr] – An outstanding set of fan-made ads for the more banal side of Lost‘s Dharma Initiative! By Adam Campbell [Via io9]
- Shooter video games ‘sharpen vision’ [News.com.au] – “Slaying hordes of bad guys in fast-paced video games improves vision, a study has shown for the first time. Far from being harmful to eyesight, as some had feared, action games provide excellent training for what eye doctors call contrast sensitivity, the study found. Contrast sensitivity is the ability to notice tiny changes in shades of grey against a uniform background, and is critical to everyday activities such as night driving and reading. It often degrades with age. The findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, reveal a previously unsuspected adaptability in the brain, and could open the way to new therapies, the researchers said.” (This week, video games are good! 🙂
- When Stars Twitter, a Ghost May Be Lurking – NYTimes.com – “The rapper 50 Cent is among the legion of stars who have recently embraced Twitter to reach fans who crave near-continuous access to their lives and thoughts. On March 1, he shared this insight with the more than 200,000 people who follow him: “My ambition leads me through a tunnel that never ends.” Those were 50 Cent’s words, but it was not exactly him tweeting. Rather, it was Chris Romero, known as Broadway, the director of the rapper’s Web empire, who typed in those words after reading them in an interview. “He doesn’t actually use Twitter,” Mr. Romero said of 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis Jackson III, “but the energy of it is all him.” … someone has to do all that writing, even if each entry is barely a sentence long. In many cases, celebrities and their handlers have turned to outside writers — ghost Twitterers, if you will — who keep fans updated on the latest twists and turns, often in the star’s own voice.” (If you need a ghostwriter for 140chars, you’re not trying!)
- Conroy admits blacklist error, blames ‘Russian mob’ [SMH] – “The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, has admitted that Bill Henson images were added to the communications regulator’s list of prohibited websites in error, while blaming the addition of a dentist’s site to the blacklist on the “Russian mob”. Meanwhile, the website of the Federal Government’s censorship body, the Classification Board, was hacked last night and defaced with an anti-censorship screed. The admission by Senator Conroy on ABC television’s Q&A program last night casts significant doubt on the Government’s ability to filter the internet without inadvertently blocking legitimate websites. Q&A was inundated with 2000 questions from the public about the Government’s hugely unpopular policy, and the audience last night ridiculed Senator Conroy by laughing at a number of his responses.”
- YouTube Being Blocked in China, Google Says [NYTimes.com] – “Google said Tuesday that its YouTube video-sharing Web site had been blocked in China. Google said it did not know why the site had been blocked, but a report by the official Xinhua news agency of China on Tuesday said that supporters of the Dalai Lama had fabricated a video that appeared to show Chinese police officers brutally beating Tibetans after riots last year in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. Xinhua did not identify the video, but based on the description it appears to match a video available on YouTube that was recently released by the Tibetan government in exile. It purports to show police officers storming a monastery after riots in Lhasa last March, kicking and beating protesters. It includes other instances of brutality and graphic images of a protester’s wounds. According to the video, the protester later died.”
Curtin’s Internet Filtering and Blocking
How much does your educational institution filter the internet, especially if you’re at tertiary level (because K-12 filtering has other issues attached to it)? I ask because in my recent shift to Curtin, I’ve discovered the joys of university-level internet filter, something that didn’t happen at my previous institution. The list of blocked or click-thru site (ie not completely blocked, but having a warning message asking if you really need this website) seems to alter week to week. This morning, every time I want to visit Twitter, Plurk, Facebook or even a wordpress.com blog, I have to click through a warning page; every time I reload, I have to click through a warning page. Apart from being highly frustrating, I’m currently redesigning several units which are thematically linked by the concept of web presence; almost everything I want students to look at will have these warnings on the Curtin network. I wonder how many students will get frustrated and give up on the unit? This morning’s blocks so far …
Ironic Update: The first attempt to upload this blog post from my work computer led me to discover that even this website is blocked now:
I wonder what sort of hoops I’m going to have to jump through to try and fix this? 🙁
Update 2: Most of the blocking seems to have magically stopped as suddenly as it began about 12 hours ago so, being generous, I’d like to believe this was an accidental blocking … I’d really like to believe that …
Annotated Digital Culture Links: March 18th 2009
Links for March 13th 2009 through March 18th 2009:
- Fake Stephen Conroy lashes out at Telstra [SMH] – “Telstra’s attempts to cover up the fact that it tried to silence Fake Stephen Conroy have backfired spectacularly. The Telstra employee who created the satirical Twitter profile has told his bosses not to “throw me under the f—ing bus just to make Telstra look social-media savvy”. After it was revealed that the popular Twitter profile impersonating Communications Minister Stephen Conroy was written by senior Telstra employee Leslie Nassar, the postings stopped. Nassar refused to speak to media, saying he was told to direct all comment requests to Telstra’s public relations unit. The Fake Stephen Conroy profile was also disabled for a period before reopening late yesterday. Telstra’s social media adviser Mike Hickinbotham came out to declare that Telstra did not try to shut Nassar up nor tell him to cease making the Fake Stephen Conroy posts. This directly contradicted earlier comments by Nassar, who said he was told by Telstra to stop.”
- Telstra man behind Fake Stephen Conroy [SMH] – “A web prankster impersonating Communications Minister Stephen Conroy on Twitter has been outed as a Telstra staff member. The staffer has now been silenced by the telecommunications giant, perhaps out of fear that the revelations will further increase tensions between Telstra and the Government, which has excluded Telstra from the bidding process to build a $10 billion-plus national broadband network. The satirical “Fake Stephen Conroy” profile, which has now been wiped, sparked almost as much discussion online as Senator Conroy himself. It primarily lampoons the Government’s proposed mandatory internet filtering scheme. Following an online manhunt that turned up a long list of suspects, Fake Stephen Conroy decided to turn himself in before he could be outed.
“OK, so here it is; Fake Stephen Conroy = Leslie Nassar,” he wrote yesterday.” (‘Twas fun while he lasted! 🙂 - Journalism students ‘don’t read papers’ [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – “The journalists of the future are rapidly moving away from traditional news services, saying they are impractical compared to new media. A survey of Australian journalism students found 90 per cent of students do not like reading the newspaper, preferring to source news from commercial television or online media. Professor in Journalism and Media Studies at the Queensland University of Technology, Alan Knight, conducted the survey and says despite an aversion to newspapers, 95 per cent of students are very interested in following the news. “At this stage commercial television is still the favoured source, but online is rising pretty rapidly,” he said.” (I read most of my newspapers online, too. That said, i really hope some of the journalism students of today and thinking of ways to ensure that quality journalism is economically viable in the future!)
- Gervais + Elmo = Hilarity on ‘Sesame Street’ [YouTube] – The funniest thing you’ll see today – Ricky Gervais and Elmo taking an interview to a place Sesame Street realyl shouldn’t go! And, as Waxy says, they have the same laugh!
Annotated Digital Culture Links: March 11th 2009
Links for March 10th 2009 through March 11th 2009:
- Video: Truly Uncut – A Complete Common Craft Video Shoot [Common Craft – Explanations In Plain English] – How many stop-motion shots goes into the average Common Craft ‘in plain English’ video … an awful lot, it seems!
- Bangladesh imposes YouTube block [BBC NEWS | South Asia] – “The video-sharing web site YouTube has been blocked by Bangladesh after a recording of a meeting between the PM and army officers was posted. The meeting took place two days after a mutiny by border guards in Dhaka that left more than 70 people dead. The recordings cover about 40 minutes of a three-hour meeting and reveal how angry many in the military were at the government’s handling of the crisis. YouTube had been blocked in the “national interest”, officials said.”
- Know Your Meme: Boxxy [Rocketboom] – Rocketboom take a detailed look at the Boxxy meme and 4chan’s micro-civil war. Good stuff on memes in general.
- Ewan McGregor twitchy over fake Twitter site [The Guardian] – “Spare a thought for the 19,639 subscribers to Ewan McGregor’s Twitter feed. For the past four months they have been treated to regular updates of the actor’s daily routine. When McGregor was “about to enjoy banana pancakes”, they were kept informed. When he “needed some Tylenol extra strength”, they were told about that too. Now comes the most alarming revelation of all: representatives of the actor claim that the Twitter site and its related MySpace profile are actually run by impostors. “Ewan McGregor does not have a Twitter site or one on MySpace either,” insisted a spokesperson for the Trainspotting star. “Someone is just making it all up.”” (Which would, I’d imagine, be easy enough to do!)
Twitter & Disintermediation
Yesterday, when talking about celebrities and Twitter, I rather flippantly threw both Stephen Fry and the term disintermediation in without giving much context beyond Fry’s popularity. Now, disintermediation at it simplest form means taking the middleman – or middle person – out of the chain; this could mean the automation of the telephone exchange (no more person connecting the various cables) or celebrities being able to address their fans directly online, removing the need for celebrity gossip columnists, paparazzi and others who make their living as informatic vultures. Today I was reading a transcript of an interview with Stephen Fry in which he expressed this point a great deal more eloquently:
If people want to announce their new this or their new that, they’re going "I’m not going to do an interview, I’m not going to sit in the Dorchester for seven days having one interviewer after another come to me, I’m just going to Tweet it, and point them to my website and forget the press".
And the press are already struggling enough – God knows they’ve already lost their grip on news to some extent. If they lose their grip on comment and gossip and being a free PR machine as well, they’re really in trouble.
So naturally they’re simultaneously obsessed because they use it (as it fills up their column inches) but they’re also very against it.
So you’ll get an increasing number of commentators going "Aren’t you just fed up with Twitter? Oh, if Stephen Fry tells me what he’s having for breakfast one more time, I think I’ll vomit."
They really will have a big go at it because it attacks them, it cuts them out.
Also, while not directly about Twitter, Fry also reiterates the point that all new media forms tend to be seen as the devil for a while:
I doubt you can find any sentence describing how human learning has degraded now that isn’t congruent to a similar sentence written at the time of rise of the novel – about how people were no longer reading sermons and classical literature, but were reading novels from subscription libraries instead.
The literature at the time in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, describing the contempt that the learned establishment had for the rise of the novel – and then of course later with the rise of the penny dreadfuls and sensational literature as more and more people came to read it – again there was a great cry of despair at how there would be nothing but illiteracy in the world, or at least a kind of refusal or inability to engage in proper, serious study.
And we hear the cry again.
Indeed, case in point, The Daily Show’s Twitter Frenzy segment …
Annotated Digital Culture Links: February 24th 2009
Links for February 24th 2009:
- Twittering celebs tell all from Oscars parties [The Age] – Forget the gossip mags – celebrities attending the Oscars and associated after-parties gave fans backstage passes by publishing messages, videos and pictures on their Twitter accounts throughout the evening. After years of dealing with the media mangling their words, stars are now creating a direct dialogue with fans. The combination of Twitter, which allows people to post short messages directly from their mobile phones, and alcohol, led to surprisingly candid postings from the Oscar festivities. Ashton Kutcher and wife Demi Moore were by far the most prolific Oscar Twitterers. They didn’t attend the awards ceremony but hosted an Oscars after-party attended by some of the biggest stars. Kutcher posted an image of rapper Sean “P Diddy” Combs clutching an Oscar alongside the message “Diddy throws up Oscars”. He also published an image of himself with Penelope Cruz’s Oscar. (Whatever will the paparazzi do when the celebrities are all happily photo-stalking each other?)
- Twitter and Futurism Week5 Participation Literacy [Slideshare] – Slides from a great lecture by Trebor Scholz in his Participation Literacy course, looking at twitter and microblogging, giving a solid explanation for it, a rationale, and a pretty good origin story! (And for a less kind reminder about how people, not advertisers, use Twitter, read Richard Giles’ grumpy post Basic Twitter Etiquette.)
- Rick astley ==[FRENCH]==interview about Rickroll internet phenomenon [YouTube ] – “Rick astley (french) interview about Rickroll’D internet phenomenon ,barack roll.,Himself For Governor Of Illinois and MTV Award Hacked.” (The talkshow is in French, but Astley replies in English … it’s worth watching just to see how the subject of a meme can enjoy it so much!)
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