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Digital Culture Links: March 9th 2010
Links for March 9th 2010:
- Mapping the growth of the internet [BBC News] – Useful flash-powered world map from the BBC visually demonstrating the growth in internet use across the globe from 1998 to 2008. (Quite a lot of growth to be seen!)
- Return of the natives by Slavoj Zizek [New Statesman] – Slavoj Zizek gets stuck into Avatar: “So where is Cameron’s film here? Nowhere: in Orissa, there are no noble princesses waiting for white heroes to seduce them and help their people, just the Maoists organising the starving farmers. The film enables us to practise a typical ideological division: sympathising with the idealised aborigines while rejecting their actual struggle. The same people who enjoy the film and admire its aboriginal rebels would in all probability turn away in horror from the Naxalites, dismissing them as murderous terrorists. The true avatar is thus Avatar itself – the film substituting for reality.”
- Adventures in the Wild, Wild West: Media140 Perth [media140.org] – Official wrap-up post for Perth Media 140 (Feb 2010), including links to pretty much everyone involved and a snappy little video summarising some of the key themes (if you watch closely you can see what 10 seconds of my talking head looks like after presenting a talk in a room which is warmer that 40 degrees Celsius!).
- Study: Ages of social network users [Royal Pingdom] – A really useful breakdown of social networking websites by age, including these stats:
“* Bebo appeals to a much younger audience than the other sites with 44% of its users being aged 17 or less. For MySpace, this number is also large; 33%.
* Classmates.com has the largest share of users being aged 65 or more, 8%, and 78% are 35 or older.
* 64% of Twitter’s users are aged 35 or older.
* 61% of Facebooks’s users are aged 35 or older. […]
* The average social network user is 37 years old.
* LinkedIn, with its business focus, has a predictably high average user age; 44.
* The average Twitter user is 39 years old.
* The average Facebook user is 38 years old.
* The average MySpace user is 31 years old.
* Bebo has by far the youngest users, as witnessed earlier, with an average age of 28.” - Twitter Hits 10 Billion Tweets [Mashable] – “It’s official: Twitter has surpassed 10 billion tweets. […] you can tell by the actual tweet ID numbers that we have crossed the magical threshold. The milestone shows that Twitter’s still growing at a rapid pace: it broke 1 billion tweets in November 2008 and 5 billion tweets just four months ago.”
Darth History
Did you know Darth Vader attended the Yalta conference at the end of World War Two?
History makes such good raw material for the Photoshop-inclined. See the full set of wonderfully mashed up Superheroes in History from agan harahap. [Via io9]
Annotated Digital Culture Links: January 1st 2009
Links for December 30th 2008 through January 1st 2009:
- Principles for a New Media Literacy by Dan Gillmor, 27 December 2008 [Center for Citizen Media] – “Principles of Media Creation: 1. Do your homework, and then do some more. … 2. Get it right, every time. … 3. Be fair to everyone. … 4. Think independently, especially of your own biases. … 5. Practice and demand transparency.””We are doing a poor job of ensuring that consumers and producers of media in a digital age are equipped for these tasks. This is a job for parents and schools. (Of course, a teacher who teaches critical thinking in much of the United States risks being attacked as a dangerous radical.) Do they have the resources — including time — that they need? But this much is clear: If we really believe that democracy requires an educated populace, we’re starting from a deficit. Are we ready to take the risk of being activist media users, for the right reasons? A lot rides on the answer.”
- Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies by Howard Rheingold [Freesouls, ed. Joi Ito] – “Literacy−access to the codes and communities of vernacular video, microblogging, social bookmarking, wiki collaboration−is what is required to use that infrastructure to create a participatory culture. A population with broadband infrastructure and ubiquitous computing could be a captive audience for a cultural monopoly, given enough bad laws and judicial rulings. A population that knows what to do with the tools at hand stands a better chance of resisting enclosure. The more people who know how to use participatory media to learn, inform, persuade, investigate, reveal, advocate and organize, the more likely the future infosphere will allow, enable and encourage liberty and participation. Such literacy can only make action possible, however−it is not in the technology, or even in the knowledge of how to use it, but in the ways people use knowledge and technology to create wealth, secure freedom, resist tyranny.
- How to Do Everything with PDF Files [Adobe PDF Guide] – Pretty much anything you can imagine needing to do with PDF files, without needing to buy Acrobat!
- The 100 Most Popular Photoshop Tutorials 2008 [Photoshop Lady] – Many useful photoshop tutorials from fancy fonts to montages and entirely new creations!
- Israel posts video of Gaza air strikes on YouTube [Australian IT] – THE Israeli military has launched its own channel on video-sharing website YouTube, posting footage of air strikes and other attacks on Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. The spokesman’s office of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said it created the channel — youtube.com/user/idfnadesk — on Monday to “help us bring our message to the world.” The channel currently has more than 2,000 subscribers and hosts 10 videos, some of which have been viewed more than 20,000 times. The black-and-white videos include aerial footage of Israeli Air Force attacks on what are described as rocket launching sites, weapons storage facilities, a Hamas government complex and smuggling tunnels. One video shows what is described as a Hamas patrol boat being destroyed by a rocket fired from an Israeli naval vessel.”
- No terminating the Terminator … ever [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – “Time will not be allowed to terminate The Terminator, the US Library of Congress said overnight. The low-budget 1984 action film, which spawned the popular catchphrase “I’ll be back”, was one of 25 movies listed for preservation by the library for their cultural, historic or aesthetic significance. Other titles included The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Deliverance (1972), A Face in the Crowd (1957), In Cold Blood (1967) and The Invisible Man (1933). The library said it selected The Terminator for preservation because of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s star-making performance as a cyborg assassin, and because the film stands out in the science fiction genre. “It’s withstood the test of time, like King Kong in a way, a film that endures because it’s so good,” Patrick Loughney, who runs the Library of Congress film vault, said.”
- Webisodes Bridge Gaps in NBC Series [NYTimes.com] – Takes a look at the late 2008/early 2009 webisodes from NBC (particularly for Heroes and Battlestar Galactica) and the way these online stories are used to keep fans engaged with television series (or, really, television-spawned franchises) during breaks.
- Nintendo to offer videos on Wii [WA Today] – “Nintendo will start offering videos through its blockbuster Wii game console, the latest new feature for the Japanese entertainment giant. Nintendo said it would develop original programming which Wii users could access via the internet and watch on their television. It is considering videos for both free and fees. The game giant teamed up with Japan’s leading advertising firm Dentsu to develop the service, which will begin in Japan next year, with an eye on future expansion into foreign markets.”
Annotated Links of Interest: November 14th 2008
Links of interest for November 13th 2008 through November 14th 2008:
- Too many twitters drown out Rudd website [SMH] – “So many people were signing up to follow [Australian] Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s short text message updates on Twitter last night that his new page on the social networking site crashed. A spokeswoman for Mr Rudd said the Prime Minister had 670 Twitter followers late last night, but he lost most of them when the page crashed due to high demand. Having witnessed the power of the web in the US presidential election campaign, the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader are engaged in a high-tech arms race to win the hearts and minds of switched-on Australians. Mr Rudd effectively used internet profiles on MySpace and Facebook and his slick Kevin07 website during last year’s federal election but, since becoming Prime Minister, he hasn’t had much time for the web.” (Yes, I am following our PM – let’s see if this really will be used as a conversation, not a lecture!)
- Google Earth revives ancient Rome [BBC NEWS | Technology] – “Google has added a new twist to its popular 3D map tool, Google Earth, offering millions of users the chance to visit a virtual ancient Rome. Google has reconstructed the sprawling city – inhabited by more than one million people as long ago as AD320. Users can zoom around the map to visit the Forum of Julius Caesar, stand in the centre of the Colosseum or swoop over the Basilica. Researchers behind the project say it adds to five centuries of knowledge. “This is another step in creating a virtual time machine,” said Bernard Frischer of Virginia University, which worked with Google on the Roman reconstruction.” (I wish they’d had this when I studied Ancient History as an undergraduate!)
- High quality YouTube video hack [Kottke] – A quick hack to embed high-quality versions of YouTube clips rather than the standard crappy quality ones.
Annotated Links of Interest: October 2nd 2008
Links of interest for October 1st 2008 through October 2nd 2008:
- Google Search 2001 – To celebrate Google’s 10th birthday they’ve gone back in time and worked with the Internet Archive to let you search the 2001 web … YouTube is a nonsense word, ‘blog’ only returns 76,400 hits and Facebook has just under 1800 results!
- EA Downplays Spore’s DRM Triggered Piracy Record [TorrentFreak] – Despite credible estimates that Spore has been downloaded over a million times via bittorrent networks, EA are playing down these figures and, in a turnabout for a big media producer, are arguing that not every download would have represented a legitimate sale were bittorrent not around (something many downloaders have been arguing about p2p film and even tv for years). Despite EA’s PR spin, it seems likely DRM is one of the big things nudging fans into downloading the Spore (and bypassing the DRM altogether).
- Blizzard wins Warcraft bot payout [BBC NEWS | Technology] – “World of Warcraft creator Blizzard has won $6m (£3.36m) in damages from the makers of a software ‘bot’. The damages award comes after Blizzard won the first round of its legal battle against MDY Industries in July 2008. Blizzard embarked on the case against MDY claiming that the World of Warcraft Glider software produced by the small company infringed its copyright. The Glider software lets Warcraft players automate many of the repetitive steps the game involves. … it helped them automate the many repetitive tasks, such as killing monsters and scavenging loot, required to turn low level characters into more powerful ones.”
Annotated Links of Interest: September 8th 2008
Links of interest for September 5th 2008 through September 8th 2008:
- BigPond backs down on Uluru adverts [The Age] – “Telstra BigPond has come under fire for placing advertising billboards on its Second Life island right in front of a virtual model of Uluru. The company has since removed the billboards, which contained BigPond logos, after online communities expert Laurel Papworth complained in a blog post titled “Bigpond brands uluru”. She claimed the telco was being insensitive to indigenous Australians.” (Seems like a pretty valid complaint to me!)
- Silence is Golden: Gay Olympic Champion Matthew Mitcham, Outside of Discourse by Alexander Cho [FLOW, 8.07. 2008] – A look at the media coverage – or, more importantly, lack of media coverage, especially in the US – of Australian Matthew Mitcham’s historic win (and highest scoring dive in Olympic history) at the diving in Beijing. Cho looks at the way the media avoided any shots of Mitcham celebrating with his mother and boyfriend or the award ceremony, arguing that Mitcham’s status as the only openly gay male Olympian worked against him in NBC’s eyes (and in other national media).
- Hey, hey, ho, ho – Video-game censorship has got to go Aaron Delwiche / Trinity University [FLOW, 8.07. 2008] – A fascinating article looking initially at the protests which occured after the recruitment game America’s Army was ported to a the XBOX360 and marketed to younger teenagers. The main argument: “Rather than sticking labels on games like America’s Army, we should be teaching students to think critically about the messages embedded in all video-games.”
Where is the History of the Amiga?
Yesterday I was part of a team presenting a lecture on the History of Computer Games (a nice small topic) and we chose to structure the lecture via our own gaming histories, so I touched on Defender in the arcades, the Vic 20 (and cassette tape drives!) before spending most of my time talking about the Commodore Amiga computer. The Amiga was the significant computer of my youth (late 1980s, early 90s) and as it seemed to have a similar importance to a lot of my friends. Being new to games studies at large I presumed there would be articles on the history of the computer, the games, the role of software piracy (a big issue, even then, long before the interwebs were there to blame) and the graphics power of the platform. To my surprise, there is almost nothing written at all (hello graduate students of the world, are any of you writing this history right now??).
I did find a few things, though, and thought I’d collate them here. Firstly, Jeremy Reimer has been slowly writing a column on his version of the Amiga’s history over at Ars Technica, with seven parts so far: Genesis; The Birth of the Amiga; The First Prototype; Enter Commodore; PostLaunch Blues; Stopping the Bleeding; and Game On! so far. Reimer’s history is very producerly, but nevertheless well written and an engaging read.
An important parallel to the production narrative is the emergence of the Amiga demoscene and game piracy, a history often linked but not always. This history is much, much harder to find although exotica (not a porn site, I should add, but rather about exotic computers) has collated a fantastic scene history, year by year, which you can access through their site. In some ways the demoscene is one of the most significant ancestors of both the open source, public domain and other freeware movements of today, and the great media bugbear, the pirates (although obviously mainly in terms of videogames at this point).
The one source that I couldn’t access in time, but I’ve not ordered and can’t wait to read, is a history of Commodore (mainly the C64 and Amiga) called On the Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore (which you can also get from Amazon). The book seems to have gotten overwhelmingly positive reviews on Amazon, so I have high hopes but I try and post something more once I’ve had a read of it.
Beyond that, though, Amiga fans of old should probably take a look at the emulators of the world (for Windows users, WinUAE works rather well) although you may have to once again resort to piracy to get a lot of your old favourite games – there doesn’t appear to be many other options right now! If you want to remember those amazing visuals and sounds, you can find videos of a lot of demos and games captured on YouTube. Zipping through 23 minutes of Defender of the Crown certainly fires a few old neurons!
One hope I do have is Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort’s new game studies series Platform Studies from MIT Press. Platform Studies looks to be an exploration of the affordances of computer platforms as part of contemporary history (so, looking at what the technology of certain platforms actually allowed programmers to do, what it stopped them doing, and how that influenced software design, among other things). A Platform Studies book on the Amiga must surely be on the cards somewhere in the rapidly emerging world of game studies! (I hope!)
Update: The Classic Amiga website has a huge archive of old Amiga demos, music and some games well worth checking out if you’ve fond memories of the Amiga years.
Links for August 20th 2008
Interesting links for August 19th 2008 through August 20th 2008:
- Facebook, MySpace users warned of cyber crime risk [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – “The Victorian Government has warned users of social networking sites not to post private information online. The Government has released a list of security tips for users of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace in response to the emergence of cyber crime, such as identity theft. Tips include urging users to think twice before posting private information such as addresses and phone numbers online.”
- I Was There. Just Ask Photoshop. [NYTimes.com] – Photoshop, from realfact to goodfact: “REMOVING her ex-husband from more than a decade of memories may take a lifetime for Laura Horn… But removing him from a dozen years of vacation photographs took only hours, with some deft mouse work from a willing friend who was proficient in Photoshop, the popular digital-image editing program. Like a Stalin-era technician in the Kremlin removing all traces of an out-of-favor official from state photos, the friend erased the husband from numerous cherished pictures taken on cruises and at Caribbean cottages, where he had been standing alongside Ms. Horn, now 50, and other traveling companions. “In my own reality, I know that these things did happen,” Ms. Horn said. But “without him in them, I can display them. I can look at those pictures and think of the laughter we were sharing, the places we went to.” “This new reality,” she added, “is a lot more pleasant.””
- Unleashed VC is a blog’s best friend [The Australian] – Steven Schwartz on being Australia’s first blogging Vice-Chancellor: “…the blog has given me the opportunity to express my views on such issues as “the idea of a university today”, reprising Cardinal Newman’s famous essay in a new context; the development of a new code of ethics at the university; if governments can make us happy; how to develop a fairer higher-education system; and expanding equality of opportunity in universities. I have also discussed philanthropy, research, innovation, the role of the humanities, what the future may hold, health, depression, literacy, education, marketing and, by way of making an argument about the importance of scholarship, Tiger Woods. It has been rewarding, and a lot of fun. There is a downside to blogging: a large amount of spam that needs clearing out each morning, and some comments are rude, hostile, or unintelligible.” [Via Andrew Bartlett]
- Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America? [Television – NYTimes.com] – An engaging profile of Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, charting where politics met parody: “Mr. Stewart’s comedic gifts — his high-frequency radar for hypocrisy, his talent for excavating ur-narratives from mountains of information, his ability, in Ms. Corn’s words, “to name things that don’t seem to have a name” — proved to be perfect tools for explicating and parsing the foibles of an administration known for its secrecy, ideological certainty and impatience with dissenting viewpoints.”
- Gaming surgeons quash technology fears [The Australian] – “”…playing smarter computer games can actually help modify our abilities in problem solving, visual attention, working memory, forming and modifying strategies, even creativity.” Professor Westwell said the study on keyhole surgeons, published by the Archives of Surgery, found that while operating and playing computer games, the doctors made decisions and responded quickly to the consequences of those decisions and any unexpected changes that occurred.”
- IOC Wants Olympic Torrents Off The Pirate Bay [TorrentFreak] – “In an official letter to Swedish Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has asked for “assistance” from the Swedish government with preventing video clips from the Olympics in Beijing to be shared on The Pirate Bay. The Pirate Bay, however, does not plan to take anything down, and renamed their tracker to The Beijing Bay.”
Links for July 23rd 2008
Interesting links for July 23rd 2008:
- WarGames: A Look Back at the Film That Turned Geeks and Phreaks Into Stars [Wired Magazine 16.08] – To celebrate it’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Wired has a good overview of the place of WarGames in videogame and geek history.
- What’s In It For Doogie Howser? [Jeffrey McManus] – McManus takes an educated stab at the economics of Joss Whedon’s Dr Horrible web experiment. (Joss himself notes that these figures aren’t that far off.)
- Xbox 360 users to build and sell own games [The Age] – It’ll be interesting to see how well the coming “Xbox Live Community Games” take off and, most importantly, what terms and conditions Microsoft force game creators to accept in order to sell their work to other Xboxers.
Links for May 6th 2008
Interesting links for May 5th 2008 through May 6th 2008:
- Little Brother » Download for Free – Cory Doctorow’s new young adult novel “Little Brother” is out and is also available, in its entirety, as a free download. The novel explores issues of privacy and surveillance (among others) as they related to young people (with culture jamming ideas to boot).
- Apple iTunes To Sell Films On Day Of DVD Release [InformationWeek] – Apple’s iTunes store is to start selling feature film downloads on the same day that they are released on DVD.
- Internet serves up 30 years of spam [ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)] – “Today marks the 30th anniversary of the computer phenomenon – spam email. Now a nuisance for tens of millions of computer users worldwide, three decades ago someone sent what is considered to be the very first spam email.”
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