Posts by giovanni tiso
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to BenWilson,
I can't blame them, but they are wrong. If you're not planning for the future, you're not actually living within your means
If you're in debt throughout your adult life - due to the unaffordability of housing and our perennialy low wages, perhaps with the cherry of a student loan on top - it hardly comes down to profligacy, does it? It's the economy that doesn't put you in the conditions to save. And we all know you simply must pay down your debt first. It's just bloody hard for a lot of people. The good thing about Kiwisaver is that it's (mildly) redistributive and the matching contributions mean that it pays to put money into it even if you're still in debt. We need more of that. And a capital gains tax. And a more progressive taxation regime. And stronger unions to help us earn more.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Russell Brown,
I can get behind this article.
As can I. The developments of the last 36 hours on the other hand are, if not altogether surprising, deeply distressing.
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OnPoint: Election 2011: GO!, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Recruiters are morons, IME, and incapable of examining any deviation from "the client's requirements"
O, RLY?
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Russell Brown,
Call me a journalist, but that seems less important to me right now than simply trying to get a grasp on the extraordinary reportage flowing out of Egypt, via all the means we've been discussing.
I am really not trying to pick a fight. To put my original comment (which wasn't aimed at you) in context: I had been following the events in Tunisia and Egypt for weeks - they're at Italy's doorstep, so the media there was predictably on to it, and I have several friends who help me keep up with these things, largely via social media - and wondering why the English-speaking outlets were keeping mum on Egypt in particular (where the rumblings started quite a while ago), then suddenly the New York Times and others jumped on it and it was all about fucking Twitter and, to a slightly lesser extent, Wikileaks. 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. It was wrong on very many levels, not least of all because, as you write
What role the technologies are playing in Egypt itself is, of course, much harder to know.
Slapping on Iran's protests the "Twitter revolution" label was deeply offensive, as it is to use the phrase Twitter generation to describe the Egyptian movement now. And while I don't subscribe to Gladwell's wholesale dismissal of the role of social media I think it's good that those crude characterisations get challenged - as they do here - in search of a more nuanced position. Because of course that extraordinary reportage flowing out of Egypt is worthy of commentary and analysis. There is no question about that.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Sacha,
I can see why Harold Innis' interest in *permanance* would attract your interest, Gio.
I was more thinking of his idea that new communication technologies introduce a bias in favour of certain forms of organisation, rather than being strict determinants.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Russell Brown,
So clearly any insights or observations they might have in 2011 are invalid. Good to know.
For people who work in media to completely ignore media theory does tend to make their commentary less informed, yes.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Neil Morrison,
I don't know much about social networking and all I know of Marshall McLuhan comes from Woody Allen movies but writing developed in conjuction with the emergence of large-scale social organisation - that could not have happened without writing.
I think the go-to guy for this one is actually the Harold Innis of Empire and Communications (1950). I have the chances that the journos who are spouting off about the Twitter generation might have read him down as slim to nil.
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Again, I'm not suggesting it's not a legitimate story, merely that it's not the story. Which up until last week it was (see asinine references to "the Twitter generation", for instance on the Herald.)
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Also, Scott Hamilton on the NZ military presence in Egypt is well worth a read.
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Hard News: "Orderly transition" in #Egypt, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Many of the urban poor, if what I've been reading in recent days is correct, are, like Indonesia, the desperately rural poor who have migrated to the cities to find jobs that don't exist - as with many poorer nations, Indonesia being but one example. The growth of these mega-cities and the problems they encounter, is, in part caused by these huge inflows from the countryside.
I'm struggling to bridge this with "the Twitter generation", see? But I don't want to be the one who keeps harping on the thing that I complain is being harped on about. The commentary this week fortunately is focussing a bit more on social and historical root causes and political prospects, so let's celebrate that.