Posts by giovanni tiso
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Manuel Castells agrees with you and Tom Coates. And I know the contrary case is hard to make - but I'll keep chipping at it. And by the way I think apps that tell you stuff about the local weather are great.
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I really don't get your objection. It's just data. It's there anyway. No one is being exploited or humiliated, it is not doing any bad thing that I can think of.
Of course it's just data, and of course you can not watch it. But isn't inordinate data consumption part of the problem? None of these small free applications are a problem in themselves, what I'm trying to say is that collectively they are an extension of the 24 hour television infotainment cycle. The oil spill cam effectively adds another television channel dedicated to just watching the oil flow. More information, yay. But information isn't knowledge, and the problem is still how to create a media ecology where we can acquire and exchange and create more knowledge. It seems to me that in the future of television, that is the present of the Internet, we aren't there yet.
(On a not totally unrelated note: did anybody else notice how the - what's a nicer word for tossers? - who run the Air New Zealand Best Blog awards define blogs as being "primarily dedicated to reporting news or views on news"? What does that say about how we understand the Internet as a medium, and blogs as a form?)
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I suspect you could say that of a thousand other iphone apps Giovanni
I plan to.
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I think there's enough other coverage to provide context, surely
Perhaps. Or perhaps what the webcam does is replace context, reflection and action with spectacle.
This is not a dig at the iPhone specifically, but... what's the communicative or social function of the iPhone oil spill app? Who needs to look at the oil spill while on the move? What does it say about the meshing of information with entertainment?
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Actually part-Samoan
Yes, but would he count as a "darkie" according to Haden? Would Daniel Carter for that matter?
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BP were *forced* to make that footage public - so I guess watching it is part of a bigger action about bearing witness.
They were forced to release it to the authorities, not to the public. And I still think it turns the spill into something of a spectator sport, seeing as arguably it is not information + context (= knowledge), but rather pure information.
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Haden's nonsense is one thing. But would you be painfully PC if you flinched at this material coming from a noted liberal who is incidentally a Pakeha former halfback? If I were brown, I sure think I would.
Laidlaw though supposedly said it to highlight an issue with racism in rugby. Which doesn't make the allegations automatically true, but it's a qualitatively different observation to the one made by Haden, who seemed frankly disinterested in that angle.
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Kyle did you just call Bernie Fraser a "darkie"? wtf man?
Actually, Fraser called himself a "coconut". And proceeded to say that Polynesian players need things explained to them in really simple phrases (unlike, say, Christian Cullen, who could hold his own in conversation with Wittgenstein) and that if he were a coach he would enforce this supposed quota, but then he wouldn't include in it somebody like Victor Vito, on the grounds that Vito is very sharp. So I guess it's actually a quota on Polynesian players who are also stupid.
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Not that I want to defend "hung a ginga day" but wouldn't " hug a blond/brown-haired person" be more equivalent? Coconut and kike being ethnic slurs. Ginga/blond not so much.
How's "hug a black person day", then? Would you find it acceptable?
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What bugs me is the way spectacle parades as information so often on TV these days: the freak-of-the-week documentary, the fat people "factual" show, the way a cooking show can't be a fucking cooking show any more -- it has to be a contest or a mission-doc.
This was already true when Postman wrote his book. I think it’s interesting to note how much more pervasive this logic has become now that we have the Internet. For instance: there is a webcam at the bottom of the Mexican Gulf that allows you to see the oil spill out (PBS has it, as do these guys - who offer it also as an iPhone app). It started off as something that BP made available to the authorities, but then it became just that, another window you could open onto real-time 24 hour news. But for what purpose? Does being able to tune into that particular channel increase the amount and quality of information available to us?