Social Media and Manchester

Went to an event (more on that word later) last night about "Social Media", at the Northern pub, just off Oldham St.

Six workshops over two sessions on all different aspects of "social media" (internet technologies that enable better communication and collaboration and hangin' out).

Very relaxed atmosphere, lots of mingling, lots of interesting people.

I went to a "Beginners" session, and learnt about the basics of twitter and 'tweeting' etc run by Chi-chi Ekweozor of www.realfresh.tv

Tim Difford, of onegreenerday, suggested I come (not that anyone needs an invite- it's very informal), and for this I'm grateful to him.

"Event"- implies centrally organised and a bit boring. "Meeting" implies one strict agenda and a bit boring. This was something in between or off to one side. It had obviously cost some people time and energy to put together, but they weren't trying to get a direct ego hit in terms of attention/adulation.

I will certainly go again, and forward on details of the next one to all and sundry. I am now also determined to have a "Social Media and Climate Change" workshop at the conference on 7th March...

Green Capitalism: Images and 'Hidden' Realities

"Of course, the more familiar image of green capitalism is one of small grassroots enterprises offering local services, solar housing, organic food markets, etc. It is true—and promising—that as ecological awareness spreads, the space for such activities will grow. We should also acknowledge that the related exploration of alternative living arrangements may contribute in a positive way to the longer-term conversion that is required. More generally, it is certainly the case that any effective conservation measures (including steps toward renewable energy) that can be taken in the short run should be welcomed, whoever takes them. But it is important not to see in such steps any repudiation by capital of its ecologically and socially devastating core commitment to expansion, accumulation, and profit."

This is banal to some, obvious to others and deeply heretical to most everyone else- at least, to those in the Corridors of Power of "our" political, economic and media insititutions.

Anyhow, it comes from an excellent article called "Capitalist and Socialist Responses to the Ecological Crisis" in Monthly Review November 2008, by Victor Wallis, who also writes for CNS.

Oh, here's a bit more:

"As this whole current of opinion becomes stronger, advocates of green capitalism pick up on the popular call for renewable energy, but accompany it with a vision of undiminished proliferation of industrial products. In so doing, they overlook the complexity of the environmental crisis, which has to do not only with the burning of fossil fuels but with assaults on the earth’s resource-base as a whole, including for example the paving over of green space, the raw-material and energy costs of producing solar collectors and wind-turbines, the encroachment on natural habitats (not only by buildings and pavement but also by dams, wind-turbines, etc.), the toxins associated with high-tech commodities, and the increasingly critical problem of waste disposal—in short, the routine spinoffs from capital’s unqualified prioritization of economic growth.... While the need to cut greenhouse gases is recognized, the challenge is posed in narrowly technological terms. Attempts to resist consumerism are belittled, on the assumption that innovations, along with massive public investment, will solve any problem of scarcity (the vision is emphatically centered on the United States, with China invoked to signify that the drive to growth is unstoppable). The very existence of an environmental nexus is called into question, on the grounds that the category “environment” can only be conceived either as excluding humans or as being synonymous with “everything,” at either of which extremes it is seen to make no sense. The biological understanding of the environment as a matrix with interpenetrating parts is not entertained."

Weight of the World 2: Early days

Jan 9th
There's always low hanging fruit, not that I get my five portions a day.

The first week has gone well- down from 130.4 to 128.6 kilos. Weighed on the same (zeroed and accurate) scales at same time of day in same clothes blah blah.

To what do I ascribe my fantastic weight loss? Starvation since Wednesday? Cutting out all pizza etc?

No, I ascribe it to having gone to the gym and done a minimum of an hour (sometimes closer to two) on the stepper literally every day.

That's unsustainable in the long term (but great for getting through copies of the Financial Times and Capitalism Nature Socialism, Monthly Review etc.)

Oh, and I hadn't been doing any upper-body, which I've just now done, so some of that loss may have been from atrophy of pecs and deltoids etc.

So, an uniequivocal success so far.

Western Buddhism and the menage-a-moi

"The problem of the uncritical acceptance of acontextual enlightenment should not be underestimated. As Slavoj Zizek often points out, what he calls “Western Buddhism” can function as the highest form of adaptation to late capitalism, allowing members of the most privileged sectors of the global system of domination to go about their work on behalf of that system while minimizing their level of guilt and stress and assuring themselves of their deeply compassionate qualities and the absolute perfection of their underlying Buddha-Natures. We may add that many of them also take comfort in the likelihood of a spectacular rebirth in their next lives: the ultimate upward mobility. What such “Western Buddhism” misses, or course, is that Buddhism is not about complacency but rather about the awakened mind."

This is from page 26 of the latest edition of Capitalism Nature Socialism, in an article that was slow to start, but really got going towards the end. It's called “Nagarjuna and the Ecology of Emptiness," by John Clark.
Zizek I can sort of take or leave. I did like his concept of the vanishing mediator, however...

Aida Hurtado said all that needed to be said on this.

"It doesn't matter how good you are, as a person, if the institutions of the society provide privilege to you based on their group oppression of others. Individuals belonging to dominant groups can be infinitely good, because they are never required to be personally bad."

She's quoted by the very interesting anti-racist activist Time Wise (blog, website). Check out this on Hilary supporters who were saying they'd vote McCain/stay home- ouch!

See also
New Age Capitalism by Kimberley J. Lau
Ones who walk away from Omelas, a short story by Ursula Le Guin

Are We Human or did you exchange...?

I've an old favourite song, that's definitely on my desert island discs.

It's “Wish You Were Here” by Pink, or Floyd (I'm not sure which one is Pink)

It's got a line I love

“Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?”

There are various interpretations, but to me it means you've a choice of being the star in your own soap opera, or you can get on with being a small and unglamorous part of the Bigger Picture.

You have to make it up as you go along, you never know if your efforts will pay off (in fact, you can be sure that most of them will end in 'failure'. The Mirror Test is no fun...)

And it relates to the whole notion of what some call the “Star System”, where social movements are seen as springing from individual heroic leaders (Martin Luther King, Gandhi etc). And if those leaders aren't around, nothing can happen. And that is both completely untrue, and conveniently disempowering. And- as usual in my experience- there's a quote from an interview with Noam Chomsky that says it well.

"The bad dynamic, what you're pointing to, is the "star story. It's standard when a popular movement takes off for people to show up and say, OK, I'm your leader. A Eugene McCarthy type, say. Here's a big popular movement. Fine. I'm your leader. Give me power. If you can't give me power I'll go home and write poetry and talk about baseball. And if you can give me power then I become your leader and now you look up to me and you go home and put the power in my hand. That's a familiar dynamic, and Bakunin's Red bureaucracy, no matter what its politics are. It could be right wing, it could be left wing. But there's a better dynamic, which is that the popular movements continue and strengthen, and where there are people around who, for whatever reason or quirk or privilege or whatever it may be, can contribute to them by intellectual activity, they do a part of it. That's all. They're not stars. They're not leaders. They're just contributing in the way that they know how to contribute. That would be a better structure. But it can tend to degenerate into this other very quickly, especially in a culture which is reinforcing their worst tendencies by trying to create an imagery of leadership and stars and heroes and so on."

And there's a new favourite song, which may not stand the test of time, but for now I love it.

It's the Killers, asking pretty much the same question as Messrs Pink and Floyd- “Are we human, or are we dancer?”

The lyrics are here, and they stand a read and a think and a listen.

“up to the platform of surrender
I was brought but I was kind
and sometimes I get nervous
when I see an open door”

Which comes to the same fear- of our smallness, the inadequacy of both our talents and our discipline to the problems we face (Samuel Johnson wrote a wonderful essay- “What Have Ye Done?” on this subject... (Dec 22^nd 1759 in The Idler)

"will your system be alright
when you dream of home tonight
there is no message were receiving
let me know is your heart still beating"

And to close, with a (from memory) phrase on the front of the Mozambican school exercise books I used to use.

“Vamos estudar e fazer do nossa de nossa educaca um instrumento de libertacao do povo.”

Which translates as “Let's study and make of our education an instrument of the liberation of the people.”

Catastrophising; C3PO, Jock and Game Theory

It only just occurred to me that C3P0 is basically a tin version of Jock from the TV show Dad's Army. And there's also Eeyore and Chicken Little and the whole "Sky is Falling" thing.

So, I don't know the whole psychology of learned pessimism and catastrophising, but here are some guesses.

• It's prophylactic- if the worst happens you are (slightly) prepared, and if it doesn't then you are pleasantly surprised, having managed to lower your expectations.
• It's pleasurable- as in "disasturbation".
  
• Also, invoking “game theory”* you don't lose credibility. To predict the “worst” makes you look tough-minded, where optimism is regarded as woolly idealism and naivete.
• It ties in with the whole Conspiracy-Apocalypse-Paranoia Complex that I wrote about yonks ago and should dig off the hard drive and post somewhere.
  

This is all true, but dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system is hegemonic, in the sense of it being something that changes the rules of the game. And were are too cognitively limited, as a species and often as individuals, to spot that. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted, I guess. If you were tolerably rich.

[* I've done no such thing of course, just used the term (too) loosely to give a patina of profundity. But once I get my head around GT properly, I'll blog on it. A lot of it is tosh, and I recently read some rather good chapters in Philip Ball's “Critical Mass” on the subject. But I digress...]

Book Review: Participative Web and UCC

Participative Web and User-Created Content: Web 2.0, Wikis and Social Networking

By Graham Vickery and Sacha Wunsch-Vincent

OECD 2006

Boiled down to three sentences
User Created Content is having various impacts on the Web, the people who use it and their societies and economies. But reliable information is hard to come by and hot damn this field is moving so fast that these guys didn't talk about facebook and twitter, which were gleams in a venture capitalist's eye back when it was written.

“Coolest” quote (it's all relative)

It is worth stressing that the social impact of the Internet in general and the impact of UCC-related pass-times and communication on society and personal relations have not yet been researched in detail. The spectrum of predictions ranges from Internet communications leading to the “breakdown of personal relationships and social contact” to Internet communications “holding great promises for improving real life relationships and tasks”. Recent assessments point to people communicating more than ever but that their pattern of communication and interaction has changed (Statistics 121 Canada, 2006). There is also insufficient understanding of how media consumption generally affects brain processing, learning, attitudes, and behaviour, e.g. the impacts of virtual worlds on behaviour, or on learning/skills (see also OECD, 2005d for skills in the context of online games).
More research in these fields is warranted.

Page 97

Should it be read? If so, by whom?
Sort of, if you're a sad anorak who wants to be able to boast about reading OECD reports in the original bureaucratese.

Other things on this theme I have read/seen that I'd recommend
The FT has a good tech coverage, though they seem a little over-enamoured of Twitter.

Couple of articles I read recently

Is Google Making us Stupid?
Nicholas Carr, The Atlantic Monthly, July 2008

The Autum of the Multitaskers
Walter Kirn, The Atlantic Monthly, November 2007

Pretty entertaining "Web Crashes" Onion TV story...

See also another dwight towers posting, on "The Angel of History"

Which includes a plug for/link to Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil

Other things on this theme that I should get round to
Grown Up Digital by Don Tapscott- it's on my list of books for 2009!

Other things by this author that I should get round to
blah

When/where I first encountered this author
blah

When/where I bought this book
Library book, cited somewhere that I can't now remember