Happy Canada Day
July 1st, 2009 | 
Author: I just had this little known fact about our National flag revealed to me today. Tell me, can you see the two faces in the Canadian Flag?
Here’s a little help from MS Paint.
The two faces are named Jack and Jacques, and from their position and expression, it looks as if they are arguing. It’s debatable whether this example of figure-ground reversal was intentional. Still, it’s a symbol of how our country was forged from a tacit agreement of equals rather than a glib consensus. I like that.
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Internet Safety in Schools
[Today we have a guest post from Sara, who demonstrated the SMART board in my SMARTboard Jungle post. ]
As a fairly young middle school teacher, I am never old to my students until I start talking technology. They listen with fascination, and mouths slighly agape, as I explain to them that I can remember when the Internet was once only words, or that I received my first free Email account when I was in university. My students and I are only seventeen years apart in age, but we are growing up in two completely different technological generations. When I was in elementary school, a small computer lab with 15 tiny Macintosh computers was set up in the storage room behind the library. 15 students would go to the lab to type their assignments, 15 students would stay in the classroom to work on Math, and the teacher would run back and forth down the hallway to supervise. Now schools are teaching children with more technology experience then I could ever hope to achieve. The students I taught this year were born in 1998, meaning that they have never been without computers or the Internet.
However, just because students have technology skills, does this mean that they have technology savvy? There have recently been various articles and comments that decry the poor choices students make with regards to technology, like revealing personal information online, posting inappropriate pictures, and cyberbullying. Children have the technological experience that surpasses that of adults, yet they lack the critical thinking skills that enable them to avoid dangerous situations online. How can we both support and protect children as they are exploring a medium that they know more about than ourselves?
For many years, students have associated with their peers through passing notes in class or spending hours on the telephone saying nothing in particular. Some of this communication had the potential to hurt others, but the consequences stayed within the confines of the home, school, or at the very most the community. Today phone conversations have been replaced by text messages, and notes passed in class are now MSN conversations or social networking sites, yet the students are still relaying the same threats, slander, and gossip as before. The difference is they are displaying this information on a public forum, where the whole world could potentially see their actions. Kids now have the ability to post pictures, download videos, and correspond on Facebook. Many do not realize that the items they post for the enjoyment of their friends could be seen by other people for whom the items were not intended.
FYI, the issue of the creepy janitor at the end has already been addressed
One observation that I have noticed from explaining the Internet to students is that you cannot simply espouse on how evil the Internet is, and how they must never, ever post anything about themselves or they will be kidnapped from their homes in the middle of the night by a cruel cyberstalker. Kids know this scenario isn’t really realistic, and because they feel their intelligence has been insulted they won’t want to listen to the better pieces of advice that you want to give. Instead, be truthful. Explain how the Internet is a great place for learning new information and for communication, but just like in any public situation, we need to be careful. Instruct how to place privacy settings on the various Email and social networking sites the students use. Explain that they should not place pictures on the Internet that identify where they live or where they go to school, and discuss why using an avatar without your profile picture would be advantageous. As for cyberbullying, remind students that this is no longer a whispered piece of insult in the hallway, and that bullying in a very public forum could have public consequences. Explain the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and show how Canadian law interprets cyberbullying. Make sure that students understand that any negative comment they place on the Internet, no matter how well-hidden they think it is, has the potential to be discovered.
Overall, try to explain Internet safety to children the way you would discuss computers with a colleague. Explain simply the points that may be common knowledge to you, and never speak down or condescend. The most effective analogy that I feel worked with my classes was to compare the Internet to a bulletin board at school: if you do not want information posted on the board for the entire school to see, then you should not post this same information on the Internet. Children are not dumb. Some Internet dangers may not have ever occurred to them, but if they are given guidance and knowledge most children can amaze you with the mature decisions that they make.
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You are making Perez Hilton a Martyr! Stop it!
It pains me that I should comment on something like this, but the insanity of this story is going unchecked. Perez Hilton was allegedly punched by Will.I.Am’s manager and within minutes the internet lost its mind. Men who don’t even read Perez Hilton’s site were jumping to the fore with “GOOD, HE DESERVED IT!” What the hell? Then you have this other gallery of hypocrites pulling their pants up to their chests and saying “Weellll, I don’t think Perez should’ve been punched, but he is trash and a provocateur, etc. etc.” Bull-tweet. They all subscribe to the same baffling brand of mob justice that makes people go ape-spazz over cartoons of Mohammed. And for what? How many people do you know, Mr. Digg Commentor, or Reddit/Mixx/wasteoftime.com commentor, that have been made fun of by Perez Hilton? Answer? Zero. None. Nai. Nada. Sorry to drag you back to the real world where people work hard and pay taxes, buddy. Will.I.Am just had his best sales week ever, and his biggest problem is this twit with a netbook? He should be so lucky. If you want to call Perez names for crying his eyes out on youtube, that man (for lack of a better word) is crying his way to the bank with the extra traffic and ad revenue from his site.
For all the rants on the ubiquity of celebrity news, I’ve been able to avoid all the specific causes of what happened and what Perez said about the Black-Eyed Peas. I still don’t care about it. The only celebrity news that I care about is the kind that’ll lead to the Marvel Avengers movies. If I have any questions, I go ask my wife. That’s it. What I am angry about is the hypocrisy surrounding the idea that he should be silenced when we as a society have decided that we want to read what’s on his site and give him a ton of ad money to update every day.
Perez doesn’t deserve to get punched in the face. He doesn’t deserve to have his website taken down either. All the verbal abuse that the internet can dish out won’t affect him, he’ll just throw on a crown of thorns and dance around for your amusment. Look, I know it’s horrible that celebrity news has taken up such mental space in our society, but it seems like the more we fight it, the more we feed the beast. In fact, I don’t know why we have this demarcation line between “Important Stuff” and Celebrities. Haven’t we already voted with our attention and our dollars that it’s just as important as Iranian Revolutions and Shuttle launches? We can’t innoculate ourselves from tragic heroes and comic villains, it’s practically in our DNA. Instead of just complaining about it, we need to understand what void people fill up when they log on to TMZ or Access Hollywood. The answer will be just as important as an electric car or fusion power.
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Michael Jackson 1958-2009
When I was little, to call Michael Jackson the King of Pop was an understatement. Today, children use his name as a schoolyard insult. The media coverage of the death seems to have focused more on his work than his antics. Set to the tune of his many, many hits, he seems like less of a sideshow monstrosity and more like an old friend who was just very, very, sick.
Preliminary reports point to a Demerol addiction as the cause of death. In BC, we talk a good game about treating addiction as a disease, but I don’t think we really know how to do that. We’re still caught up with the idea that addiction is simply the product of moral failure. We don’t know the science behind it and we don’t know what’s involved in treating it. Because of that, we can’t take action to help the average addict on Pender Street, much less a heavily enabled celebrity like Michael Jackson. Perhaps his passing will help us realize how little we know and put us on a path to get the answers we need.
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I, Freelancer
I wake up every morning at around 6:30. I wait for the shower if I don’t get there first. I get dressed, pop a diet coke, and sit down to my computer. I am now at work. Although I’m not technically employed, right now I’m doing web projects for a select set of clients. The work is flexible, and I’m available to perform any sort of errands a teacher’s husband needs to do. Every day is a series of decisions that could potentially affect the rest of my career. Should I work on this project, or that project? This proposal promises more money, but that personal project without a client could promote my business. Even writing this blog is a business decision. Sometimes I wish I could just go to an office 8 hours a day and pick up a direct deposit pay stub like everyone else.
But then again, what everyone else am I talking about? Most people my age are in the same boat when it comes to employment. They might not be fencing web projects from a basement apartment office like me, but consider the following. I have never held a job since graduating university that had any expectation of permanence. Okay, there was one, but my whole department was outsourced before the end of the year. Saddest Christmas party ever, let me tell you. When a friend gets laid off, it doesn’t quite have the stigma it used to. You just grab a beer and move on. The security that our parents had may not have been the best idea to begin with. General Motors went bankrupt because of the health and retirement benefits it had to pay over the years.
It sounds like we’re working more for diminishing returns, but there is a trade-off here. Sure, there’s no payroll department shoveling money into my account every month, but when I’m done the work I need to do, I move on to some other client or business that needs me. I don’t have an office per se, but I’m also no more than 20 feet from my own fridge and television either. In turn, the people I work for run with less overhead, resulting in savings that they can pass on to the end consumer. Everyone is producing more work with less resources, and over time that’s what a liberal capitalist society is wont to do.
If there any disadvantages to this situation, it is that there are a lot of unwritten rules of the office that no longer apply to the new workaday world. Phrases like “paying your dues” don’t mean much when your contract runs out in six months. Should workplaces have the right to admonish you when you look for new work while on their payroll? How do you even look for that new work when simply sending in a resume is such a crap shoot? How much should you invest in your own computer hardware and software? These are tough questions, but they’re certainly not intractable. The industrialized world didn’t get its start from people who were just looking to follow the rules. There was a time before people decided what a resume looked like or what a bathroom break policy was. Now we have to make those decisions ourselves and stick to what works. When you’re in control of your own destiny, there’s no one looking over your shoulder to see if you put the semicolon in the right place. It’s just you and the real world.
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The Great Maginot Line of China
Here’s a video by Clay Shirky, author of the recent bestseller “Here comes Everybody”. He gives a little more detail to the kind of changes that are happening to mass media. I love it when he describes the Great Fire Wall of China as the Maginot line of the digital age. If you think about it, any countermeasures against transmitting or processing data are ultimately just as avoidable as the Maginot Line was. It goes against the basic tenets of what a computer is supposed to do, kind of like trying to stop an internal combustion engine using a fire extinguisher. It’s especially ironic considering that China manufactures most of the devices that it’s so desperately trying to hobble.
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Iran and the Death of Mass Media
The wording of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s speech last Friday was so earnest that I almost believed it myself. He really believed that the election was a divine assessment. He also believed that he could blame the recent troubles on Iran’s enemies, who were all living a higher standard of living despite never having heard of such things as a secret morality police. From the hard-liner’s perspective, the regime still seems to be doing all the right things. They are manufacturing reports on state television, throwing out dissenting foreign journalists, confiscating cameras, and applying truncheons to anyone who gets in their way. The methods may seem harsh, but it’s all in a day’s work for defending the Islamic Republic. The only problem is that they are trying to fight an information war in 2009 with techniques that belong in 1979.
Back when the Islamic Revolution was young, print was still the primary source of information. Radio and Television were transmitted through massive antennae using machinery that would fill a small room. Media was still thought of as infrastructure back then. If you had control of it, legitimacy came by default. Today, that sort of centralization of media power doesn’t exist. Your average Best Buy has at least enough media creation equipment to start a revolution. All it took was the video from a single camcorder to set an entire city on fire in the 1992 LA riots. The Iranian Revolutionary regime now faces devices 1/10th the size, with 1000 times the storage capacity, and the ability to connect to a global network that not even President Ahmadinejad’s nuclear ambitions could threaten.
Iran Expert Afshin Molavi claims that if Khamenei were to call for another election, it would be an extreme blow to the regime’s credibility. In my opinion, all hope of the regime’s credibility was dashed in Friday’s speech. He didn’t realize that he had brought a knife to a gun convention. In days passed, his was the only channel on TV. Now he is but a single voice among millions. One of the great myths of the 20th century was that if the footage going through the camera or the sound coming through the microphone didn’t lie, then anyone that had such equipment wouldn’t lie either. Even if the imagery was obviously false, individuals couldn’t come up with something vivid enough to compete with the propaganda. When that kind of power is the hands of all instead of the hands of the few, we begin to see that reality is once again decided by the agreement of people, not by an appeal to any authority, divine or otherwise. So now, along with the Divine Right of Kings before it, the myth of ultimate truth through mass media has been dashed, hopefully forever.
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What’s On Thursdays: Diggnation
You can’t really talk about Internet TV without making note of the great grand-daddy of video podcasts, Diggnation. Kevin Rose plays straight man to his co-host Alex Albrecht as they review and discuss the most popular stories of the week at the social bookmarking site Digg.com. In short, it’s two guys sitting on a couch, drinking beer, and discussing what they find on the internet.
Whatever Kevin and Alex are doing, it seems to be working. The podcast average about 200,000 downloads a week. Their first episode was released 2005, making it one of the longest continuously running shows on the internet. It has sponsors, and even plays to live audiences from time to time. However, every time I download and watch an episode, I get the feeling that Diggnation is only benefiting from a lack of competition rather than a surplus of quality. The episodes are 45 minutes long, and I’m pretty sure 15 minutes of that is filled with long pauses, poorly edited youtube clips, and Alex reading out the stories rather than just summarizing them. Not only that, the banter is secondary to the stories that they talk about. There aren’t many jokes, and there aren’t many arguments. It’s just Alex getting old-time-gold-prospector excited at finding articles that thousands of other people have already found, read, and voted on, while Kevin just introduces the next article like he was calling out bingo at the old folks home.
Perhaps I’m a little biased. I don’t want to watch two guys surfing Digg.com when I’ve got a computer and a net connection handy. People without the time or inclination to search Digg.com’s vast database of articles will find this show helpful. Still, I can’t help but think Diggnation may hold its position as one of the most popular internet shows out there only because it’s one the first. At this point and time, people who write and make jokes for a living still don’t know how to take advantage of this medium because computers are still considered specialized knowledge. The best and the brightest of entertainment are still tied up in traditional forms. A new generation of actors and writers is coming up who have been handling a mouse since before they could read. When that new crop of talent comes of age and finds that all television has been replaced by sociopathic reality shows, they are going to go to the one medium where they can work on their craft. When that happens, shows like Diggnation will simply fall by the wayside.
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And The Trail Led To Backtype.com…
Let’s face it, commenting is the very soul of the blogging business. If it’s on your own site, it provides you with direct access to your readers. On other people’s websites, it offers you an opportunity to promote your website while adding value to the articles you comment on. But what if you have a thought that is simply too small to make a full blog post, yet is too good to be relegated to the bowels of another site’s comment section?
Backtype fills the gap between blogs and the twitter search engine. It keeps a record of your comments using a combination of your name and site URL. You can even log into the site and claim comments that match your identity criteria. While it is a little spooky that your comments can be tracked this way, it’s important to keep in mind that the Internet is a public forum. If we live in a free society, and we deign to voice our opinion on that forum, shouldn’t that opinion be as public as possible?
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The Story of #iranelection
#iranelection was for many people the top news source for the aftermath of incumbent President Mahmoud Amedinejad’s so-called victory over reformer candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi last Friday. It’s not a new cable news channel, or even a news website. It’s what is known on twitter.com as a “trending topic”, a self-declared association of posts on the micro-blogging site. Every post with the word “#iranelection” self-identifies as having something to do with the Iran situation, be it opinions, links to mainstream news articles, or even first hand reports. It’s a new form of primary historical document, one that combines the intimacy of personal letters, the immediacy of video or sound recordings, and the openness of a mass media broadcast.
Twitter is by no means new technology. I find it very similar the web-based chat rooms I myself used in highschool. What is different about it is that it has repurposed current technology to be used in a unique way. Where other systems wanted to emphasize privacy and security, Twitter emphasizes publicity and openness. Most of the 140 character “tweets” are meant for the rest of the Twitter community and the internet at large. It’s easy to write it off as some kind of narcissistic toy, I’m guilty of that myself. However, Twitter’s status as a toy rather than a serious social networking site probably kept it from being blocked in Iran within the first few hours of the protests. Other aspects of the site, like the 140 character limit and interoperable architecture have allowed bloggers in Iran to deal with shoddy connectivity and the government’s attempts to block communication from within the country.
The result is a riveting stream of human emotion, rumor, and anonymous people from across the globe communicating like they never could before. Take a look at this feed from @Change_in_Iran
from the looks of it they are waiting to arrest all the students! it’s also explains the vans9:14 PM Jun 13th from web
some people are now parking their cars in middle of the street trying to block the vans. #iranelection9:16 PM Jun 13th from web
Police is trying to stop people from gathering around while Intel guys still holding a line in front of the gates #iranelection9:05 PM Jun 13th from web
police demanding people to move their cars and start crashing car windows. more people are coming. I will try to get a better view9:18 PM Jun 13th from web
Down with the dictator! Mousavi, Karoubi; support us! #iranelection9:30 PM Jun 13th from web
my eyes are burning hard to keep them open #iranelection9:46 PM Jun 13th from web
I’m dizzy but ok. some people are getting shelter in the nearby unfinished bank building. police arresting a middle aged man10:11 PM Jun 13th from web
@ahmadinejad no wonder you are OK Mr president 24.5M10:13 PM Jun 13th from TwitterFox in reply to ahmadinejad
it’s 9:54 AM -Amirabad street near Pasargad bank and to be honest I don’t have the courage to leave the roof right now #iranelection10:27 PM Jun 13th from web
There are more accounts like this on #iranelection interspersed with rumors of riot police stings disguised as Moussavi rallies and burning ballot boxes. Some tweets supply the Iranians with lists of proxies to get around the government’s internet filters. A hacker’s toolkit of programs to shut down Iranian propaganda websites is making the rounds. From the rest of the world, there are notes praying for the safety of the protesters, “retweets” of some of the more vital bits of news for fellow bloggers, and criticism of mainstream media outlets for their lack of coverage on the events. To see people communicate like this on such a personal level, the future of totalitarian regimes is doubtful. Any government that oppresses its own people on the basis of the threat of an external enemy cannot survive like this. The Great Satan has no horns or pointed tail, and he’s able to send a twitpic to prove it.
This is not to say that Twitter and services like it are going to replace more mainstream froms of news gathering. CNN doesn’t deserve its own #CNNfail channel for the coverage of the Iran Election. The network has to tread carefully to get the kind of access it has. President Obama had just recognized the USA’s involvement in the 1953 installment of the Shah only a week before. The US would do well to keep its distance and establish that it has nothing to do with the current unrest. Besides, it doesn’t matter whether True Blood is the higher trending topic or the mainstream media has to wait a few dozen hours to report on what it finds. That’s not what this is about. We all have an opportunity now to witness history. If we can’t take to the streets, if we can’t tend to the wounded, if can’t tweet from our laptops on the roof, the very least we can do is watch and pray that freedom wins out.