Robert Sharp

Pupil Barrister

Month: August 2007 (Page 3 of 4)

Robert is Blogging about Facebook

13 August 2007 / / 9 Comments

Clive Thompson in Wired, on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense:

Individually, most Twitter messages are stupefyingly trivial. But the true value of Twitter is cumulative. … When I see that my friend Misha is “waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop,” that’s not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.

Twitter is a kind of mini-blogging, where you can post message via text message. Thompson predicts that this feature will be incorporated into other applications… and indeed, a similar feature exists in Facebook, which incorporates a “status” field that you can fill in with whatever you wish.
Facebook welcome screen
One feature of the Facebook feature is that the site automatically adds the word “is” to the start of the sentence (i.e. “Robert is…”). This can be frustrating when one’s status (whatever it may be) does not lend itself well to an “is”. I have to write “Robert is wanting…” instead of “Robert wants…”, and “Robert is thinking…” instead of “Robert thinks…”
Some people have been agitating to have this little quirk removed from the site. However, I think this would be a mistake. Sometimes, real creativity arises when one has to overcome constraints. Some of the best Facebook statuses (stati?) I’ve seen, have caused the obligatory “is” to be integral. When you realise that the first two words of a sentence are mandatory, a cliche suddenly seems inspired.
My recent favourites are both very much the epitome of 21st century urban life:

Gill is like, so, whatever.

and

Mike is just popping out to the shops, do you want anything?

Fuerzabruta

9 August 2007 / / 2 Comments

fuerzabruta
Last night I was lucky enough to see the astonishing Fuerzabruta, a kinetic dance/circus show down at Ocean Terminal in Edinburgh. Men running along treadmills, ballerinas chasing each other up walls, dusty cast members smashing pieces of set over the audience members’ heads, and a huge transparent paddling pool lowered to just a foot above the audience member’s heads! Each set piece presents a new thrill that challenges one’s perception of space and one’s relationship to the performers.
From the shocking opening to the wet finale, Fuerzabruta feels more like a concert than a theatre show. Never have I been to a Fringe show (or circus for that matter) that creates such a sense of communality in the audience. It is that visceral pleasure of being simply a part of the moment, that human moment, when everyone is moving to the same beat.
It will quickly become the talk of the festival – book now!

Photographing Kids

6 August 2007 / / 2 Comments

Dave Gorman’s depressing post Twisted (via Post of the Week) prompts a pause for thought. He was harrassed by a couple of police-people for taking photographs at a fair-ground. Although he was not taking images of children at all, he was apparently making security guards nervous. In the comments, Matthew makes a related point:

One of my requests for the recent events was to take photographs for the PTA/school website. Nope no go due to child protection laws.

We often read such laments about how society is changing, and parents are becoming more risk averse. However, it always seems to be ‘other people’ who are the problem. I’ve never read an article or blog from a parent endorsing the stigmatisation of photography in public places or in schools. Anecdotal evidence would suggest that such litigious parents are in the minority. Yet schools and councils and the police have to err on the side of caution, and then bear the brunt of the criticism when taking measures to avoid trouble.
I wonder if the web has a part to play in emboldening a more permissive society that (it seems) most people want? Perhaps a website with a similar set-up to Creative Commons could provide a set of guidelines and a handy logo, which any event organiser could attach to their flyers and advertisement:
“Heatherside Junior School’s Nativity Play is operating under the Creative Commons Family Photography Guidelines (UK) Level 2 (Close-up Photography Allowed; Scenes of a Mild Christian Nature).”
Risk averse parents would then have plenty of time to withdraw their children from events they disapproved of, just as some kids do not participate in school prayers. This approach would still be highly problematic, however, since it still an imposition of values, only in reverse.
Either option flies in the face of such concepts as “parental choice”. This is an idea that seems to have much currency in education debates at present, but it looks to me like a red herring. In some areas of communal life, it is possible to partition time and resources so that people who make different choices can access the resources (think of women only swimming sessions). In other areas, such as a school play or an annual fair, such allocations are impossible. Someone has to impose their values onto the event, and no “choice” is possible.

Day Light

6 August 2007 / / 11 Comments

A street lamp ablaze at 3pm
This is a street light in Embankment Gardens, at 3.45pm on Saturday. It is fully switched on and drawing electricity, despite the clear blue skies and impeccable visibility that one might associate with a mid-summer mid-afternoon.
There must be a cheap piece of technology that solves this inefficiency. The logo on the public bins says City of Westminster Council, so I assume they’re responsible. I wonder who I should write to?
Some people may argue that excess streetlighting is barely an issue when London has so many other problems, such as gun crime and poverty. To be clear, I’m not whining from a climate change point-of-view, so much as the general administration of the thing. How can we have confidence in local authorities to tackle the more complex social problems, if they cannot tell the difference between day and night?

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