Time again to plug the upwardly mobile Edinburgh tinkers/tinklers, FOUND. Their new album is entitled Factorycraft and is launched on 14th March by the extremely respectable Glasgow label Chemikal Underground. Here’s a short trailer for the album, put together by Adam Proctor. Its an aesthetic not unlike videos we have previously admired on this blog.
FOUND, you will recall, sold music to fund their trip to the SXSW festival, and created the marvellous yet moody steampunk musician, Cybraphon. They’re playing at the Voodoo Rooms in Edinburgh on 3rd March, and Dingwalls in London on 7th March. Yrstrly has some small psychological stake in their success, having helped create an earlier music promo ‘Static 68‘ while I worked at Fifty Nine Productions.
Month: February 2011 (Page 1 of 3)
Housekeeping: I’m fed up with the 500 Internal Server Error Messages that keep being generated, and I know others are too. I am not sure whether it is the del.icio.us API or the postalicious plugin itself that is at fault. Since Yahoo is trying to ‘sunset‘ del.icio.us I am guessing the former is more likely.
But until I work it out for sure, I shall have to disable it the regular posting of links. These automatically generated posts with no useful content are ruining what little credibility I have.
If you take a stroll down Farringdon Road, from Exmouth Market towards Clerkenwell Green, you will come upon a magnificent sight-line into the City of London. It is not until you reach the Betsey Trotwood and the Free Word Centre that St Paul’s Cathedral emerges on the skyline, but from further up the road, a new landmark is emerging – Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’ Shard of Glass, currently under construction.
Since I work at the Free Word Centre, I regularly happen across this view. I often take a quick snap with the camera on my phone. Below is an example that has been filtered through Instagr.am.
A better attempt with an SLR and telephoto lense is on Flickr:
Birth of the Shard by yrstrly on Flickr
I have found that the damp and foggy days when the building emerges from midst are when the Shard looks most interesting. The giant looms on the horizon, and one’s sense of scale is confused and compressed, which reminds me of the famous photograph by the Liverpudlian photographer E. Chambré Hardman, ‘The Birth of the Ark Royal’, taken in 1950.
Photograph of the HMS Ark Royal, taken from the top of Holt Hill in Birkenhead, by Chambré Hardman.
See also the weathered early photographs of Tower Bridge and the Eiffel Tower under construction. Watching The Shard rise, I have a strong sense of being embedded in history. I know that it will become a symbol of London, like Gherkin and Millenium Wheel, or the pointy Transamerica Pyramid in San Fransisco. Watching it grow makes me feel like I am sat inside an iconic, historical image.
Overlay my last two posts (on digital tools for Boris Bikes; and how to wage cyber-resistance) and I think an interesting question arises: How much code should a Citizen know?*
Its clear that literacy and numeracy are essentials for active citizenship as they are for Life and Work. For millenia, the ability to communicate your thoughts in a clear and pithy manner has been a prerequisite for campaigners, dissidents and indeed anyone who wanted to be part of the civic discourse. In recent decades, I would certainly add ‘A working knowledge of Microsoft Office’ to that list, along with an ease at using the Internet. They teach all this at school now.
But is that enough? My feeling is that, at the very least, basic HTML skills should be included too. you need to know the difference between your <em> and your <img> and your <a href> tags if you want to communicate efficiently. For the professional political campaigner, these are certainly essential. I cannot shake the feeling that they should be equally indespensible for the average citizen, too. Do they learn this stuff in school yet?
And when HTML and CSS are taught in schools, what more should political campaigners be learning? If I want to start a mass movement but have no scripting skills, am I missing a trick? If I want to start a new local campaign, but have no clue as to how to pull and push data from an API, am I doomed to failure?
I am reminded of The New Liberal Arts prospectus:
A generation of digital natives is careening towards college. The economy is rebooting itself weekly. We have new responsibilities now—as employees, citizens, and friends—and we have new capabilities, too. The new liberal arts equip us for a world like this. But… what are they?
‘Coding and Decoding’ and ‘Translation’ are two of the skills listed briefly, but the authors don’t go into specifics. It would be interesting to put some flesh on the bone.
* I deliberately capitalised ‘Citizen’ to distinguish between the literal sense of the word (i.e. someone of a particular country with the rights afforded to all citizens; and a person who participates in that democracy.
I am sure readers will be aware of the long-running global discussion about the role social media can play in revolutions. Clearly, Facebook and Twitter can catalyse opposition to authoritarian regimes, and spread news of protests and government oppression between citizens, and to the world at large.
In Egypt, Hosni Mubarak’s heavy handed response to online opposition may actually have quickened his fall. He and his cronies felt they had no option but to ‘switch off’ the Internet, depriving the entire country of proper connectivity. This was an obvious ploy which only signalled the regime’s desperation. The protesters in Tahrir Square were emboldened.
In the future, however, oppressive governments may become more subtle and savvy in their approach to censorship. In Episodes #81 and #82 of the Rebooting the News podcast, Dave Winer and Jay Rosen discuss this problem at length. Winer explained out that Twitter and Facebook could be nixed by regimes. An Internet ‘kill switch’ is bad for governments, because it signals to the people that the protests are working. Instead, oppressive governments will try to develop tools which simply filter out content which undermines their agenda, yet maintains the appearance of normalcy. The Chinese regime does this very well, and managed to selectively filter out references to Egypt for Internet users inside China. Having witnessed the sobering examples of Mubarak and Ben Ali, other dictators will begin to commission tools to achieve this. Corporations (which, we must remind ourselves, include Twitter and Facebook) will be happy to do this, in exchange for access to the emerging markets these countries represent.
Winer expands on this idea on his blog, Scripting.com:
They can do the same with Facebook that they do with Assange. There’s all kinds of crazy stuff you can do at a firewall to make one site appear to be having technical problems. Real technical problems (but fake ones nonetheless). There are consultants calling on generals all over the world, right now, selling them wonderful Internet dashboards that selectively and randomly make sites appear to have problems of their own, not caused by the government.
Anticipating this, we have to create communication networks on the Internet that require that the whole Internet be cut off in order for them to be cut off. The reason is simple. The people who are being manipulated will know they’re being manipulated. In a centralized social space, there could easily be doubt. I know this is a complicated idea, but the intellects are at work, I promise you. They are smart, we have to be smart too.
It’s important that people learn to manage their own infrastructure. It’s going to happen, we can do it. We can make servers much easier to set up and maintain, and do more stuff that’s meaningful to people like the people in Egypt fighting for freedom. By spreading out we’re harder to stop.
This strikes me as being one of the most important ideas for freedom of expression right now, and a crucial lesson from the Egyptian uprising.