I’ve uploaded a few images to Flickr of the Basketball arena and the Olympic Park locale. All fairly generic – I am sure millions of other people have taken exactly the same images.
Category: Diary (Page 113 of 300)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
I think the strangest example of compulsive documentation is the bizarre need we feel to photograph events that are definitely going to be documented anyway. The athletes filming the Opening Ceremony from within the parade last week is a great example of this. I was very taken with this at the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Games and took a really bad photo of the athletes filming the crowd during that ceremony.
And I’ve noted this oddness before, when thousands took photos of the 2008 Presidential inauguration, Malia Obama among them. In these actions, (entirely superfluous in the age of the mass media), we see the audience authenticating their own experience. “I was there and I took my own pictures to prove it.”. It’s the digital equivalent of picking a pebble off a beach – banal in itself, but imbued with meaning and sentiment for the one who took it. Continue reading
https://twitter.com/lukewaterfield/status/231319214496043008
I was at the Olympic Park earlier this week, and for technical reasons I was unable to share this fact via my social networks. As Luke says above, this absence of the need to login and share is indeed ‘freedom’, but nevertheless the unease took a few minutes to wear off.
This feeling should not be written off as mere addiction. The desire to tweet and share and document is not always a sign that we are slaves to technology. As well as being a means to share, these technologies are also simple aide memoirs, reminding us where we read something, or when we went somewhere and who we spent time with. The value of such archives depends, to a large extent, on their completeness (this is also true for a lot of digital art like timelapse montages, which are another type of archive). In my senile years I anticipate being grateful that I compiled a comprehensive diary of my activities.
https://twitter.com/dance4joseph/status/231323499057266688
For me, the main unease generated by my missing smart phone was not that I could no longer (over)share, but that I would not be able to fill the regular moments of downtime that city living always presents. The time spent waiting for a bus or on a platform is no bother when you have a near-infintie supply of quick and quirky messages to read. Kipling’s penultimate stanza “If you can fill an unforgiving minute / With sixty second’s worth of distance run” sticks in my head. Does the tweeting count as a useful way to spend that “unforgiving minute”?
After viewing some of the responses to my article on Tom Daley and Twitter trolls, I have been thinking some more about this issue, and the wider problem of people posting offensive and threatening things online.
Many responders felt that I was too lenient on @Rileyy_69, when I said that “This appears to be the kind of outburst that is commonplace in a noisy, modern, and connected society.”
https://twitter.com/UrsulaWJ/status/230343421506768896
In their view, the level of abuse was not an ‘outburst’ as I put it, but something more sustained. The same person posted threatening videos on YouTube, and the invective he posted on twitter was not limited to the Daley tweets on the day in question. If this behaviour is systematic rather than a heat-of-the-moment slip of the finger, then it should be treated as threatening behaviour. Or so the argument goes. Continue reading
Away from the Olympics, there has been a massive rush for lottery tickets ahead of tonight’s £105 Million Euromillions Draw.
Its not really new or interesting to point out how irrational playing the lottery is. Playing the lottery is often called “a tax on stupid people”. It is not only irrational in the sense that people pin their hopes on something extremely unlikely to happen, but also economically irrational. The ‘expected return’ (a function of the probability and the amount invested) is much less than other types of gambling too. The odds of winning the UK lottery jackpot are 13,913,816 to one, which suggests thatyou should win at least £13,913,816 on a £1 stake, should your six numbers come up. Instead, the lottery jackpots are usually much lower (typically about £2 million). That’s like getting only £15 winnings after putting a quid on a 100/1 horse at the Grand National!
However, playing the UK lottery does become economically rational if the rollover jackpot goes over £14 million, because then you’re actually taking a bet with a better return than the odds would suggest. This happened frequently in the past, though less so in recent years as the popularity of the Lotto decreases.
There’s no such benefit with EuroMillions however. The odds are one in 95,344,200, and the price of a ticket is £2 in the UK. That means it is only economically rational to play EuroMillions when the jackpot is £190 million or more. This has not happened yet. the biggest win so far was £161 million. In fact, rules for that lottery cap the jackpot at €185 million.