An unborn child, a plant and Astro_Mike regularly coincide together.

Web 2.0 is celebrated as a means of bringing people together by means of information exchange without the constraints of physical and temporal space. Its is championed as the ultimate manifestation of democracy. The network structure intrinsically  is built on the premise of user equality and in fact relies on this notion to exist at all. The cybernetic system in its broadest sense is akin to the network structure in that to function it relies on the feedback of all its components in order to self govern and maintain itself. 

Twitter I feel has finally facilitated in ‘real life’ what The Terminator’s Cyberdyne_Systems had originally set out to achieve free from the ethical implications of human cloning.

I found in a forum mention of a project being developed in the United States that involved developing a mechanism that essentially plugged an indoor plant into the Twitter network and alerted its followers to its moisture levels and its need to be attended to. The gracious plant than thanks its carer once its need has been resolved. Some weeks later I heard of the Kickbee, a device developed by Corey Menscher that was worn around the tummy of ‘mommy’ and their then unborn child. The device transmitted a signal to a Twitter account everytime the sprog kicked. On his site Menscher claims that the device was created to express some form of paternal empathy with ‘mommy’. The site also features photos of the alturistic ‘mommy’ vessel sporting the Kickbee.

Being the astrophile that I am, I discovered and began to follow the adventures of ‘Astro_Mike’. Astro_Mike is currently in preparations for the forthcoming final shuttle mission to hubble space telescope and luckily for us mere civilians an avid twitterer and goes to great effort to depict his activities.

I receive Twitter updates onto my iPhone so that information from my followees (?) aggragates together in a neat, condensed and cohesive fashion. This also led me to the idea that my Twitter account is a cohesed cybernetic system within itself, information is injected into my account, received by me and I in turn respond to that information and maintain the circuit. In effect Astro_Mike, a foetus and a pot plant were operating as an interconnected system.

Above all this, democracy is elevated beyond mere human equality but equalising the power between species eg Plant and Human, Plant and Foetus, Birthed and Unbirthed. 

While its critics may claim that Twitter merely intensifies the trivial and mundane, it has in effect provided the platform an interconnected, species-defying system to conglomerate… 

follow them here: Astro_Mike    kickbee  pothos

 

unaltered original image sourced at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/drexler/2827407599/

Facebook-to-give-developers-more-access http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/1016721/Facebook-to-give-developers-more-access

Firstly I am SBS fan number 1 otherwise this probably wouldn’t have irked me so or even have drawn my attention in the first place. Just stumbled across this article and landed upon this winning snippet of journalistic wonder

 

“Internet social media company Facebook plans to allow outside developers access to core parts of the website so they can build new services, a person familiar with the situation said. The person said the company is expected to announce the plans shortly.”

“A person”?! Which person?!

SBS sought that shizz out!

In the wake of this and last weeks lecture on the internet business model of niche targeting with personalised recommendations, I was curious to find out just who Google thought I was… scarily, I think this is quite true to life

 

 

me in 11 boxes

PS this floated my boat today

Few words exists to accurately convey my sadness in the wake of the the Miss California USA fiasco so I shall not exacerbate myself here. What I will say however is that if we present the hypothesis that beauty pageants are in fact are perfectly valid consumer of public funding and media space, one small grace is that it has brung to the surface a still very much alive prejudice against homosexuality. Miss CA’s draconian answer to Perez Hilton’s question has successfully propelled an issue into both the blogosphere and heritagemedia-a-sphere (?) that badly needed the attention not only of American policy makers but of the world itself. Despite her mother’s exclamation that the Bible reads “Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve!” (I wonder how long she was sitting on that one for), I sincerely hope that the media furore will eventuate in the overturning of Prop 8 and the repercussions of this victory are felt by nations around the world including my own.

I urge you to saturate your twitters, facebooks and blogs in support of SOCIAL EQUALITY even if this does not concur with your own moral standpoint.

 

Only recently discovered this and for those of you who still haven’t, Insights is yet another notch on the Google bedpost that enables users to find out where in the world and and to what degree search entry terms are generating.

Based on the data, this is what I discovered:

-The States, Canada and Australia are the more fiendish states 

-Pakistan and Trinidad and Tobago are those most concerned with the Penis

-and Mexico is Lilo’s biggest fan!

Happy Researching! : )

PS procrastination is a beautiful thing…

 

My Boris

My output in all areas has been noticeably lacking this past week not the least of which those that pertain to my online responsibilities. This chiefly can be attributed to a tiny, new addition to my family, Boris. Before those that read this and know me start to fret, Boris is an iphone and I am utterly in love. Those close to me know I have a penchant for naming inanimate objects and cherish my gadgets (cheifly because I am an impoverished student who must all but sell soul to have possessions…  I’m so hungry …).

My housemate and I several days ago made a special trip into the city solely so I could indulge Boris in a new, bright red leather case  and have incessantly  forced Boris upon all those that listen as does a childless yuppie couple with their new labradoodle puppy. Those close to me will also be aware of my clinical addiction to facebook and I delight in being able to facebook where ever I choose.

I often reflect upoun a smartphoneless life as does one with a mobile phone and find it impossible to imagine, albeit this were only four days ago. I find it incomprehensible to organise my life without allegorising it through the fluid iphone interface. While this does mildly worry me, its hard to maintain this fret when Boris alleviates all my organisational stress in such an aesthetically pleasing fashion. … I ❤ you Boris!

The death of civilian Ian Tomlinson was a tragic result of the protests during the G20 Summit that took place in London over the last week. What makes his passing even more appalling is the way in which the Metropolitan police have manipulated the information initially released to the media. No involvement on behalf of the police is even briefly mentioned.

released April 2nd:

Little explanation is required to demonstrate the difference between reports on behalf of the Metropolitan Police and those on behalf of citizens involved.

Citizen captured video of police striking Mr. Tomlinson shortly before he died:

Released April 8

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/video/2009/apr/07/g20-police-assault-video

One small grace from this event is that it demonstrates to a small degree that the citizen can return some power in the face of mass commercial media.

I’m sure many of you have seen this already but it gives me infinite, infinite pleasure…..

: )

Who would you blend?

It comes I’m sure as little surprise that given my previous post I don’t know that many children. So for my project I had to rely on my ever generous family for the necessary human resources required to complete it (big shout out to the fam- much love xx). What did come as a surprise was the huge amount of fun both I and my siblings had in doing this. I deliberately was very vague in posing the questions and what I wanted from them so that their responses were more spontaneous and true to their own thoughts. I was immensely astonished to discover just how bloody clever kids are these days (fuck did I really just say that?!) and how witty. Not only were the responses astute and left of field, but they were able to justify their answers in a meaningful fashion. I pretty sure at their age, I was only just graduating from constructing mud pies and macaroni necklaces and in no way was concerned by the actions of media personalities beyond those featured in play school. It’s hard to discern whether this can be attributed to the ubiquity of the media environment that by default encapsulates kids at a younger age. Maybe it’s just the chicken. Either way, I can only hope that my editing does justice to how savvy these kids are.

I am generally fairly wary of most children. Anything that isn’t for the most part self sufficient frustrates and irritates me. What I find even more vexing is this strange, parasitic mother-child conglomerate. With the aid of an armoured vehicle cleverly disguised as a pram, they block train doorways, shopping aisles and clothes racks. They slovenly progress as a unit with all the resolve of a starfish. All this behaviour is conducted under the pretence  that simply producing said child immediately gives one unrestricted licence to be as obstinate in public places as one pleases. That said I do very much appreciate a child”s perception of the world. The world as seen by our tinier counterparts is brutally honest and without the fluff we older people must hide our real opinions within. I should like to give a group of kids the opportunity to espouse their respective heroes and heroines and see how this contrasts with the old folk. While I would like to see some original responses, I suspect however that cultural conditioning in the media happens fairly on in a child’s development and that most will simply regurgitate what they have been taught, Ned Kelly, Mum, Dad etc…  lets see what happens..