The most recent Facebook faux pas has been analysed as a lesson in customer managment for online businesses. (This post is adapted from my comment there.)

I argue that there is a larger context in which this issue resides. Clues to its existence can be found in John Sviokla’s observation that Facebook is ‘the 6th largest “country” on the planet”, and that ‘every firm will eventually have a social media strategy’.

Social media is creating a public sphere of unprecedented dimensions, with characteristics that make regulation difficult and which challenge notions of ownership, and which has powerful agency for change.

This online public sphere exists almost exclusively in proprietary spaces. Online terms of service, regulation, and notions of ownership will need to be framed not just in terms of consumer rights, but civic rights.

The proposed ISP-level internet censorship in Australia is supposed to be to protect children, and we are repeatedly assured that it has nothing to do with blocking freedom of political speech. Yet on Friday a board member of Electronic Frontiers Australia (a group opposing the filter) received a death threat telling him to ‘Cut the libertarian bullshit’… and keep his name out of the papers. Police are taking the threat seriously.

The EFA board member, Geordie Guy, had exercised his right to free speech by publicly criticising an article by Jim Wallace of the Australian Christian Lobby supporting the proposed censorship in The Sydney Morning Herald.

Ironically, Wallace’s article begins: ‘It will be the downfall of the internet, the end of free speech as we know it. It will lull parents into a false sense of security, and it doesn’t even work.” Wallace then encourages the reader not to believe these things that critics of the filter are claiming.

I think this message Geordie received underscores our point, Mr Wallace. Political speech is very much at stake.

This post was prepared as a response to Just How Valuable is Personal Branding on Des Walsh’s blog Thinking Home Business. I have modified it slightly here.

Re personal branding, I am with the contrarians. The term ‘personal brand’ began to peeve me some time ago, perhaps because I have always hated anyone’s attempts to pigeonhole me. I wondered how I was going to do that to myself. Then I decided I wouldn’t, no matter how fashionable it is.

I am in the process of re-starting this blog yet again, a blog which I think shows some of the pitfalls involved in personal branding. Initially, I spent a lot of time developing a clear focus for the blog, which was to be an academic blog about the shared nature of creativity. I called it ‘Culture is a Conversation’ based on a phrase in a book by JD Lasica. That brand ended up being a conversation stopper, which constrained me from posting most of my thoughts.

I decided to move from that focus, and explained why. It would be possible to read that post either way, as a further exploration of how to arrive at a personal brand, or as a rejection of personal branding in favour of emergent practice. I favour the latter.

Today I was editing the ‘about me’ page of this blog when a tweet came past about Des’ discussion. There I state the limits of my self-branding:

‘I like the education I have had, as it gives me the ability to approach anything from a humanities, scientific or creative perspective; and to see things from the intersection of all three. Emphasising this diversity is as close as I am prepared to get to the current notion of ‘personal branding’. I mistrust anything that might make my life smaller, and I have no interest in defining any presets for my thinking. I will use whatever tools I have in whatever way my content requires.’

To constrain myself to a ‘brand’ would risk limiting my vision to things that already exist. Then again, maybe I could just add ‘contrarian’ to that brand-like list above, because I usually end up being one

Today on Twitter I found that a friend and colleague (Nic Suzor) was to speak on am radio “right now”. I had to quickly figure out where my old radio was, then messed around for a couple of minutes getting it to work as it has been a long time (and there was a line in – pulling that out did the trick). After the program I found out that Nic doesn’t even have a radio. Now I know Nic and I are not exactly alone in using the web for all our audio (except this one time). In fact I can only think of two or three people I know who still regularly use actual radios.

I wonder if this degree of change in media usage has dawned on the people attempting to architect the proposed ISP-level internet filtering to be trialled in Australia shortly.  That is what Nic Suzor was speaking against.

First, we have an enormous amount of audio data to push through the filter’s bottleneck. Second, by what means is the filter going to censor real-time audio? And last but not least, with this shift in audio consumption from radio to the web there will be censorship of society’s major audio communications medium. That has a distinctly totalitarian feel.

Perhaps we will all be buying CB radios again, if the censorship proposal is not defeated.

Yesterday I went to a writing masterclass with Chris Abani at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival. I was drawn to it via this TED video, which was screened last week at the MAP Magazine Cafe Series at the Brisbane Powerhouse. In teaching a conceptual approach to how to create art, Chris Abani reframed the debate about the common practice of modeling our work on that of others. He said that writers need to collect things “like magpies”, and gave us permission to steal. “There is no such thing as influence, there is only the recognition that somebody sees the world the same way you do.” In other words, as in this TED video, we find in others a mirror of our own humanity.

Earlier this year I had to move house, and the rents have gone up so much that, sadly, I am unable to live in Brisbane any more. I was lucky to get a place at all. The area I live now is pleasant enough, but I am feeling amputated from my real-world culture.

The rental crisis is widespread, and getting worse. The other day there was a news item re concern over the likelihood of ghettoes forming around Darwin, due to aboriginal people wanting to access the services they need that are not provided out bush. To me the article possibly had racist undertones, along the lines of “quick we’d better get some services out there or they’ll come here”, but it does underscore a point about housing affordability in Australia. Maybe I’ll be off to Darwin to join them when it gets worse here.

However, there is more to affordable rental than having a roof over your head. What you can do under that roof matters. Vanity Fair recently ran an essay by Christopher Hitchens on the necessity of “Bohemia” for the renewal of culture. “In every age in every successful country, it has been important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals.” Well the rental increases are so steep here in Brisbane that even the Chinese Club has had to move out of Chinatown.

Where will high cost of accommodation leave artists, musicians and other cultural practitioners? It will physically scatter us, robbing us of the contact that is so necessary for cross-fertilisation of ideas. And in downsizing our accommodation, artists won’t have room to do things like painting and sculpture. I have just acquired sets of artist’s coloured pencils because this place is so small I have nowhere to paint, and nowhere to store canvases.

Creative people are imaginative and resourceful and will adapt as best they can. We have the internet now – if we can afford it and all the gear to run it. The web is building creative networks as never before. Our work can be produced digitally (software is available at no cost) and exhibited online. But there is no substitute for physical cultural spaces accessible to people outside the mainstream. It is well known that the cost of failure has to be low for innovation to occur. These rents are making the cost of failure prohibitive.

What will become of art in the cities, and where will artists go?

Caterpillar#5bis, originally uploaded by Frederik en Katleen.

I must be. I’m so in love with this Caterpillar that artist Wim Delvoye has laser-cut into fine lace. It is on the Belgian coastline, near Middelkerke. There are several others, shown on Delvoye’s web site; and then there are his other gothic works, including stained glass windows made with x-rays of guts and stuff. They are amazing too.

Some say this Caterpillar is parodying religion and industrialism at the same time. Others say it is Steampunk elevated to High Art. It definitely has the pseudo-Victorian look of steampunk. The artist himself describes it as gothic. As always, the interpretation of these things is in the eye of the beholder, so I am not going to try for the “correct” one. I wonder if there is a photo of it against the sunset, reverently bowing its head?

Neither you nor I are counterfeiters, so why should we care?

Hidden in this secretly-negotiated treaty are several things that will affect us all. I will try to explain these in terms that are as non-technical as possible.

ACTA has nothing to do with counterfeit money. It is about policing copyright. It will do this in ways that infringe civil liberties, privacy and free speech plus create a surveillance organization answerable to no-one.

ACTA will empower border guards to take your laptop, phone or iPod and search these for pirated music. How are you going to prove that you own every tune? They can hold these for months, and give your data to other agencies to analyse. There will be no presumption of innocence, no right of appeal, and no due process.

These excessive powers will be wielded by a proposed governing body outside of the World Trade Organization and the United Nations. In other words, the entertainment industry will have its own international police force.

Further, ACTA will introduce filtering of internet content by service providers, who will be obliged to cut off your internet access if you are accused (not convicted, just accused) of violating copyright three times. Techniques such as “deep packet inspection” will violate your privacy.

ACTA seeks to more strongly enforce Digital Rights Management (DRM), including the possibility of eliminating region-free DVDs. (I’ll write more about the multitude of problems DRM causes, and link to it from here.)

In addition, ACTA seeks to limit peer-to-peer networking (P2P). I can’t help but wonder what that will do to internet telephony – Skype runs on P2P. There are well over 100 million users of Skype, which runs on P2P. P2P has many current and emerging applications for business and society. It seems that those who have drafted ACTA, and any who sign it, have no understanding of how the internet works.

The terms of ACTA, which emanates from the USA, will be set by the initial countries that sign it. Subsequent signatories will have no say in these terms, and in most cases will have little power to resist. So the time to stop these excesses is now.

The only reason the general public knows about ACTA is that someone provided the secret discussion document to Wikileaks, and some online news publications picked it up. I think it is also relevant that we talk to our governments about the need for transparency. This was all being done behind closed doors.

In my country, Australia, which is party to the ACTA discussions, there are several respected organizations that have expressed their concern. These are the Australian Digital Alliance, the Australian Library and Information Association, CHOICE, and the Internet Industry Association. In my opinion it is urgent that we everyday citizens let the government know that we know, and that we don’t want this treaty and its accompanying private police state. Or the negotiations behind closed doors.

Yes it is a found object, a piece of recycled art. It happens to express my dilemma perfectly. [Note: I consider this title a new work of art, due to the extra layer of irony created by putting it here.]

Don’t worry, I have been thinking creatively and plan to have some serious fun during my leave of absence as my state of health permits.

Yes I know I blog irregularly and inconsistently. There is a reason for both. (Ask me if you really need to know.) Today I have been watching ooblecks, listening to my son and his dad squabble on Skype, and checking out the talks on TED.

I just found a nice performance by Vusi Mahlasela on the ted.com site. I went to a Vusi concert earlier this year, and have a signed CD. Vusi is a leading South African singer/songwriter, who was part of the struggle against apartheid. If you haven’t seen or heard Vusi before, play this video. (I had a few goes at posting this. As a Firefox 3 user I have to use VodPod to post video to WordPress. The quality of the TED videos is good – don’t be misled by this image.)