My ISP said I could have ADSL2+ at my new apartment, yet it looks like I can’t have broadband at all…

I checked that with my ISP before I signed the lease. I knew there is no cable in the area. Today I phoned my ISP to transfer my account from here to there, only to be told that I can’t have either ADSL2+ or ordinary ADSL. I checked again, and the sales guy said yes I could have ADSL2+. I then told him about the conflicting advice I had been given. He said hmm that might be right, the best thing you can do is get your phone connected by Telstra (because Telstra messes them around too much) and then enter the number on the web site to test whether the line will work with ADSL2+.

So I phoned Telstra. The woman there gave me a better trick: take a handset to the new place, and if there is a dial tone type in 12722123 and that will give me the last number connected there. Key in that number on the web site. But then she had a good look at her databases, and said there is no ADSL where I am and wireless is my only option.

So I checked out the wireless broadband plans and availability. Telstra’s wireless might reach me, but their best download limit is way too low and their price way too high for me. Then again it might not actually reach me. According to 3, which has a detailed map, I am in the middle of a black spot so I can only do chat and messaging not wireless broadband.

OK a friend says it isn’t so bad, I will be eligible for the Australian Broadband Guarantee. He sends me the web page, and sure enough it gives me what looks like zero suitable broadband providers. I fill out the form, and the form is continually rejected because I do not have the phone connected.

Catch 22: I can’t afford a landline unless my internet comes through it too. I can’t find out if I can get the Australian Broadband Guarantee until I connect a landline.

Needless to say I am really angry about being misinformed by my ISP prior to signing my lease. I would never have signed if I had been correctly informed. And funnily, they don’t have a record of my original call.

[mood: very grumpy]

moving house

This blog has been really quiet lately, and will continue to be while I look for a place to live and move house. That is taking all of my limited energy supply.

There may be an exception when I go to the Oxford Internet Institute seminars by Ralph Schroeder at QUT on 8 February. I’m not missing that day for anything. Seminar 1 is “Social aspects of e-Science, e-Research” and Seminar 2 is “Shared Virtual Environments”.

The collision of fronts

I have been thinking for a while now about a post on Design Research about the problems with Facebook’s attempt to monetize its social network assets (that’s us) by making us into unwitting viral marketers. The author, Sam Ladner, reminds us of Erving Goffman’s notion of “the front”:

Using the theatre as a metaphor Goffman argued that we actually “perform” multiple selves. Each place we go has a “front” that we learn to incorporate. A front has a wardrobe, a setting, a decor, make-up, a script and stage direction.

Ladner argues that

Facebook’s Beacon didn’t work because it forces people to use multiple fronts AT THE SAME TIME.

In my view, even without Beacon, Facebook has that propensity. And so does blogging, particularly this kind of blogging where some of us are attempting to integrate blogging about our research and blogging about whatever else we want to blog about, including ourselves. We can choose what we blog about, which is a lot better than having our online purchases broadcast to everyone on our social network (surely they thought how embarrassing that could be?). But if we are going to blog in our real names about real things then there will be a collision of fronts.

Sam Ladner has pinpointed for me the issue that I felt but wasn’t articulating so well, which has been holding me back from “research blogging”. Now all I have to do is work out how to use multiple fronts at the same time without worrying. No - I have to start enjoying it!

The Web is Agreement

The Web is Agreement, originally uploaded by psd.

Someone posted a link to this on the AoIR list today. It is worth looking at full size (the A2 PDF is good). I love “Mordorsoft” and the Pol Pot pile of skulls in front of DRM, and of course the moral compass.

Currently (yes, still - my chronic lifelong health condition has not been behaving this semester) I am writing up a research piece on internet governance. While I love this drawing as it is, and will be printing a copy for my study, I could add lots more to it.

The web is governed by code, lots of different kinds of code as we see here. It is also governed by legislatures, lots of conflicting legislatures all of which want the final say - an impossible situation, as Michael Geist explains. Corporations have a huge say in what happens on the web, and we have to remember that just as corporations are not democracies, the social spaces they architect are not democracies either.

Open Source community platforms are something I want to see (and be in). That way we will reclaim community governance of web spaces.

When I am done with my assignment I will start drawing…

The end of the internet as we know it - again

It looks as though there is yet another way to end the internet as we know it. Italy is doing it this time, by drafting a law which will, if enacted, make it compulsory for every blogger to register, to pay tax (whether or not the blog is for money-making), to form a publishing company that will hire a registered qualified journalist to be the director of the blog…

Which would wipe out upwards of 99% of blogs - and that is probably the idea. For more, see Beppe Grillo’s Blog.

Some folks don’t seem to like the fact that citizens are currently able to publish what we like, and to sometimes contribute significantly to public affairs. Fixated on that, these legislators also forget that most blogs are innocuous expressions of people’s daily lives. I mean, what about knitting blogs? Will they have to do all that too? What a farce. The Italian legislators are starting to resemble Senator Ted Stevens I am afraid.

[I know knitting blogs were unfairly bagged out during the Aulstralian Blogging Conference, and I defended them. I promise I will post some of my knitting soon.]

Masters of Media

I’ve just added Masters of Media to my blogroll. It is the group blog of Geert Lovink’s students - more than 30 of them. Lots of interesting posts on Web 2.0, and on censorship. (I am researching Web 2.0 as a censorship tool at the moment - Censorship 2.0).

It is heartening to read in the post Collaboration under Censorship that internet access has been restored in Burma (Myanmar).

Zotero is good

I recently found Zotero, an Open Source browser-based research tool that is going to kill EndNote before very long. George Mason University developed Zotero, which runs specifically on Firefox (because it too is Open Source). I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks: collecting, tagging, annotating and archiving content from the web. There isn’t anything I am doing that I can’t put in there (although it won’t search Word documents or PDFs yet). I am really happy with its organizing capabilities and can see many uses for it beyond the research I am doing.

I was struggling with my current project until I found Zotero - now I think I will be on top of it very soon. And I’m not using EndNote any more.

More reflections on the Australian Blogging Conference

Not only is my university OK with blogging, students doing my current unit have actually been asked to get out there and participate in the political blogosphere.

Which reminds me of the Australian Blogging Conference a couple of weeks back. Vidcasts of some sessions can be got from a link on larvatusprodeo including the session on political blogging (that I didn’t go to).

I enjoyed the session on citizen journalism, particularly the section on photojournalism led by Rachel Cobcroft. Citizen photojournalism is changing the way breaking events are being reported. Rachel says, for example, that nowpublic.com will post on your Flickrstream and ask if they can blog your image of whatever issue they are reporting on. Rae Allen said that the recent Pasha Bulker incident was 80% citizen journalism on the ABC web site – he works there, so he knows.

It is also changing the whole flavour of election reporting – for example the Blair Watch Project which has a great Flickr archive . (I just love the Blair Watch motivation: “ We felt the election was going to provide the nation with a tidal wave of bullshit and someone had to provide an umbrella.” )

Jean Burgess asked how do we get it across to people that it is citizen journalism. I took that up, suggesting that we are witnessing a convergence (yes, that word again) of journalism and citizenship, and that it need not be political as such but covers the whole spectrum of people’s activity. Mark Bahnisch made the point that we need to separate civic action from political action, to separate citizenship from voting. Jean sees an opportunity to link up all the active citizenship that is already there. I am not sure if she means establishing a site to do that, but Axel Bruns mentioned the possibility of repurposing youdecide.2007 for ongoing activity.

Somebody reminded us of Clay Shirky’s observation that in traditional media you filter and publish, whereas on the web you publish and filter. I just realized that is something that I will take and apply to research blogging as well.

my political views, or lack thereof

It has been suggested by an academic colleague that we post our political views online. Could be a good way of making sure we never get that job we are after, but never mind. Let’s not be silenced by that kind of intimidation… After all, the silences we participate in can be damning.

Anyway, having been through 1960s radicalism / revolutionism, a few years ago I wryly came to the conclusion that contrary to orthodox left opinion, the revolution actually did happen, but most of the lefties were looking the other way at the time. The revolution of our era is the one you are looking at now - the digital revolution, the networked society. It is mind-blowing, and at the same time it isn’t all good. It is a stupendous collaborative achievement, but it is so far from doing everything and righting every wrong.

My brain hurts (mostly) when I have to listen to conventional politics. It reminds me of when my mother used to participate in market research. She’d be given two packets of laundry powder, one yellow and one blue. She had to use them both, and answer a questionnaire about the differences between them. But she wasn’t dumb. She knew they were both the same, and they were testing the color of the packaging. Nonetheless she kept it up for free stuff. But I get sick of “Brand A” and “Brand B”, same-shit-different-bucket, especially when it’s not just washing powder - and people’s lives and our entire habitat is at stake.

But I can’t fix it all by myself, in fact there is very little any of us can do. So then I start thinking that if each of us does our little bit it might be good. For this reason I have decided that while I will no doubt support some political issues and causes as they come up (e.g. I’m attending a memorial vigil for the SIEVX in late October), my civic engagement is going to be mainly with the politics of the internet. I’m well placed to do that, as I am working toward a Master of Internet Studies.

Most people aren’t aware of internet politics, so I have a lot of work to do (along with all the others who are doing this) in a limited time frame, because the structures being developed now will have a decisive impact. Our collaborative tasks incude educating the public, and all decision-makers, about the social and economic importance of a neutral internet; curbing the excesses of digital copyright so that creativity can flourish; and maintaining the networked public sphere free from undue political or corporate pressures. Of course, there’s an endless list really. Just like everywhere else, it is about ownership and control, and the social implications of that.

So there, good people, are my political views. If you expected something along the right-left dichotomy, go to politicalcompass and see why I don’t think like that. Who will I vote for in this year’s election? Wishing the Liberals would listen to Malcolm Fraser but they hate him; wishing the local Labor guy wasn’t a speedbump; wishing the local Greens hadn’t expelled some people I trust; keeping an eye out for a Climate Change Coalition candidate… sigh.

the spam monster has been eating real comments

I was looking around my WordPress dashboard, still getting used to it, when I found that Akismet had saved my blog from four spam comments. I checked to see what they were, and there was only one there, from sajbrfem. So I un-spammed that. But I wonder about the other three.

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