http://ctsr.wordpress.com
Why are Mick Jagger and Keith Richards called the Glimmer Twins? Fame and rationing…?
“We used to see the same couple in the bar, who kept saying to us, Who ARE you? What’s it all about? Come on, give us a clue. Just give us a glimmer. That’s when Mick and I started to call ourselves the Glimmer Twins”. – Keith Richards, on holidays in Rio with Mick in December 1968
Only two 7 inch singles still exist…
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1355027
Dope Trio at The Bull and Gate, Kentish Town, 19th March 2009
Dope Trio at The Bull and Gate, Kentish Town, 19th March 2009
Dope Trio were good. They played at The Bull and Gate, Kentish Town, London. Their summery sound more suited to festivals than this dingy-ish pub in March. http://www.myspace.com/dopetrio
Mind The Gap - Kentish Town, possibly
Mind The Gap - Kentish Town, possibly
Mind The Gap - Kentish Town, possibly
Digital Planet
Label Listen (26mins 30secs)
Last Updated: Tuesday, 3 March 2009, 10:32 GMT
Date of first transmission: 2009-03-02T21:32:00-00:00 (audio available for approximately 1 week)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/digital_planet.shtml
*
Digital Planet
The weekly technology programme from BBC World Service, with presenter Gareth Mitchell and studio guest Bill Thompson.
Cory Doctorow on the surveillance society
Blogger, journalist and sci-fi novelist Cory Doctorow talks to Gareth about technology and civil liberties.
Are surveillance technologies a justifiable way to protect citizens, or do they erode our privacy?
Cory Doctorow blog
Boingboing.net (editor)
Neil Tennant on technology and freedom
This weekend the Convention on Modern Liberty held debates and talks across the UK.
BBC reporter Chris Vallance was there and so was Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys.
He told Chris about his concerns over ID cards, data security and digital music piracy.
Convention on Modern Liberty
Bill Blog – Digital politics is different
“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.” Niels Bohr
Book: The Decisive Moment
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hzygp
Will have to look again – but singer called something like Shonti has released an album. It’s wonderful ridiculous title? Shontitelligence.
Also: Heard on R4
Island Dreams: Poet Gwyneth Lewis explores the idea of the island and island life, and the ways in which it continues to capture the British imagination.
A mention for something like: There was no need to name your island until you needed to define it. Only need to define when under pressure from an intruder. Interesting.
Wombourne (Bratch) Station, Staffordshire at night.
Brighton at night – December 2008
Brighton beach – December 2008 – by Ciarán Ryan
Facebook’s business model depends on people using the site. We converse on the site… and then Facebook can commodify our conversations. The more we converse on the site, the more popular it becomes.
The more popular it becomes, the more paying advertisers they can attract.
Us Facebookers don’t mind being turned into products because it’s a cool tool… that let’s us keep in touch with each other.
But are there dangers ahead?
Should we stop using Facebook?
Notes: There’s something I can’t shake – a thought that there’s something not quite right about the rise of digital social-media.
Is there a philosophical and political framework for social media? Who is looking to the past and ahead – beyond the “this tool is cool” techno-utopians? And the assured media types?
From what I can tell, the adoption of social media tools – networking tools is going to continue.
1) Is it encouraging “First thought – best thought”* – constant banal jabber? On Twitter etc.
2) Is it breaking down the boundries between personal public and private? Is public and private outdated?
The early adopters seem to sieze these tools and use them because they are cool – because they are useful – because they offer 15 minutes of fame? They offer a taste of celebrity to shy geeky people… like politics is showbiz for ugly people?
But these websites have reached the mass – they must be of use… but at what cost?
Big organisations are joining in because their audiences are using these websites – they have to go where the eyeballs are – and they have teams of techo optimists to evangelise the benefits.
But these websites are not really free – they’re commercial. They exist to make money. It’s just that some have not quite figured out how, yet. The theories around them have a scientific sheen.
But what are the political philiosophies that are shaping our uptake of these websites? Where will it lead? The techno-evangelists enthuse about the cool tools – but what about the politics? There’s always politics and power lurking somewhere, even when the consumer is using the clean friendly curves of an Apple Mac.
What are today’s themes? Consumerism? Celebrity? Are we to all be mini Russell Brands? Where nothing is private, because we all want to be somebody? To stand out on the shelf?
Are we becoming the products? Jabbering away to each other in an commercially sponsored environment? We talk and talk about nothing and then click on an ad?
Last night I watched “Fire Walk With Me” by David Lynch – I think that’s why I’m asking these questions today.
The film is a circus mirror held up to American society. It’s about sex, dreams and abuse – in a society consisting of religion and consumerism. The American dream – and rational suburbia being overcome by irrational- the primal that lurks within us all.
The veneer of normality – but it can be only a veneer. Because humans are not the neat little figures seen in the architect’s drawings – we’re messy and irrational… oh I dunno.
I think I’m beginning too believe that these social networking sites are just a little too neat and tidy. The techno-evangelists a little too clean cut and optimistic… where’s the angle? Humans always have an angle. It usually involves power.
“The “abolition of privacy” was the stated intention of the horrible Marxist sociology professor Howard Kirk in The History Man, Malcolm Bradbury’s novel of the early 1970s. The private is necessarily inseparable from the public, he gleefully pronounced – and privacy is, in any case, a redundant bourgeois notion.”"
Alfred Noble mused that the explosives he was manufacturing might put an end to war.
*”first thought – best thought” said Jack Kerouac. But from what I’ve read about him, he painstakingly edited most of his work.
I am writing this on a blog. I am part of the jibber-jabber.
… and lots of other thoughts.
“He doesn’t wear a helmet – indeed, one of his most iconoclastic pieces of work made the case against them. Typically, it challenged official statistics on account not of their accuracy but of their relevance. Until his study in 1993, the road safety orthodoxy was that wearing a helmet made you safer. Hillman discovered, though, that most fatalities and serious injuries to cyclists occur not when they fall off their bikes through losing control (which causes minor injuries that a helmet can slightly protect against), but through collision with a motor vehicle. And here a helmet is of very limited value.
What’s more, the road safety campaigners and helmet manufacturers pushing helmet use assume that cycling behaviour is unaffected by the wearing of one. Wrong, says Hillman. The helmet-wearing cyclist feels less vulnerable and therefore bikes less cautiously, taking marginally more risks. Helmet use, argues Hillman, can expose a cyclist to greater danger by inflating their idea of its protective properties. “Cyclists rarely ride into motor vehicles. Calling on cyclists to increase their safety by wearing a helmet shifts responsibility away from drivers, the agents of danger, on to cyclists, who are nearly always the victims. Were cycle helmets to be made compulsory, it would encourage the view that cyclists are responsible for their own injury.”"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/
2002/nov/02/weekend7.weekend2
Will Page, Chief Economist at the MCPS PRS Alliance has not released his stats yet – but says the Long Tail doesn’t work. More Will.
Also: Chris Anderson and Sergey Brin.
