Terrorism + Child Abuse Joke = National Post
What do obsessive coverage of terrorism and a joke about how to beat children have in common? As it turns out, it’s today’s National Post. Firstly, everything in the first 5 pages was devoted to the terror suspect arrests, except for one article stoking the idea of staying in Afghanistan, so that’s related. 5 pages. [...]
The Beautiful Game: Football, Politics and Social Struggle
Is it any accident in the countries where sports teams are considered community institutions, publically owned and politically active, that their general social welfare situation is in much better shape? Is it not entirely fitting that in a country like Canada where even basic services like education and healthcare are increasingly becoming unaffordable and inaccessible to the majority of people, that things like pro sporting events have likewise become obscene luxuries?
Is a Car Free Vancouver Possible?
CarFreeYVR posted a nice video [below] discussing the motivations and inspirations for car-free days in Vancouver. With car-free days festivals coming again on June 20 on Main Street, Commercial Drive, Kits and the West End [happy Father's Day!], I’m excited to see hundreds take over the pavement. But how does Vancouver ever become the first [...]
Why Teens Give Me Hope
In the category of young people who keep me from weeping for the future, we have Jamie Keiles who is living an experiment to let Seventeen magazine “run” her life for a month. Her high school English teacher should be proud of the media critique she is already pumping out. Jessalynn Keller once interned with [...]
For Everyone Saying “I Told You So” About Facebook
Infrastructures via xkcd: Infrastructures. Share the Love: Twitter del.icio.us email RSS Facebook Google Bookmarks Digg LinkedIn StumbleUpon Technorati Yahoo! Buzz
Just Bring Your Social Network Out of Facebook
Sure, Diaspora is only weeks old, but if you’re reluctant to leave Facebook because they’re holding hostage the rest of your social network, just bring your people to an open source alternative. This blog is a fine companion to the official Diaspora development team blog. There are grounds to be optimistic about an alternative to [...]
Diaspora: #Facebook’s Open Source Nemesis
Here. Read this. If you don’t speak “social media sociology”, what it’s saying is that Facebook sucks and they’re going to build an open source, distributed, non-corporate, free, privacy-rich replacement. Now give them money to fund their junk food summer. It’ll be the best investment you’ll ever make in a liberating social media interweb. Thanks, [...]
What Distributed Social Media Looks Like
Having already written about reasons why I’m leaving Facebook, I’d like to explore how new, open source, non-proprietary, non-profit, non-corporate, decentralized, distributed social media could work. Let’s start by talking about BuddyPress. It started as a WordPress plugin designed to add social media elements [like Facebook features and Twitter] to people’s WordPress sites. Then BuddyPress [...]
Quitting Facebook: Privacy Shouldn’t Be the Price of Community
Facebook is Celebration, Florida, the surreal Disney-owned community so effectively critiqued by Naomi Klein in her stimulating book, No Logo. It is a similacrum in the disturbing Dick/Baudrillard sense of the word. It is also a surrogate for more authentic and rich human connections. So I’ll be extracting myself from Facebook over the next few [...]
Handcuffing a Community’s Resilience: Bata in the 21st Century
I first knew Bata shoes as a kid taken shopping to try on new shoes. As a teen I learned about the nexus of globalization and apartheid with Bata as a model, since they were operating in South Africa. Thomas Bata said, “We expanded into Africa in order to sell shoes, not to spread sweetness [...]
Olympic Ad Pollution with Building Condoms and Commercials: Vision Vancouver’s Vision
Honestly, it’s bad enough that every billboard will be literally monopolized by VANOC for its corporate johns during the Olympics, but now we are going to get dozens of buildings wrapped in ad condoms and “celebratory images …including video imaging and projections on walls” to Blade Runner proportions for about 5 months. That’s almost as [...]
No One Is Illegal – Ignite resistance ~ Canadian multiculturalism is not enough!
No One Is Illegal – Vancouver » Blog Archive » Ignite resistance ~ Canadian multiculturalism is not enough!. In a world where the deregulated global market capitalist regime is imploding, there is wide open space to re-frame the local, national and global economy in a socially and economically just way. An off-shoot of this progressive [...]
Vista Video Arrives!
Politics, Re-Spun is intricately connected to the dgiVista.org nexus of expression. As much as my audio podcasts have been terribly fulfilling and well received [with hundreds of hits/month since mid-2006], it’s time to move into video. My audio podcasts have been audio versions of my editorials as well as interesting chats with people I know [...]
Recipe for Assassinating the CBC
Start with an ideology that opposes communitarianism and public ownership and worships the market’s capacity to create “the good” even if the market is far from freely competitive. The federal Liberals and Conservatives have well demonstrated this. Choke its funding. Appoint corporate leaders who wouldn’t dare come up with an original idea to guide CBC [...]
Society’s Celebrity Bloodlust Complex and Britney Spears: Part 2
In Part one I compared society’s fascination with Britney Spears to the new movie Untraceable where people visit a website to accelerate the murder of a prone victim. Now that she’s out of the psych ward, there seems to be a new level of intimacy between Britney and the “journalists” out to get the best [...]
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