Friday, 30 December 2011

Occupy Facebook

“I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our own Facebook,” said Ed Knutson, a web and mobile app developer who joined a team of activist-geeks redesigning social networking for the era of global protest.
They hope the technology they are developing can go well beyond Occupy Wall Street to help establish more distributed social networks, better online business collaboration and perhaps even add to the long-dreamed-of semantic web — an internet made not of messy text, but one unified by underlying meta-data that computers can easily parse.
The impetus is understandable. Social media helped pull together protesters around the globe in 2010 and 2011. Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak so feared Twitter and Facebook that he shut down Egypt’s internet service. A YouTube video posted in the name of Anonymous propelled Occupy Wall Street from an insider meme to national news. And top-trending Twitter hashtags turned Occupy from a ho-hum rally on Sept. 17 into a national and even international movement.
Now it’s time for activists to move beyond other people’s social networks and build their own, according to Knutson...
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Thursday, 29 December 2011

thiefotime Doug Weir
last night's Will Self point of view on the media landscape, well worth a listen, audio: http://t.co/Uh6u3FiV text: http://t.co/LJm41Hxs

♪♫ Jamie Woon - Night Air (Ramadanman Refix)

The Firm

Mickey at home with Maria and Chanelle. Photo credit: Jocelyn Bain Hogg, The Firm
UK photographer Jocelyn Bain Hogg spent ten years documenting organized crime life, from the activity of British gangsters in South London to their exile in Tenerife, Canary Islands. With unprecedented access, these glaring images capture the storied villains at home, salacious private parties, unlicensed boxing matches, business talks ,and funerals of the “the old-school Godfathers of British crime” whose deaths would fracture and decentralize the social order within these underworld societies. The Firm was completed in 2001, re-visted in 2008, and is now on view at London’s Foto 8 Gallery through January 14.
“These are not the faces of criminals who hide behind the facade of respectability or the corruption of political influence. They are, in fact, the real thing, men who hold their head up when challenged, and who seek no false redemption in the face of public vilification...”
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