I like.
Monthly Archive for December, 2010
1. Twitter – For still being a fantastic place where people spell out interesting things.
2. Facebook – Already been there today to have a look what some of my friends are up to.
3. Spotify – All that music. Wonderful.
4. Last.fm – What’s on at the moment? Which concert?
5. Scribd – Guess you can call that social reading. Please read along.
6. Mendeley – Social reading, active Version – mark your text. Also good to know what research others are into.
7. Tumblr – Visual version of this place was intentionally left blank.
8. Posterous – The slicker version of Tumblr.
9. Flickr – Did you noticed that the amount of things in pictures at least tripled?
10. Google – again better this year, and soon we get GoogleMe.
What was your favorite platform this year?
This year, there is a lot to talk about on Christmas dinner parties. Several friends have been out demonstrating against the rise of student fees last Thursday and report an outrageous brutality of the Police that obviously was missed by the press. Four days later, the Guardian at least reports that footage emerges of a police officer not wearing ID. And there is reason for this.
People have been humiliated. They were forced to wet their pants as there was no toilet in the kettle with police men cheering at them. There was obviously strategic misinformation about where the kettle was open so people were forced for hours to go back and forth. Kettles were forced back on two sides as once with people getting hurt and panicking in the middle. Injured people were not allowed to leave the kettle.
Unfortunately the focus on the violence of students was like a perfect shadow for the police to unfold a shockingly brutal behaviour even before Charles and Camilla took demo2010 over. Apart from Peter Hallward’s text I haven’t seen proper reporting in the press, so the news travels the old way by word of mouth. Or in the net like with Brutalcops.net.
Merry Christmas.
Two keywords govern the British attention span at the moment: Wikileaks and student protests. During an event at Goldsmiths College yesterday, media theorist Matthew Fuller had the interesting idea of bringing the two together in order to force the the universities to be transparent. Most universities do not really show strong solidarity with their students, and actively and insistently oppose the cuts/fee rise.
On top, watching how BBC news is covering the demonstration is very sad. In the afternoon, they intensely focus on vandalization, and have minutely updates if objects are being thrown – ‘Two.’ Also, they are desperately looking for anarchists – in vain.
Worse, that’s it. Obviously BBC news decided not to focus on the fact that thousands of people are on London’s streets today to fight against the idea of a university that follows a pure logic of efficiency. Re-structuring a public body purely according to the logic of the market is something that is done to society, and not only to the students. It is hilarious that the economy itself with all those financing of innovations isn’t following this logic; there are good reasons for that.
Don’t we have to call this kind of reporting that the BBC does biased? The vandalization of society by the government isn’t taken into account at all. A sad day for the BBC. If you ask me, I think the situation does need a bit of wikileaking, really.
Update 6pm: Obviously 30,000 came despite the cold outside. As expected, MPs voted to increase the tuition fees to £9,000, of course. Also in the evening, reporting on the ‘rebellion to the plans’ and ‘public anger’ a bit more complex, at least from time to time like with Nick Robinson for example, while this other BBC bloke finds it ‘hard to understand what the mass thinks’ who just was informed about the vote, hence angrily talk all at the same time. Ah!
Update three days later: Or not. Police has been outrageously brutal, but that wasn’t reported at all. Even the Guardian just mentioned the kettle, but didn’t bother to go and look. Some friends still shocked about what happened to them.
