Filed under: Blogging
Who’d a thunk I’d be an internet sensation.
Tenty thousand readers and counting. If you have read oneplanetmikey and liked it and chuckled; A big thanks.
And if you are the twenty-thousandth reader. I’ll buy you a beer.
Filed under: Blogging
I haven’t posted for a few days, I’ve had blog block. Too much going on, too much uncertainty and correspondence from a reader that took the wind from my sales.
It will pass.
Filed under: Australia, Blogging, Censorship, Citizen Journalist, Civil Liberties, Election, Fascism, John Howard, Politics
Ramping the fear up another notch, neo-fascist Australian Prime Minister John Howard, has just re-announced a $189 million Net Alert initiative. It will include safety officers (black shirts) and is designed to provide internet filtering in the home.
Three cheers I say to this wonderful initiative, because there is just too much independent thought going on in the world. Why, with the touch of a button I can check out the Al Quieda website, see what is happening in North Korea and use Google Image to look at all manner of cocks and clits.
Taking this further, I am now suggesting that we start burning books, because they are the root of all evil. Fuck it, (whoops, that should soon be a banned word), we would all still all be living on a flat planet if some ancient fucker hadn’t fucked it up, looked at the stars and wrote what he saw in ’Consolation ofPhilosophy’.
As good Australians we must stop the evil that men and women citizen journalists and bloggers write; because we love our leaders and because we know that there is nothing scarier for a politican than dissenting opinion. And in this day and age, we all know where that leads to.
So tonight I am going to buy some metho and roast and toast the evil that sits in my bookcase. And if you are reading this and don’t do something similar over the weekend, then I would suggest that you are most un-Australian, Australian.
Filed under: Australia, Blogging, Cyber-flaming, John Howard, Liberal, Politics
Cyber-flaming is the act (or art) of tarnishing a reputation online. And yes, I am guilty of it, but like many a murderer before me, I claim the defence of ‘provocation’.
I would suggest that cyber-flaming occurs partly as a response to corporate-speak; the workplace language that promotes capitalism, says nothing and pays communications consultants vast amounts of money to get their crayons out.
My interest in cyber-flaming was sparked by a recent article in The Age about the public respose to our dear leader’s first foray into YouTube. Quite simply, his two minute video about global warming saw him shot down in the dual flames of bile and vitriol. And a good thing too, because Bonsai has become far too removed from the everyday concerns of Australians.
The Age quoted University of Sydney academic and cyber-psychologist, Dr Andrew Campbell, as saying that online anonymity gives people a free shot which they would not take during a face-to-face meeting. I’m not entirely sure. Certainly I have always thought that if I ever met Howard I would refuse to shake his hand, and that I would be obliged to push him about various issues.
But would I call him a pigs abortion of cretinous monstrosity as I have in the post Goodbye Mr Howard, or Please go Now? Well, no. I might be a one-eyed, smart-arsed prick with a nasty turn of phrase, but I am not rude and I am unfailingly polite.
So why do I do it? For me it is about the writing and execrising my wit, and opposing what I see as governement endorsed meaness creeping across this country.
Howard’s weapon of choice is the language of exclusion and cruelty. Unfortunately, it appears to be mine too.
Filed under: Blogging, Brian Williams, Citizen Journalist, Gun Control, Massacre, Media, NBC News, Steve Capus, Virginia Tech
This is the desperately ill and demented gunman who killed 32 Virginia Tech college students on Monday 16 April, 2007. I will not mention his name because there is no need. Any memory of him as a person should be expunged from our collective consciousness. Forever. He came, he killed, he should never have been, and we should not honour his crimes with recollections of him as a person.
However this is much harder to practice than it is to preach, as the gunman recorded a video manifesto in the minutes prior to his slaughter. In it he speaks, he rants, raves and outlines his ill-reasoned and psychotic logic. He ensured it would be seen by sending it to Steve Capus, the president of NBC News in New York. The shooter sent it after the first two killings at 7am, and prior to the larger massacre that was to follow. In an event that was made for mass media coverage, the gunman ensured his own notorious immortality by using digital media to further his pathetic agenda.
Time Magazine last year named the Person of the Year as you. They meant us, the bloggers, the myspacers and the creators of our own digital content. It was supposed to be a positive, with content being created by the people for the people. It reflected the growing importance of the citizen journalist, and their ability to cut through the spin. Time did not and could not foresee that we the people, the bloggers and the citizen journalists, would be taken down a peg or two by one of our own. This is why we should expunge the shooter from our memory. He had no place using technology to further his demented logic, just as he had no place owning a gun, and just as he had no right to take the lives of people going about their daily business.
I have watched the shooter’s video manifesto. I wish I hadn’t. I will watch it again. I would hope that NBC will treat the film in the same way it treated the film of the 9/11 attacks, by simply not playing it once its news value has passed. I understand why they played though. We all want to make sense of what happened at Virginia Tech and know what was going on in that cretins mind. And really, if I was Brian Williams, there would be no way I would be sitting on the scoop of the century.
