Another great term coined at #Media140 by Crikey’s Bernard Keane: “Communities of interest, or ghettos of agreement?” tweeted @matthewsinclair yesterday.  My immediate reaction was “what does he mean another???!” but in fact I don’t actually remember using the phrase.  Nevertheless, I’m claiming “ghettos of agreement” as mine because it sounds good. Sorry Matthew.

In my quick and dirty presentation to the Media140 conference I avoided talking about the ostensible subject of the panel I was on and talked instead about how I thought Twitter was fulfilling some of the early, and wrong, predictions about new media from a decade ago – both good and bad.  I ended up suggesting that empowering media users tended to mean they ended up only seeing what they wanted to see or agreed with, whereas the traditional mass media had a greater variety of viewpoints to which its users were perforce exposed whether they liked it or not.  “Digital ghettos” was how I characterised it.

The immediate reaction from a number of my… ahem… followers was to the effect of “bollocks” – they followed people they disagreed with, sometimes violently disagreed with.  I’m sure they do.  And they probably do for a variety of reasons – because it’s part of their job, or because they like to know their enemy, or because they find hilarious what people of a different ideological hue have to say.  But I still suspect, without any evidence, that your average Twitter user – like your average blog reader – mainly navigates toward material they are comfortable with, which is a known quantity, with which they agree.

Even if I’m right, I do wonder whether it is significant.  Perhaps in the old days of mass media we navigated the same way as we skipped past columnists with whom we disagreed, or changed the channel on a politician we disliked. But the clash of ideas occurred then on a common battlefield, employing a shared language, culture and method of argument.  Fragmentation may end up being of more than just audiences.

But then in the blink of an eye, Twitter can do something no medium has ever done before, at least not as rapidly and successfully.  The viral-like spread of information about the ultimately futile attempt by Trafigura and its law firm Carter-Ruck to hide damning information about the company’s role in dumping toxic waste in the Ivory Coast should worry politicians, corporations and the lawyers they depend on to regulate information the world over.  The internet made information harder to hide, but now the information doesn’t just sit on blogs, or sites like Wikileaks; now it has a virus-like capacity to spread rapidly across the globe, propelled by retweeting, beyond the capacity of any one law firm or government to close down.

Yes I know it sounds like that old “the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it” information libertarianism of the 1990s, but just ask the low-lifes at Carter-Ruck, whose efforts to obtain super-injunction after super-injunction from compliant British judges, including to even shut down reporting of Parliament, came to a very expensive nought, defeated by Twitter.

Lawyers and judges already rail at the internet for the threat it allegedly poses to the legal profession’s obsession with information control and keeping jurors untainted with unwanted facts.  Well guys, you ain’t seen nothing yet.  Your whole model of control – that there are a small number of “media” and they are well-established and amenable to legal recourse i.e. they’ll comply with your injunctions – has vanished.  Now there’s just one giant conversation and most of it isn’t even going on within the borders of your jurisdiction.  You can’t control it.

So whatever capacity social media has to erect ghettos of agreement may well be offset by its capacity to significantly undermine the efforts of lawmakers, lawyers and corporations to control information.

As they say in exam papers, discuss.

It obviously bloody isn’t, it’s the opposite.

The problem with hi-tech is that humans simply become a cog in an ahuman process, the problem with bureaucracy is that it makes humans the process.

The image is interesting, because the article feeds the Right’s dominant fantasy – whether it’s talk of the nanny-state or of big bureaucracy, they are the folks who will come in an restore plain common sense. Reagan is always quoted and Devine does not disappoint with a few words from the great afternoon-napper, whose saying ‘the worst phrase in the world is “i’m from the government and i’m here to help” ‘ kinda stopped being funny at Katrina.

Trouble is, federal public service numbers and spending went up under Reagan (and under Thatcher) at a faster rate than under Carter. As they always do – for the simple reason that they never have the guts to really slash in (and when they do, and cause social mayhem, they have to increase the numbers of cops and prisons and laws anyway).

What’s even better is Devine’s example of creeping totalitarian bureaucracy – ‘try getting your passport renewed at the Neutral Bay post office’. Apparently they have some sort of standards regarding photos or something, which the counter guy can’t relax just because he knows you. I mean what’s the world coming to  you’re trying to get home to write your 129th article on how we need to have stricter border security and the bastards won’t let you use a photo from year 8. It’s enough to make you say ‘don’t you know whose daughter I am?’

The Right can’t think about these problems – and they’re real problems – properly, because it would mean giving up their ideal self-image. So they cling to it, and sound like Ayn Rand on acid, and never evolve an argument about how we manage increasingly complex societies in a complex, but less overbearing way.

But hey Miranda keep playing on your laptop – unaware that the airport was a coupla hundred clicks back thataway.

The most widely highlighted environmental impact from this is the threat to the survival of the orang-utan. It seems appealing to people’s concern about orang-utan extinction connects with people more than appealing to concern about the impacts on human beings.

The logging, much of it illegal, threatens the survival of the culture, traditions and food sources of the Penan, an indigenous tribal group who live in the Malaysian state of Sarawak. The Penan have been fighting a losing battle for some time, but they had a win recently.

Malaysian blogger and Member of Parliament, Jeff Ooi, has written that the advertising regulator in the United Kingdom has banned an advertisement placed by the Malaysian Palm Oil Council. The ban occurred due to a finding that the advertisement’s claims that Malaysian palm oil was ‘sustainable’ and contributed to ‘the alleviation of poverty, especially amongst rural populations’ were misleading and unverified. A small win perhaps, but one which should draw more attention to the serious impacts of forest clearing and the unsustainable nature of much of the palm oil industry.

Ooi is trying to pursue the issue of the impact on the Penan people in the Malaysian Parliament. But I suspect they will continue to be fighting an uphill battle unless greater consumer power is brought to bear against the expanding use of palm oil.  So far, I haven’t noticed a great deal of coverage of this issue in the Australian media.

Of course, continuing deforestation will make meeting greenhouse emission targets a great deal harder, so we all have a direct interest in this.

PS: This report suggests similar problems are occurring in Uganda, with the involvement of a Malaysian palm oil company.

The neo-atheists – Dawkins, Hitchens and others – are an annoying bunch, taking the most literal version of monotheism, and then guffawingly mocking it (’oh a whale, really’) in a tone not unlike the baby in the Family Guy.

Trouble is Craven sounds worse…

If you’re going to oppose atheists, you better give a more sophisticated account of what belief is, because even those of us sympathetic to the possibility of meaningful belief do sometimes wonder what exactly it is intelligent religious people believe.

Does Craven, G, for example, actually believe that God is some form of higher consciousness watching our every move like it was a billion films unspooling and occasionally intervening? Or is it more abstract? In a scientific civilisation there is at least a case to answer.

Craven G avoids them all, being both supercilious (’such dislikeable creatures’), put-upon (’ohhh how they hate us’) and skirting genuine issues, such as school funding and child abuse.

This won’t do. Craven G’s tone simply feeds the darkest atheist suspicion about intelligent religionists – that their beliefs are a form of bad faith, designed to avoid the tough issues posed by a universe that comes with no big Meaning supplied.

The treatment of child abuse is stupidly blithe — does Craven G think we haven’t noticed that whole sections of the Church, such as its entire child home system in Ireland for decades, functioned as a sadistic and predatory gang? Quite aside from the suffering involved, might this not suggest a church whose core beliefs have corroded away, leaving nothing but a wealthy political organisation with schools, universities…and generous tax breaks?

Does Craven G think it would be both wise and necessary to make a better case? And that maybe he should be a little more down in the Lions’ den, and a little less up himself.

To help flesh out the argument, Crikey sent two of its most bristlingly politicised regulars to take in the movie and offer their thoughts.

This from the IPA’s Chris Berg:

… Moore’s argument is even more misdirected. He’s justifiably outraged at the bailouts and the way they were pushed through Congress. Who isn’t? He’s angry about the favour-trading relationship between Wall Street and Washington. Again, who isn’t?

For Moore, Barack Obama’s election is a spiritual catharsis, an explosion of people power, and a sudden break with the capitalist nightmare. But the outrages he spent 90 minutes detailing have, if anything, gotten worse under the Obama administration. The employment pipeline between Goldman Sachs and Treasury has is even busier. And Obama has graduated from bailing out banks to bailing out car companies. For Moore, when Bush did this sort of thing, it was capitalism. When Obama does, it’s democracy.

In Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore can’t quite get himself to the problem. If he did, he’d have to admit that the big activist government of his dreams is actually the cause of his nightmares. Read Chris’s full piece here.

This from Overland editor Jeff Sparrow:

Moore’s clearly on the side of the downtrodden but what that means in terms of a political program remains something of a mystery. Thus, on the one hand, he’s overtly nostalgic for the ’50s of his childhood; on the other, throughout the movie, he employs clips from ’50s documentaries (square-jawed men in suits; bouffant-haired housewives, etc) for a comic effect that implicitly rests on the awfulness of the decade. It’s a contradiction that continues to the closing credits, played out with a schmaltzy lounge version of the Internationale. “Arise ye workers from your slumbers”: Moore simultaneously uses the track for a gag even as, in some fashion, he wants us to take the sentiment seriously.

Moore always features in his own movies and in many respects his films resemble their narrator: bloated and sprawling, self-indulgent and infuriating, but, ultimately, on the right side. There’s plenty of things not to like about Capitalism: A Love Story. But it’s hard to think of another filmmaker who would even attempt a popular documentary about the financial crisis, and if he only succeeds half-way, well, that’s half way better than any of his contemporaries. Read Jeff’s full piece here.

And just for the sake of balance, here’s what Crikey’s film guy, Luke Buckmaster thought:

It’s hard however, especially for those who lean to the left, not to agree with the long and short of his hypothesises – i.e. that the U.S. health care system is horrible and ravaged (Sicko), American gun laws are dangerous and inhumane (Bowling for Columbine) and the Bush administration were a pack of mongrels and thieves (Fahrenheit 9/11). Capitalism: A Love Story presents Moore’s broadest assertion yet: that capitalism is if not downright evil then certainly corrosive, immoral, punishing to the small guys and about as appealing as a fart in a sleeping bag. Again it’s kinda hard to disagree with his basic stance even if most viewers (not unreasonably) will probably wrap a devil-you-know context around the debate in absence of a clear workable alternative. Moore paints an important distinction between democracy and capitalism, arguing that one can and should exist without the other. Like a lot of the material here (such as an intriguing segment about a democratically operated company where all workers own an equal share and take a part in the decision making) this begs to be further extrapolated.

Moore’s sprawling scattershot approach in Capitalism: A Love Story feels like he set out to make a film about the GFC but decided somewhere along the line to train his sights on a much larger beast. Thus the film’s disjointed structure connects case studies – all of them interesting, a few of them fascinating – sometimes spuriously to the grander concept. Luke’s full review is here.

Your turn. Have you seen the movie? Do you have a view on the health or otherwise of market capitalism? Is capitalism culpable in our recent economic woes? Can a better system ever be devised? Should Michael Moore lay off the doughnuts? Join the discussion!

Even being seen as weak, as such, is not necessarily enough. But there are clues in there. Think about the so far extra-ordinary difference between the party votes. What if it was based on seeing Rudd as more ethical than Howard? Maybe it was the glow of him appealing to our better angels by at least appearing to take the high moral ground. Now he has tried being amorally tough to appeal to conservative voters.

So I suspect the loss of the exceptional difference was the slip back to earth of those voters who now realise he is just another expedient political animal!

After all, closer two party preferred is the norm for voters who see little difference, and maybe we are now back to the reality: whoever you vote for a politician gets in

Unit Man!

Each side of politics takes it as a given that governments should treat citizens at least a little paternalistically – laws which protect people against their own desires are too numerous to list.

But it’s one thing to mandate seatbelts. It’s quite another to completely treat us like children.

In that spirit, the ACCC has introduced Unit Man, a comic character which, in the competition regulator’s words, is designed to “help consumers better understand unit pricing.” Yes – unit pricing, itself a fairly patronising initiative developed under the belief that consumers can’t do rudimentary sums in their head while standing in the soup aisle. Quite a damning indictment of our school system.

To sum up – the government decides Australians aren’t smart enough to figure out the cheapest way to buy cereal, so it compels supermarkets to display their prices differently. But then the government decides that consumers aren’t smart enough to notice, so it creates a cartoon character to make saving money  – and maths! – fun.

Certainly no money seems to have been spent on things. The sort of medieval-looking streetscapes that in France would have been tarted up – or at least kept clean – for the tourists, have here just been let go.

But what’s this? In the upper left corner of the frame? That’s right, it’s a bright shiny new security camera.

Priorities.

According to the operator of the oil rig which been leaking 400 barrels of oil into the Timor Sea every day for the last ten weeks, the rig is now “engulfed in a massive blaze and is at risk of total collapse”.

The chief financial officer of PTTEP, the operator of the rig, said “The fire is out of control.”

Indeed, things are now so bad, Prime Minister Rudd is reduced to having to ask himself his own questions:

“Do I think this is acceptable? No, I don’t,” Rudd told Fairfax Radio Network. “Are we angry with this company? Yes we are. Are we trying to do everything we can to get this under control? You betcha.”

Shifting from an uncontrolled oil spill to an out of control fire isn’t much to show from more than ten weeks of ‘doing everything we can’. Still, at least we  have confirmation that it’s unacceptable.

So far at least 17 people have been rescued.

And as sketchy news continues to trickle through, Daily Telegraph readers weigh in. There are nineteen comments so far, here are some highlights:

SteveO of Sydney Posted at 8:09 AM Today:

It’ll be asylum seekers who most likely sunk the boat themselves so they can be brought to Australia… The government better not fall for this stunt!!

Mick of Nowra Posted at 9:21 AM Today:

My understanding is this boat was closer to Indonesia then Australia, so what are the Indonesian doing about this rescue why do we have to get involved when the indonesians are closer, their are laughing at Australia. When are we going to put a stop to these people coming to this country illegally.

A Ryan of adelaide Posted at 10:00 AM Today:

Of course the government will fall for this stunt, as usual they will be brought to christmas island before being quietly brought into Australia. The milky bar kid has lost control of the situation, border protection is now just a pathetic joke. Krudd get enough backbone and stop these parasites getting into this country. Increasing facilities on Christmas Island is not the answer,we dont want them. Send them straight back to theit country of origin and put a stop to this once and for all or be out of office

What now mr rudd of brisbane Posted at 10:04 AM Today:

At what point will rudd and gillard let their egos admit that they blundered badly in dismanling howards tough border deterants.? Presently our govt has no answers and whilst theyve hired costello to help them manage finances may i suggest getting howard in for a chat on border protection.

Matt Thompson of South Coast Posted at 11:54 AM Today:

Let’€™s get real and see it for what it is. It cost up to $15000 to get a ride on one of these boats. Last time I looked the average wage for a person living in Afghanistan or Sri lanka is around $1000 per year. If these people can afford to get their whole family onboard these boats then I would say they are not underprivileged and should buy a plane ticket and go through the proper application process. In saying that, maybe they cannot go through the proper application process due to the fact that they have obtained their money through illegal activities in their country of origin. The right to asylum that they seek has been brought on themselves and we don’t need criminals from other countries here as we already have our fair share.

Darkie McMillan of southwest coast of WA Posted at 10:14 AM Today:

Tell someone who cares.

bill pappas of Kogarah Posted at 12:05 PM Today:

bad luck……….and how is that our responsibility

Stirring stuff.