Tag: The Semaphore Line

• Another Apple Maps Fail

  This time it’s all rather serious. If you’re trying to find the town of Mildura in northwestern Victoria, Australia, you might have some problems. Apple’s iOS 6 marks it a whole 70km away from its actual location. The warning was put out by the state police, here. I always like seeing the comments on news sites when these stories come up though. Here’s a selection from The Guardian:

  Don’t worry, the other Very Good features make up for it. Like the 3D view, or the ability to control the GPS with Siri. For example:

  “Where the fuck are we, Siri?”
  “That abandoned coal mine doesn’t look like a Starbucks, Siri”
  “Communicate our whereabouts to the nearest search and rescue chopper, Siri”

  Here

  Not sure Siri would be able to help much!

  Oh for **** sake – why are people stupidly relying on technology that needs batteries, is prone to error and damage. Get a map, you know the paper versions with contours etc

  Here

  And a great response to the above, here:

  @ agir: you mean use paper maps made using the same processes and techniques as electronic maps?
  Oh for **** sake – why are people stupidly relying on paper maps that disintegrate in the rain and are difficult to read in high winds, are prone to error and damage. Get a phone, you know the electronic versions with contours etc

  both have advantages and disadvantages…

  I love it when people assume the paper map doesn’t have faults of its own. Although admittedly, it is rather hot in Australia this time of year so I doubt high winds and downpours are going to cause a problem.

  2012.12.10

• Hackers and anthropology

  On Wired today. Great part of the conversation here:

  Wired: Did you get grief for not travelling to somewhere exotic?

  [Gabriella] Coleman: Yes. All the time. They just kind of laughed at it. They were like, ‘You’re so lucky. You get to be in San Francisco going to cafes and hanging out with hackers. I had to really sweat it out and be in the jungle. It was really difficult.’

  Nice connection between the classic anthropology of ‘the jungle’ and Coleman’s work in what counts as her ‘jungle’.

  2012.12.03

• I don’t have much time for Zizek…

  …but this is rather funny. From The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.

  2012.11.30

• Carnivalesque windows of opportunity

  

  Two similar ‘carnivalesque’ moments in protest history, consider:

  In 1982, during the [Polish] May Day celebrations, members of [the activist group] Orange Alternative dressed up in ridiculous costumes, rented a bus, went to the local zoo, and waved red flags and sang communist songs while ironically demanding “freedom for the bears,” the bear being an obvious Soviet symbol. Although the “protesters” were arrested, they were so ridiculous that the police refused to fine them, particularly because it was difficult to know where to draw the line when it came to this obscure kind of political performance. Additionally, because the government wanted to take advantage of its newfound ability to distance itself from direct Soviet intervention in local economic and political affairs, officials did not want to be seen as returning to the more openly brutal political oppression of the past.

  And;

  The idea for the turtle people [during the Seattle WTO demonstrations] was the brainchild of Ben White of the Animal Welfare Institute, mainly as a reaction to the fact that the WTO court had overturned a US law passed in 1996 banning the sale of shrimp caught in nets that killed endangered sea turtles. The WTO court’s reasoning was that the law constituted “an unfair barrier to trade.” White thought that a public performance by “turtle people” could send a number of important symbolic messages. […B]ecause unelected courts in newly empowered international government organizations designed to enforce “free trade” were (and are) now able to overturn the laws of nation-states, the turtle people wanted to provide a “street theater [sic] spectacle” to draw attention to this new and relatively unknown form of corporate global governance.

  Then as a summary;

  These two examples, limited as they are, suggest that the humorless [sic] state has a very difficult time dealing with absurdity, symbolic protest, and the curious blending of the fictive and the real—people becoming turtles, elves becoming “real”—but it has much less trouble violently dealing with more “serious” forms of protest. And perhaps this has always been true.

  Really enjoying Michael Lane Bruner’s (2005) ‘Carnivalesque Protest and the Humorless State’ in Text and Performance Quarterly. Available here (subscription only). He argues that whilst playful protest does indeed work in subverting and inverting typical social roles and power hierarchies they only work during specific ‘windows of opportunity’. In his examples, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 80s and pre-9/11 era USA. Is there a similar window currently open across the UK and Europe? That’s difficult to say. I’m tempted to say yes, only because I think there is a particular ideological objective to be reached for those in power, and ‘serious’ protest arguably is only having a detrimental effect to those involved. At least in the UK that is. Carnivalesque forms of protest (similar to calls for ‘playful protest’) open the door for a wider inclusion of those who otherwise might not have engaged in any protest at all. The ‘seriousness’ of protest can frequently deter those who feel like they need to in some way ‘swot up’ on what they’re protesting about. No doubt there needs to be a certain amount of education involved, but that’s not to say that people should be deterred from heading out onto the streets. I do think carnivalesque forms of protest can help in mobilising people. As Major Fydrych (leader of the Polish Orange Alternative movement) was quoted as saying in Padraig Kenney’s A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (2002);

  Orange Alternative “happenings” were “places to learn opposition” and to “discover more political forms of protest.” He argued, “The WrocŁaw street slowly ceases to fear, and through participation in the fun, people learn to support more serious [protest] . . . [and slowly the] fear of detention—usually for a few hours, without serious consequences—evaporates” (190). It was, as Kenney remarks, a kind of socialist surrealism as sociotherapy.

  A sociotherapy I’m sure many people in the UK would welcome now.

   

  2012.11.29

• Gamification of Protest

  Yesterday I intended to follow up my first post on ‘march dynamics’ with a second on the ‘gamification of protest’. I ended up reading the whole of the fantastic Endres and Senda-Cook (2011) paper, posting a short comment on it, and failing to even consider my second theme of protest and play! Anyway I shall say a few words now.

  Following on from Wednesday’s somewhat bodged NUS march, Samuel Carlisle of the protest application Sukey posted a few interesting discussions over on his soundcloud page, here. The first of interest was entitled ‘Gamifying Volunteer Participation’ where Sam talks of auto-assigning roles to online volunteers. This basically means that anyone who’s willing to help out but isn’t at the live demo, can assist in completing lots of little tasks (meta-tagging photos, adding users to the ‘whitelist’, finding trolls to add to the blacklist, mapping facilities etc.) in a service called freenode, an open-source network that helps Sukey distribute these kinds of jobs to eager volunteers. Now, the only problem Sam found with this distributed tasking is that people aren’t always proactive in getting started on a job, whilst nonetheless wanting to help in some way because they feel like they have a particular skill, or specific experience of doing a certain job. So, says Sam, how do you get these people involved? This is where the gamification element comes in, because if people get rewarded for their work they tend to want to continue doing that work, so with the assigning of particular roles (‘tagger’, ‘whitelister’, blacklister’, ‘mapper’ etc.) each group have clearly defined divisions (tag division, whitelist division etc.). This ‘gamification’ dynamic can help in engaging far more people in the application’s workflow, and ultimately, in increasing the efficacy of the Sukey project.

  The second clip; ‘Dynamic Random Role Assignment’ discussed bringing this kind of gamified interaction out onto the ground, so that protesters during a demo could, perhaps, be given a specific task to do based on their geographical location. So they mention what Sam calls ‘pseudo-leadership’, although I really want to call it ‘fleadership’ (fleeting-leadership!), where protesters are given a specific, momentary command (‘start chant’, ‘speed up crowd’, ‘direct to X’ etc.). It’s a kind of distributed leadership role that allows protesters to sink back into anonymity once their job is complete (back into ‘civilian mode’ as Sam points out); only to pick it up again should they be called into action. Moreover it allows people who maybe don’t even know each other to coalesce around a set of shared objectives (i.e. on the Sukey platform). Of course, this is presuming the crowd’s a) big enough and b) willing enough to recycle roles. But they’re interesting tactical points nonetheless.

  The final discussion, ‘The Art of Gamification for Protest’ follows on from the nascent gamification concepts Sam talks about in clip 1 and 2. It tries to make sense of these gamified elements and suggests splitting online roles into predefined temporal tasks, so that those with a particularly long block of continuous time (a weekend) can do a specific job, whereas those with interstitial but consistent blocks (weeknights, lunch breaks) are assigned others. In other words: “little missions that fit their schedules”. The importance though still lies on it being a ‘fun’ and playful practice, so its about giving users/protesters the choice to engage in certain tasks in order to then reward their involvement (and it not be conceived as a job in the purely work-as-forced-to sense). A way of heightening participation and increasing involvement, enjoyment and togetherness leading up to, and during a protest.

  Also: The picture above is taken from Sukey’s Survival Guide for protesters, which is on flickr here and on the Sukey website, here. If you click the image you can also download it as a PDF directly.

  2012.11.23