The FCX Clarity is a pretty impressive piece of high-techory but why must we wait 10 years or so before such gizmos are generally available when clearly they could have been made before now. The almost inescapable answer is that complementary relationship between car makers and oil companies is determined to wring the last drop of oil out of the planet before they concede the folly of using a non renewable resource for the mundane business of moving people and stuff around. Of course the Honda is still another “made” thing which probably will require considerable amounts of electricity and raw materials to get into your 21st century driveway so Honda’s talk about sustainability only goes so far, still its better than GM’s Hummer…
Australia, like most countries in the world, nominates a particularly significant day to symbolise the modern nation state. The modern nation that is Oz has its origins as a penal colony founded by the British who decided that the country was simply a piece of property they could claim by the wonderful expedience of planting a flag and announcing they owned the land. Understandably the indigenous aborigines refer to Australia Day as Invasion Day.
Since then the invading population of largely European origins has achieved some significant milestones. According to Wikipedia, 70% of the native vegetation has been cleared and the surviving Aborigines have a life expectancy that is approximately 20 years less than the average white Australian. The farming practices imported from Europe have proven to be incredibly unsuitable in this hot dry land. As a result land degradation, dry land salinity and erosion marred substantial areas of once productive arable land. The inland waterways of the south east are tottering on the brink of collapse poisoned by blue green algae, overrun with imported pests like European Carp and starved of water by a rapacious system of dams that “manage” the water for the farms and cities.
So my reflections on Invasion Day (the day the British formally began the hostile European invasion of Australia) are coloured by what 200 years of occupation has done to this piece of the earth. While our Prime Minister and others talk about the “greatest nation” and a place of opportunity that is built on some questionable notions of egalitarianism and a “fair go” little is said about the plainly unsustainable ecological practices that underpin the modern Australia. In that context I would like to draw my readers attention to just one example, however it is an example which illustrates the intellectual disconnect that is a hallmark of 21st century humanity in this country.
The issue is water. Amongst other dubious claims that Australia makes about itself is the idea that this country is the driest and hottest continent on the planet. We thrust out our chests and bang loudly as though this fact is somehow an indication of just how tough and resourceful Australians can be in the face of adversity. We proudly point to ecological disasters like the Snowy Mountains Hydro Scheme and claim that they somehow represent a crowning glory in our battle to overcome this harsh and unforgiving land. Yet all these words and metaphors obscure a simple reality: when the white men invaded this country and commenced their initial forays into the interior they found a few rivers, sources of drinkable water that sustained their explorations and the indigenous populations of humans and animals. No doubt Hume and Hovell on their famous journey from Sydney to Port Phillip Bay enjoyed their river crossings as a time when they could refill water bottles and maybe catch the odd fish.
Yet these days the water quality of our inland waterways, in particular the rivers that make up the Murray Darling basin are pretty much undrinkable in their untreated state. You probably could drink it if your life depended on it but in most places the river water is contaminated by high levels of nitrogen which in turn breeds noxious blooms of algae, not to mention the usual pollution from other man made sources such as mines and factories. The river themselves are often slower due to the regulatory effect of upstream dams and weirs and carry sediment that has been flushed into the rivers from the creeks eroded by decades of inappropriate farming. As a result, the water of the Murray which sustains the city of Adelaide must be heavily treated to remove an unusually high level of salt and other contaminants, a process that seems unlikely to be sustained as the SE of Oz continues to feel the effects of a warming planet.
This problem of water is conveniently projected as a challenge to town planning or farming but it seems equally obvious that the “challenge” is not so much a challenge but a consequence of 200 years of exploitative land use. In Canberra, where federal parliament sits to debate matters of importance and device policies that supposedly lead to a better Australia, approximately 300,000 people routinely live their daily lives. They wash in fresh water and they flush their toilets, they pave the roads and create artificial lakes to trap the resultant stormwater where a few enthusiastic Canberrans can enjoy sailing or canoeing. Yet the price of this comfortable existence is not truly paid by those who enjoy running water from a tap, nor is the obvious sanitary affect of a functional sewage system considered since the whole notion of a sewage system is to effortlessly remove such concerns from the minds of men, women and children. But the conversion of pure fresh water into sewage does have a consequence and despite the effectiveness of Canberra’s sewage treatment plant, it is still a fact that the Murrumbidgee River receives 90 megalitres of Canberra’s waste water every day, all this water coming originally from fresh water sources that used to flow unimpeded into the river before the arrival of the Europeans.
Even more revealing of the exploitative attitude in the minds of Canberrans is a recent debate over the question of recycling drinkable water. The idea was floated during the most recent dry spell that saw dam levels drop to around 30% of capacity and the local water utility conducted a pilot scheme to investigate the idea. Overwhelmingly Canberrans rejected the idea that they should have to drink their own waste water yet it is obviously okay for water which is less effectively treated to be pumped into the major artery of our inland waterways.
For people whose lives are conditioned by what they see and hear in the mainstream media and who have no experience of nature in a relatively unspoilt state, the idea of a river whose major tributary is a sewage treatment works might seem like an acceptable state of affairs but the natural order is as unforgiving as it is undeniable and the long term consequences of such exploitative behaviour are starting to emerge. Native fish stocks are almost vanishing as are other native aquatic species. Replacing them, probably briefly on a geological time scale, are the invading pests like the carp. The outbreaks of poisonous blue green algae are now so common that they hardly rate as news and most of the waterways are lined with a slimy build-up of conventional algae as they are deprived the flushing effect of floods and enriched by nitrogen rich run-off from farms.
This is not something to be proud of as an Australian. It shows a criminal disregard for the very land that sustains us and the continuing practices that see the process accelerate, Canberra is projected to grow to 500,000 people over the next 20 years, demonstrate a dangerous contempt for biological and ecological processes. Instead of building unsustainable societies based on fictitious symbolism it is time for Australia to take a seriously long look at what it has destroyed in the last 200 years and made an attempt to repair some of the damage. It was easy to say sorry to the Aborigines, that was cost free, but doing something positive about their plight is as unlikely to happen as doing something real about the lifeblood of all humans in this hot dry place, our water. Neither is cause for celebration on Australia Day.
Out of the mists we Europeans came, we played briefly in the golden light and gorged ourselves on the fruits of heaven before we disappeared…
Posted 7 months, 1 week ago at 10:38 am. Add a comment
Nothing happens quickly at the ABC. Mark Scott’s announcement today has been a long time coming and probably has more to do with Australian federal election cycles than anything else.
2010 is an election year so the traditional media will beat themselves into the usual lather as willing participants in the politics of distraction while ignoring those items that seemingly are beyond the scope of the mainstream news. Questions about our future, our dependence on economic growth and our reliance on carbon based fuel with its attendant greenhouse emissions will no doubt continue to be a preoccupation for the loony left-wing watermelon party while the real business of keeping the good ship Status Quo afloat will be entrusted to the serious politicians and those media that can be trusted to tell the right stories.
Then there is the issue of consolidating the news outlet into one location, conveniently located in Ultimo Sydney where the newsmakers can sup their morning lattes while wondering about how they will beat the peak hour rush home. But Mark Scott says
“No media organisation in the country is better equipped to deliver this channel than the national broadcaster”
so who am I to argue?
It would seem that most of the respondents on the ABC site agree. Hardly surprising since the ABC fan clubs around the country have been amazingly successful in generating a vociferous grass roots mentality that places the ABC somewhere between Mt Everest and Heaven, sublimely untouchable and beyond all serious criticism. All for a mere 8 cents a day….
However all sniping aside, there remains a rather thorny issue here for ABC management, one which I expect they will solve in the usual heavyhanded wasteful manner, and that is just how will they generate 24hrs of new daily content, even if it is “news” and do so without more money? And if they can do it without more money does that mean that they have been squandering money in the past?
But according to Scott the solution is the new technology that the ABC has been busy spending squillions on. This new gear will allow stuff to get re-purposed across the spectrum of ABC outlets without involving a lot of extra people because as we all know people cost money. But as anyone who has watched Sky’s continuous news would know, “news” can be a fickle commodity. Some days there is more “news” than you can poke a stick at, other days, the best news story is the new monkey at the zoo.
Strangely the “news” seems to emanate from the places where there is a lot of media already present. A cynic might be inclined to judge that the media manufacture the “news” to certain extent, they certainly facilitate its transmission to larger audiences and in that context Mr Scott is bang on the money when he says that no else is better equipped to deliver “news” than the ABC.
Will the new ABC 24hr news render the localised state based 7pm bulletins obsolete? Probably in time, yes. Will it supplant the other ABC news services such as News Radio? Possibly. More likely is a scenario where less resources are available for the other news services within the ABC as more output feeds the 24hr appetite.
What we are likely to see is news for the sake of news. Minor story changes between midday and 6pm in order to keep the story alive. Feeding controversy and generating debate on the deep and meaningful issues of our time and getting talking heads on the screens. News, news and more news…all of it brought to you by your big friendly ABC.
As for thoughtful insightful behind the scenes research and development of the kind that used to be the strength of productions such as Four Corners, well who watches that these days, its all in the NEWS!
Will it affect the decline of newspapers, who cares? It’s just another establishment mainstream media player monopolising and managing public opinion in the interests of maintaining a social consensus which conveniently ignores any alternatives.
It seems that Twitter is looking to cash in on its users according to this unsurprising news story. Perhaps the collective twitter mind could be tapped for some inspired business ideas. Imagine a tweet from twitter…we love giving you this free service but someone has to pay, send us your ideas.
A song by the wonderfully talented Tiffany Eckhardt tells me to shine today, something I’m sure Auntie Gertrude would agree with, my lack of illumination not withstanding, yet I am sorely troubled by two things that have surfaced on my screen in recent times.
The first one I want to share is a job ad. I won’t bore you with all of it, just the summary should suffice.
“Are you passionate about changing people’s understanding and attitudes toward death and dying? Do you want to contribute to social change…”
Now I don’t know about you (I mean really I don’t, drop me a line sometime and tell me) but being passionate about death and dying? Okay there is the bit about attitudes and understanding as well as social change but is this really the right tact? If I think about people who are passionate about their interests artists and musicians come to mind, and accountants… actually no, sorry accountants don’t have an entry in their system for passion but I digress. This idea that one can be passionate about death and dying or changing people’s attitudes to it is intriguing. The only other people I can quickly think of who want to change social attitudes towards the end of our days usually come knocking on my door nicely dressed in suits and or dresses clutching copies of the Watchtower and offering to shine a bit of light into the dark corners of my troubled soul.
That is not to say that social attitudes to death and dying couldn’t do with a nudge but given the constraints of a part time position for ten hours a week just how much change could we expect to see? Society is a big scene and one person for ten hours a week hardly seems like social changing event but maybe I’m just cynical. On the other hand it might just be a cover for some kind of evangelical organisation that’s busy recruiting passionate people to spread the word that it’s okay to die because our suffering and death leads to a better world.
The other thing that crossed my screen this morning that deserves some reflection is (warning…adult material) this. News from the Expo is slowly making its way into the mainstream press which I guess just goes to show how easy it is to get publicity if you smile sweetly. But something about this easy adoption of the sex industry by the traditional conservative mainstream media is worrying me a little and it coincides with the avalanche of publicity over eReaders that has swamped the tubes recently.
Volumes have been written about the sex industry and my opinion is covered somewhere by someone so I’ll skip most of it. What I do find interesting about the “industry” is its implication for relationships between the sexes. Douglas Hines illustrates the point perfectly. A middle aged man sitting next to a piece of plastic that he can have sex with. Sure sex dolls are nothing new but people like Douglas are making money out of selling dolls to other men presumably because they can’t have a normal sexual relationship with another human being. It’s hardly surprising that women simply go and buy an unobtrusive vibrating thing that neatly fits in the drawer next to their bed but men have to buy a “recreational innovation” that can talk but still ”has a full C cup and is ready for action” for a quiet little $7000.
That the sex industry is primarily directed towards fulfilling heterosexual male fantasies is pretty much beyond question but what does it say about our societies? Like the 3D experience that Lance Johnson and his muse Breanne Benson are selling (and a virtual reality scenario putting it all together can surely be just around the corner) I am inclined to ask, is this the pointy end of the capitalist system as applied to our fundamental desires? It certainly seems like it. Create an environment where sex is commodified, regulate supply through various social agencies which increase the demand and then sell a solution. That would simply be business 101.
Am I passionate about death and dying…is selling sex ok? It’s worth thinking about, death as something we end up doing alone and sex as something infinitely more meaningful when it’s done with someone else.
Posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago at 10:08 am. Add a comment
Twitter has been on my mind a bit lately and David Carr’s piece reminded me of a draft post I have in the pile of unfinished stuff lying around. At first I thought the two lines of thought might cross over but Davi’d article takes a fairly familiar line so I guess my Twitter Confession will have to wait.
I am going to have a look at David’s article because I am starting to suspect that Twitter is more hype than substance but it may yet become something. What? Well I think Twitter is a ready made tool to replace the News and Advertising industries that until recently was married under the auspices of the newspaper industry. I think there are some reasonable grounds to make that assertion but let’s have a look at some of David’s claims with regard to Twitter.
First, there is the claim that Twitter is somehow an essential part of the internet plumbing, that the internet service provided by Twitter is so deeply meshed with all the other services that it must survive. An example is this blog, where you can tweet this story using the “share/save” button. This groovy little bit of code makes it easy for you to send these words anywhere else with just a few mouse clicks. If you take that functionality and apply it across the web then you can get some sort of picture of the sort infiltration that David means by his quote
“Twitter is looking more and more like plumbing, and plumbing is eternal.”
Okay, Twitter is part of the landscape whether or not it does anything. With such built in connectivity it is likely that Twitter will achieve some sort of critical mass and take on a life of its own. Possibly it is already there but before it becomes entrenched it will need to do a couple of things. First it needs to start making money for someone because no web service can survive for free over time, either they are subsidised by another profitable activity or they make a buck in their own right. The hard fact of life is that there is nothing free about providing a service on the net. This site costs money, facebook costs money to the people supplying it, Google costs money.
So Twitter will eventually have to attend to business. When it does then we will have a better idea about motivation and rewards, until then however Twitter’s business model seems primarily one of garnering sufficient mindshare to justify its existence.
The other thing Twitter will need to do is establish a much better track record in terms of service availability. Twitter Fail is fairly common in my experience and this is tied in with the business side of Twitter. To put it simply, providing a 99.999% reliable service on the net costs money, more money than Twitter can probably afford. So the gurus at Twitter probably sweat their arses off hoping it all holds together until someone comes up with the money for them to deploy a better service. In the meantime we get lots of “we are working on it” type announcements.
David acknowledges the issue of service reliability in his article but he seems more concerned with what Twitter can do for you and me. According to David, Twitter can keep us informed and up-to-date. It’s the electronic pulse of humanity, you just need to put your finger on the right spot.
It’s at this point that I think we need to stop and look seriously at what is being claimed for Twitter. According to Clay Shirky who David quotes;
“Anything that is useful to both dissidents in Iran and Martha Stewart has a lot going for it; Twitter has more raw capability for users than anything since e-mail.”
How is this raw capacity defined? It sounds like an impressive claim but one that David fails to substantiate. He then goes on to parrot the now familiar lines that Twitter represents some collective networked intelligence, a claim that may be true but one that begs the question of so what? According to David, this collective intelligence is best deployed helping him decide what netbook to buy or what is going on with flights during a US style terror scare. It seems uncritical thinking on his part, and it avoid the corollary. That is just how much time and mindshare is absorbed by being part of the Twitter experience.
And it is at this point that I really depart from David’s line of thinking. From my experience Twitter is a interactive now type of internet service. What is happening now is millions of tweets are filling up cyberspace with what’s currently of interest to the authors. And then there are the retweets and the corresponding conversations, but all of it is very NOW. Switch off twitter, as I have done for the last month or so of my break from uni, and suddenly life seems slower.
What you get from Twitter depends on who you follow and how often you use the service. For journalists and other media professionals I can easily see the usefulness of Twitter after all currency is the what drives the News industry. For the average punter I guess there is some value in tapping directly into the mindshare of the masses when something is happening but the question remains is it something we need? And given the business imperative that Twitter must deal with sooner or later, what will commercial interests do once they figure out a way to exploit the collective mind?
The bottom line for me is that Twitter is another time sink. It is also another mind grabber. Sure I can ration my use, I can organise my internet patterns so that it’s sitting in the background but the fundamental fact remains that unless I actually engage with Twitter, which means time and effort, it does nothing extra for me. The collective wisdom is what Andrew Keen discussed in his book “The Cult of The Amateur” and although I disagree with his predictions with regard to the creative mind, his points about the wisdom of the masses are well worth considering.
David is probably right in the sense that Twitter is here for the foreseeable future even if the retention rate of service adopters remains at it’s current level. It is hard to see Twitter disappearing overnight but it is also hard to see what is going to take Twitter to the next level of a “must have” internet service. Hype of the kind that David and other evangelists preach might drive a few more people to look at Twitter but the constant on feature is not, as claimed, a bonus in terms of our already busy lives.
