This week’s NTK says it best:

“Into the final days of the government’s Great ID Card Consultation – and the Home Office couldn’t be more excited. Lord Falconer continues to tell everyone who’ll listen that over 1500 people have responded, and the majority of them were extremely positive on the idea.

Now, given that they’re proposing a massive IT project to introduce a universal identifier for all citizens, with a centralised database of personal details, kept accurate by making a new crime of withholding your current address from the government – well, we can’t help but think that more people would a bit squeamish on the principle.”

The lovely folk from stand.org.uk have created a tool to make your voice heard in the consultation on Identity Cards, making it easy to go and do your bit.

» Stand.org.uk: A Cynic’s Guide To Entitlement (*cough* ID *cough*) Cards

I was prompted by recent hubbub over videoblogging (or ‘vlogging’ if you must) to take another look around the BBC’s own “Video Nation”.

For about 10 years, Video Nation has been letting people record, edit and broadcast their own stories on national television. The website has now become the archive and dominant prescence of Video Nation when it is off-air. It recently redesigned to create a more accessible archive, and navigation by geography amongst other improvements.

In the history section of the site, a social research organisation called “Mass Observation” is cited as an inspiration for Video Nation.

Later today, while wandering around Kookymojo, various outwards links on psychogeography lead me back to “Mass Observation”.

When this happens, I pay attention.

Found therein, a quote from David Mellor:

“One guise which reconciled the twin demands of the Surrealist and the Documentarist was that of the Poet Reporter. In his BBC broadcasts of 1938, on the general theme of Poetry and the Public, Jennings posited a unity which once existed in English literature before the advent of the mass media in which the poet was a kind of reporter; and poet-reporter was in fact the title adopted by Charles Madge during these years, echoing the Utopian hopes of Mass Observation to have reconciled science and art after their separation brought about by the Industrial Revolution.”

I get a few more synapse-sizzles from this, reminding me of a pre-Newtonmas IM conversation with MattW about another little-known BBC product: “Open Country”.

Matt often holds that Radio is the once-and-future medium, and in this IM he pointed to Open Country as a premium example of why it’s different and better than anything else. I caught the 28th December edition, driving to London back from home yesterday and he’s right. It’s fantastic – reportage, atmosphere, happy accidents and connections are rendered in rich, real, audio: a great example of the poet-reporter in action.

I had another IM conversation today with a very smart person, in which I tried to recount this feeling of everything you see being densely interconnected and interwingled with everything else. It quickly moved to Borge’s library of Babel and the death of coincidence in the age of the interweb. As social networks and domains of knowledge become more and more overlapped, the way we find things is changing… it feels more like things are finding us: manufactured serendipity.

When the blogosphere/noosphere sometimes surrounds me so uncomfortably, it seems like the navelgazing about it’s nature is both restricting and constricting, like it’s headed to either a big-crunch, with nothing to guarantee its expansion. Or maybe a heat-death, with nothing but vast, undifferentiated internodal space almost indistinguishable from the rare, dead, dark node.

But then I remember not to take blogs or the internet so seriously; and that there are poet-reporters in the world.

“Kids don’t have a clue about how things work. Sure, kids can whiz through a lot of menus and commands, etc. But I understand what is
happening underneath — they are clueless. This bothers me.

Society seems to think that because kids have memorized the actions required to
get something working that they understand it. “My kid is a whiz at technology,” they brag. This scares me. This is why China will become the dominant nation and the US will fall behind. We don’t understand that true knowledge is more than learning how to push the buttons. In fact, those with true knowledge are not necessarily adept at using the stuff. Let’s not confuse one with the other.”

» Peterme.com: Don Norman on the UI generation gap

© (I imagine) Warren Ellis, Steve Dillon, DC Comics and Comics Continuum

Warren Ellis has just posted links to a preview of Global Frequency #3.

• Cover
• Page 1
• page 2
• Page 3
• Page 4

Fantastic. Warren Ellis is really “on-it” with Global Frequency. It’s a great book, and along with Patrick Farley’s Spiders joins a few other pop culture artifacts than are hitting the haeccceity, nailing the thisness-of-now.

It’s a favourite OtherMatt word: Haecceity: the “thisness” of something. Both the phrases “the-thisness-of-now” and “the-nowness-of-this” have pinged around our conversations this year about fashion-trends, fiction-suits, e-prime, semiotics, noophysics, magick and mythpolitik, comicbooks and culture; and the way the web has won.

But, as per usual, this Matt has been winging it. Biting on the wordsnorkel and diving into french philosophy has never been my idea of fun. All that Dellllooooze and Guitarry stuff was not really for me, but I liked the idea.

So when I found this trying to get a friend a swift googleplanation of the word, I was knocked out:

“It is the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate that is a haecceity; it is this assemblage that is defined by a longitude and a latitude, by speeds and affects, independently of forms and subjects, which belong to another plane. It is the wolf, itself, and the horse, and the child, that cease to be subjects to become events.

You will yield nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what you are, and nothing else. … You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of non-subjectified affects.”

Being “on it” is about tracking these flows, locking on this latitude of longitude of the now. Sometimes you can feel it, sometimes you are lucky enough to ride it, more often than not it rides you. Like I say, Warren Ellis is “on it”.

Good evening, you’re on the Global Frequency.

» Global Frequency at WarrenEllis.com
» GlobalFrequency.org

Adam Greenfield takes on telempathics and fear-minimization in a post about the marathon-running-moblogger.

» v-2.org: marathon man

I’m watching “Enterprise” and Capt. Archer is staying on a paradise planet in a small apartment. With a door.

Why do you think all alien civilisations have doors in science-fiction? Would they all have arrived at the same concepts of territory, property and privacy that we have?

Ben Hyde has been reading “The Evolution of Cooperation”
by Robert Axelrod:

“There is a lot to chew on in this book. Facinating things about minorities, hierarchies, enclaves, etc. etc. But in the end what’s marvelous about this book is it’s message of hope. It lays an exciting foundation. In short it strongly suggests that nice cooperative behavior (with players willing to react when they are misused) is a dominate strategy over the selfish behavior of those imaginary rational men who populate so much of pop-economics.”

On Friday, we just got back some initial findings from the ethnographic study we’re doing as part of the project I’m working on which aims to encourage people to engage with civic life and politics. We got some insight into the negotiations and conversations that groups engaged in which led to understanding, and cooperation. It’s going to be very, very hard to do, but we have to be able to engender the sorts of interactions that Ben summerises in his post.

Tangent: There might be some merit in “cheating”, and designing the system with deliberate “seams”/firebreaks that encourage real-life interaction. What would the web be like if you could only make a hyperlink if you’d had at least two phone-conversations or one real-life encounter with the custodian of the targetted document?

Been hitting the “Computer Mediated Communication” literature (which is a whole new world for me. I’m still staggered at how much stuff you’re not exposed to if you hang out with designers too much) but the Axelrod book(s) look worthwhile – any other pointers?

This project is really overwhelming in the richness of research already out there and how complicated we could make it – but in the last couple of weeks we (as a team) have been trying to put aside the theory and make things as practical and as simple as possible. The initial field research – being exposed to real-life problems, and propspective users – has really given me a boost, and renewed focus. Finding posts like Ben’s has too…

» Ben Hyde: “Nice is better than mean”

I imagine it’s been a crazy week for those involved in Popbitch. This week, there has been a very high-profile football player who has been very annoyed at rumours about his life circulating around the internet. The Times of London reflects on this today [registration required], and expands the case to look at the intrinsically ‘rumour-mongering’ nature of the internet:

“It is not just celebrities who keep falling victim to the gossip websites. From chief executives to Hollywood directors, the battle is on to retain some control of the web’s 24-hour information barrage and, if possible, take advantage of it. One false rumour on a bulletin board or in an e-mail can travel around the world within seconds, and no matter how firmly the claims are denied a corporation’s reputation can suffer from a few keystrokes.”

Some words of consolation for the popbitches:

“It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown.”

Vernor Vinge, The Singularity

And, on the other hand…

“Everybody’s looking for the
big surprise

But nobody will notice when it
does arrive”

“Coming in from the cold”, The Delgados

I think we’ve hit the gossip singularity where almost anything you can think about someone in a position of celebrity will get reported somewhere, and what’s more, it’s no bad thing.

The aftershocks of the death of deference experienced through the satire boom of the early 60’s have bounced off the lower strata of the 7-layer-model and travelled back to smack the new establishment upside their giant, 16-by-9 heads.

The “24-hour information barrage” demands that everyone’s an editor, and we decide what entertains us, and what we think is true – together. The flipslide of the blogcirclejerk is that we factcheck [each other’s] asses.

Fast, cheap and out-of-control, we’ve reached the gossip singularity. The “new reality” of the network, that is already demystifying and destroying celebrity might yet regulate the hubris of both the financial markets and politics.

Newsbitch, anyone?

More on Doors soon. To people who’ve asked me how it was, I’ve simply replied so far: “usefully annoying”.

Here’s a snippet of the sort of voice and opinion that was notable by it’s absence, which skewers the root of my annoyance with the whole event exactly:

“Funny, isn’t it, how generations of international bureaucrats and guilty middle-class students have campaigned for decades against global poverty and oppression — but it takes the spread of technology, and a bit of free-market hustling, to really have an impact.”

» NickDenton.org: saving the world

AnnaKookymojo has posted up a great, big swathe of notes from an eevent at the ICA debating intellectual property.

» Kookymojo: “intellectual property?”