Hacking the Good days…

I love to spend more time enjoying the holiday – but the two essays have been bugging me – I hate writing and I am admittedly not a good writer… There is this sloppy-personality of mine that I have not come to terms with.  I guess most students are like that though, you write, ponder, and go back to your drafts and then you’re like – I have enough of you guys…

The good thing is, I am informally a MPhil!  That sounds really cool because I never expected myself to study more than a Bachelor since I was a kid.  Not that I don’t want to, but as I said, I am sloppy.  Hence to this date there are a few people that I have to thank, especially Dr Ng, Andrew, M and A, who gave me a lift (actually numerous lifts) when I was lost and confused.  I have to admit my superficial side – sometimes getting an extra degree doesn’t help much in terms of personal growth, but it does bring a sense of security… Though I don’t know how exactly a research degree in Wikipedia is going to help!
And my two weeks in Hong Kong had been completely bomblastic (is there such a word??).  It was really nice seeing all my mates and family, while there are weird ad hoc computer problems that happened during my stay, and unfortunately most of them were outside my range!  For example M’s ibook went through a phase of kernel panicks – from once every week to once every 2 minutes.. I tried everything I could, restarting the power management, ram and etc… Still it didn’t work – so probably there are times I just have to admit my limitations in IT :s

Also got hooked up with second life – well not that I am addicted, but it’s quite fun flying around… the learning curve was incredibly steep though; it took me a long while before I understand what’s going on there.  Meeting G from Romania here in london is nice, and she actually asked me if the avatars can take of clothes and…. of one another… Hm.. that sounds quite tricky, huh.. Potential suing and assault cases right there if these actions were possible.  /knock knock If Marshall McLuhan was still around, probably he would get quite excited about these possibilities

Hm.. I do want to blog about Hong Kong – was stroke incredibly by the familiar cultural environment and yet all the drastic recent changes, especially when I’m reading Lung Yin-Tai’s new book..  Will definitely blog more on that.

Okay okay, enough procrastination from Adorno.  Happy new year to everyone, and may your new year’s resolutions (mine seldom) come true!  xx

It’s been a while since we get to talk about Marshall McLuhan, one of the most important thinkers of the time who coined ‘medium is the message’. Talking about his theories actually reminded me of some good times of sharing ideas and ideals back then in my good-old teens… I guess time flies, and the passion about the medium dies, literally and naturally. In today’s seminar we were revisiting McLuhan, not just about the medium is the message, but also about the ‘temperature’ of the message.

Pardon my lazy and not-so-academically-precise paraphasing – medium gets hotter if they deliver information on an one-way street, such as books. Authors decide the narratives and the rythm of wich the stories are being told. On contrary, medium gets colder if users are given more discretions in responding to it, such as the Internet, which can be quite user-oriented if you think about it.

Incidentally my movie-guru mate, Ed, had kindly reminded on tonight’s BBC program, ‘Imagine’.

It explores the potential of the Internet and interviews some of the main key figures, such as the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales; David Weinberger, the author of the Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined (great overviews of the New Media and its potential). It was nice seeing them as a reminiscent to the Wikimania conference last summer (actually Weinberger has kindly posted about my presentation :D) (I know I know, I’m being, well to some, a geek)… Over all it’s balanced and informative documentary on how the Internet provided opportunities for user-generated content, with prominent examples like youtube and myspace. But – their criticisms or suggested potential threats about the Internet remain a bit over-simplified by viewing the corporations as the monsters. I do hesitate to agree with this traditional dichotomization of commercial-as-being monster versus participatory-as-the-saint argument.

There are, well, various degrees of ‘evilness‘, so as to speak. For example, although Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all agreed to bend their corporate practices in China, they did it substially differently. While Yahoo had been accused of leading to the imprisonment of the Chinese journalist, Shi Tao, by giving out his personal information, Google vowed to do no evil – and so far – apart from imposing censorship, Google has not given out personal information of its users. In Zuckerman’s words,

In launching Google.cn, Google made an interesting decision – they did not launch versions of Gmail or Blogger, both services where users create content. This helps Google escape situations like the one Yahoo faced when the Chinese government asked for information on Shi Tao, or when MSN pulled Michael Anti’s blog. This suggests to me that Google’s willing to sacrifice revenue and market share in exchange for minimizing situations where they’re asked to put Chinese users at risk of arrest or detention.

Obviously I also understand that for an one-hour program, they have done what possible to fill in the information matrix. What I like in particular, is that I get to see the author of the 1 millionth article on Wikipedia as well as Clay Shirky in ‘real’ for the first time. And may I say – he’s actually quite charming. (Yes I like reading his blogs on many-2-many).

Finally – hm everyone is talking about second life now.. I downloaded it months ago and never have time to play with it. A quick yardstick would be there are already 17,723 photos on flickr. For those who are interested in knowing what it is but dont’ bother to start one for yourself, flickr is a good way to start your exploration. The only question I have is the copyright policy of the secondlife – how far can I play around with the screen captures? One prof was kind enough to share a moment of having a meeting with grad students on second life,

For more information, please visit their wiki.