February 2012
31 posts
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“Although ‘Give up Activism’ neglected to recommend any actual change...”
– From the postscript to Give Up Activism, an apparently rather inflammatory essay in the wake of protests on 18th June 1999.
In the postscript the author partly backpedals on a promising initial argument which @spitzenprodukte directed me following my earlier post. Nonetheless, the excerpt quoted...
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Thinking out loud
Why do I want to have anything to do with radical politics?
Because the world faces problems - oil, climate, social justice - that mainstream politics is proving wholly inadequate at confronting
Because I am interested in radical social / political theory, and consequently in how it connects to real-world actionsWhy do I feel so fucking uncomfortable about being involved in any specific events /...
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Bundle: it watches your wallet →
Interesting new start-up called Bundle which aims to provide an objective take on recommending where to shop.
Instead of relying on personal reviews, which suffer from various biases (fake reviews by shops; people more likely to comment when they’ve had a bad experience), Bundle uses anonymous - but demographically-tagged - credit card spend data from Citi.
It uses this to analyse...
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Postscript on the Societies of Control
Pew Study Finds News Sites Fail to Aim Ads at Users
Tazina Vega, New York Times, 13 Feb 2012.
A new study released Monday by the Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at 22 news Web sites and more than 5,300 digital ads. It found that many of the sites had not attracted the same advertisers online as they did on other platforms.
In part, these sites were failing to...
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I should probably just write a book called...
It seems to be a fair portion of what I blog about these days.
Not that I am a marketer by profession (I’m a researcher), and certainly not that I like marketing or what it tries to do.
I am, however, interested in how it works - or otherwise. I am interested in how marketing concepts seep outward into wider ways in which contemporary people/society view themselves, and I am interested...
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Three links on control & digital advertising
1. A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry That’s Watching Your Every Click
Joseph Turow, The Atlantic, 7 Feb 2012
An excerpt from his new book, The Daily You.
2. How Companies Learn Your Secrets
Charles Duhigg, New York Times, 16 Feb 2012
The Target / pregnant teenager case-study you’ve already read.
3. Predictive Analytics and Information Camouflage
Rob Horning, the New...
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How Pinterest can attribute sources better
About 99% of Pinterest items are in violation of its own terms of service, says Josh Davis on LLSocial.
Their TOS:
You acknowledge and agree that you are solely responsible for all Member Content that you make available through the Site, Application and Services. Accordingly, you represent and warrant that: (i) you either are the sole and exclusive owner of all Member Content that you make...
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Pinterest, copying & copyright
One of the problems with this innovative and cool approach by the Wall Street Journal to writing about Pinterest by writing about Pinterest on Pinterest (and it is!) is that there you can’t address that, more than early Napster, more than Megaupload, more than any government-seized hip-hop blog, Pinterest is entirely copyright-infringement. It’s just that, unlike with music and...
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HOW TO STOP BEING A PINTEREST SEXIST →
“6 Pinterest Pointers…For Tech Bloggers Who Want To Get It Right”
Aka “women like it” isn’t a problem, it’s the exact thing it’s doing right.
In terms of aesthetics & social dynamics, Pinterest feels a lot like using Polyvore (aka the fashion site with the shit-hot collage editor), except that - crucially - it’s got bugger-all barriers...
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Tesco asks government to change flagship jobless... →
Work experience programme must be voluntary, says major employer amid complaints it is profiting from forced labour.
Supermarket group Tesco said it has asked DWP officials to make the work experience scheme voluntary after thousands of angry customers wrote in and posted messages on Twitter and the company’s Facebook site accusing the multinational of profiting from hundreds of thousands...
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Special People - Ch.4 of Everything Is Obvious by... →
A clear and convincing take-down of the notion that (a) influencers exist, and (b) marketing at them is worth doing.
To summarise the key points:
1. Six degrees of separation does in fact exist - but it doesn’t work the way most people think it does. When we imagine these chains we assume they must work through celebrities, leaders, & other social connectors - whereas in fact...
Foot Locker: the brand that spells trouble →
For a chain store with good insurance, being looted can be double-edged. “Your security director might be appalled, but your marketing director might think you’ve achieved something.
Excellent long Guardian article about Foot Locker & its promotion of the “sneaker way of life”. I’d call it a brand case study but that might wrongly deter the leftists! Actually...
“The introduction of mandatory unpaid work by the Tory-LibDem government should...”
– Comment by DWearing on John Harris’s Guardian article, Work for free and ‘be of benefit’ to a multinational like Tesco: “A Tesco job advert offering ‘JSA plus expenses’ reveals the sinister reality of government work experience schemes.”
Having got into...
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Travelling light in a time of digital espionage... →
When Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China expert at the Brookings Institution, travels to that country, he follows a routine that seems straight from a spy film.
He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings “loaner” devices, which he erases before he leaves the United States and wipes clean the minute he returns. In China, he disables Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, never lets his phone out of...
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jupitermission:
Hey, remember when you asked me...
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Dear startups and other relevant parties: It's... →
chartier:
Not offer a way to download our data in some sort of a standard, transparent, and at least somewhat human-siftable format
Hide or otherwise be opaque about precisely what personal data you smuggle out of our devices
Not offer a one-to-two-click process for deleting our accounts
Fail to actually remove our data from your serversafter we delete our accounts (while complying with...
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“So what do post-structuralist/cultural thinkers bring to the geography party?...”
– Sounds like there might have been a bit of a ding-dong about post-structuralism on the Critical Geography Forum mailing list. This defence by Jonathan Cloke (Loughborough) made some practical rejoinders.
[via @demilit]
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“Facebook’s revolution is obviously less Maoist than feudal. The “social graph”...”
– Also from Rob Horning’s commentary on the Facebook IPO. Saved for further thinking about…
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“People sharing more — even if just with their close friends or families —...”
– Rob Horning (Marginal Utility, Popmatters) notes that Zuckerberg “intends to rewire the way sociality works in the world” in his “grandiose” IPO letter quoted above.
Obviously Eli Pariser’s “filter bubble” takes on Z’s “diverse...
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Surveillance drone industry plans PR effort to... →
The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems Association (UAVSA), a trade group that represents the drone industry to the UK government, has recommended drones deployed in Britain should be shown to “benefit mankind in general” be decorated with humanitarian-related advertisements, and be painted bright colours to distance them from those used in warzones.
Also worth noting that...