madhatter’s coffee.

• Irgendwas ist ja immer: Flickr Alternativen
  A nice alternative list for Flickr – nevertheless: it adds to the social network principle. You won’t change because it’s the community.
  (tags: flickr socialnetwork alternatives censorship photo)

What kinda name’s that? Man, it not unlikely that I would kill people for participating in social networks but I surely kill them him if they participate in a network named AKA AKI. I mean, well, the idea of bringing social networks to cells is already a bit orwellesque but why name it after… an ELK?

The concept of a network that enables people to know what I’m listening to on my iPod, despite my anticipatory use of noise-reducing earphones, may appeal to social degenerated control-freaks with the idea that you have to know what someone thinks to talk with him. I mean I’m paranoid, yes, and if I’m not I will become so if people start using such networks – especially people I happen to know.

with a normal data rate you can send something about 500 aka-aki messages to the price of one SMS. Which is, we suppose, funny.

Ah. Well. I suppose it ain’t funny. Not at all. Especially if the people using it are approximately two meters tall and tend to cut their hair frantically short. Nope. That ain’t funny. And their ‘jokes’ about elks ain’t funny, too. Elks are bigger as cows. Ha ha. Elks don’t use social networks – at least those who have antlers.

And of course all those quotes about the possibilities such networks can open are quite elaborate. There may even lie some truth in it. But I’m still not sure if I want those possibilities. And I’m not just conservative. And I’m certainly not getting old.
Certainly those possibilities ARE gorgeous. Think of a demonstration, the cops getting kinda hard and you’re able to control and communicate with a whole network of activists – and all this just with with some clicks on your cell’s keys. Or about new forms of getting organized: social and psychological barriers are lowered and participation would get easier. You’d have access to loads of potential sympathizers which you could spam with information.
If you hear the obligatory but coming… well, here it is:

It doesn’t matter. For Social networks reproduce the society they are based on. And if it’s a fairly unpolitical one the network will be, too. The ’student’s movement’ against tuition fees WAS fairly political – students are the perfect soil for a political movement: they are usually pretty well educated, at least supposed to learn how to access sophisticated ideas and despite many contrary pretenses they have enough spare time to engage in political or social movements.
But they didn’t – even though a new study revealed that nearly two thirds are against tuition fees. Even though paying money and having less is the most usual reason for people to take the streets. As a matter of fact, ‘StudiVZ’ – in this respect the most promising social network with over 500.000 users (about quarter of all students enrolled ind the FDR) – didn’t activate them. And there were multiple attempts, vast ‘groups’ with people against tuition fees – but ideas and organizations for even a virtual demo never passed the state of a plan.

Social networks change nothing in this worlds social or political reality – in dictatorships they can be an additional way to spread information – in democracies they are just a way to find new friends or someone who at least could be called so.

Plus: social networks not only can be controlled – they are always controlled. By money, economic interest, or political aims. Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace for the same reasons which caused him to establish the Fox news channel – which were not not merely for economic aims.

On the other end of a network there’s always someone who pulls the strings. And the more sophisticated and the easier the access to that networks becomes the more powerful it will prove as a weapon not of censorship – but of unnoticed control.

via Elektrischer Reporter

• Spiegelfechter: Freiheit statt Sozialismus
  Unmatched and surpeme even over the old Frontal News: the one and only!
  (tags: blog journalism politics fdp)

Stuttgart builds Trojan horses… again. I won’t try to draw any parallels to giganto-maniac building projects or other ideas of that fantastic Lord Mayor my former home chose to elect.

But MfG really hits the point – although me won’t go so far and declare my love for Stuttgart. It’s more something like motherly care.

(via Stuttgart-Blog.net)

• MyspaceMP3.org – Download Music from MySpace

  Kool. That’s what I waited for.

  (tags: mp3 music searchengine myspace)

• PHOENIX Bibliothek

  For everyone who searches new sources for his or her journalistic ambitions.

  (tags: history tv web2.0 politics phoenix)

• Stefan Niggemeier: Chronologie einer Falschmeldung

  Very readable. That’s how press works. Often. Too often

  (tags: g8 journalism media)

• Behindertenparkplatz: Die Leserschaft zeigt sich bestürzt

  And the explenation for Niggemeier’s documentation. Of course. If time’s everything facts count… ahm. Much. Money.

  (tags: dpa g8 journalism media)

• spree8

  News from the fences. Heiligendamm-Moblog. Featured by Spreeblick.

  (tags: g8 moblog weblog)

• !!! – Chk Chk Chk

  Elektropunk from Brooklin. I can’t help… this has drive. It has fucking drive. It could even be summer. A little bit more surf guitars, maybe.

  (tags: !!! art music)

Well. Nothing more to say. Most of them are basic part of my lecture since more than three months so I decided to let them stay.

One personal relation also made it back on the rollup of communicational shitwork: Mango House. A sketchblog of a friend of mine who regrettably decided against poor and glorious life of an artist to become a… ahm. Lawyer. Well.

Another Update: Quox is moblogging pictures on his blog now using his new Sidekick III. Nice again for my personal entertainment.

• NDR Online: Gegen die Wand online
  Well, sometimes one could think that paying the GEZ is worth something. Sometimes.
  (tags: art media movie)
• Goon #22
  The new Goon’s online. And offline of course.
  (tags: #22 Goon art journalism media)

Got one. Finally. Over here.
Oh. And an internship. Somewhere over there.

Yeah. After hours of reading newspapers, listening to radio news and surfing through flickr photo-streams I have to admit – I gotta say something. I gotta say three things.

First. What in God’s holy name did this idiots think of? Radicals are no pussy cats. Yeah, they throw stones and they do it out of conviction. The problem is that half of the media, some of the so called police specialists and obviously none of the attac organisators has the faintest idea of what radicals think like. It doesn’t matter that the organizatory committee took the pink spectacles and the police chose the black ones. No what matters is that most of the journalists never did any research on left and counter youth culture.
Even if they once were part of a Maoist separatist group. They never realized that you have to update your experience. Well. So far for that.
The results are obvious. It was a scarce comfort that the tageszeitung at the third day offered of the official protest a small chapter on autonomous radical movements in Germany. Nobody reckoned that there would be what the police called an unprovoked outburst of violence.
Ridiculously. Police and State Security spent the last two months on preventive strikes against the radicals in Germany, a vital center of autonomous organization in Denmark was cleared, criminalize the protest before-handedly. Who thinks radicals can’t read takes his heading straight towards ignorance. They even communicate.
Interesting.

Second. Who for heaven’s sake thought there would be a positive output of protests and summit? Kueppersbusch put it in a pretty straightforward line: would you expect a general meeting mafia bosses to discuss the problems of the third world? Exactly.
And all those commentators and self imposed specialists who debate on the outcome of the meeting or the protest or both – they just want to earn money. Too.
The protest will have no effect because, if it would, it would make no sense that the summit would take place anyways. It’s the aim of the protest to make the summit redundant. And if the summit would not take place there would of course be more reason to protest against what’s going on. But there would be no place.
Both, summit as well as protest camp, are part of a ritual stating that no one will give up. The real solutions or processes aren’t part of an one-week meeting. And sitting around a nice bonfire lamenting over third world’s poverty never did anything against it. The ritual is one for the media, in a wider sense for the public and throwing stones is and putting fences up, too. It’s necessary to gain the attention of those who read about Knut and his relatives during the rest of week. And on weekend about the stone-throwers. Interesting species, ain’t it?

Third. Who on earth thought that the locals would love radicals that ain’t no pussy cats? No one. But why then telling them so. Radicals and even critics of globalization are neither domesticated nor tolerant. They are in the dead end of this society. And they stay there because they want to. And most of the petit bourgois want them to. And even if they don’t get up and start trashing your newly bought convertable as a statement against poverty, they still wear long hear and hear strange music.
No one in North-Eastern Germany who as a halfway decent sense of what his educated should look like will let them play with their children. Which is why it never was the aim to produce something as tolerance between those two groups. More something like a ceasefire period. For a few days.

Well that’s that. Maybe I start with a few more thesis after consuming some few more news and getting angry again. Now I’m thirsty.