Skip to main content
Home
Snurblog — Axel Bruns

Main navigation

  • Home
  • Information
  • Blog
  • Research
  • Publications
  • Presentations
  • Press
  • Creative
  • Search Site

Blog

Snurb — Friday 2 May 2008 00:43

For Spam Mail, Uganda is the New Nigeria

Internet Technologies |

Ugandan email scamThis is weird.

OK, I understand the logic behind Nigerian email spam: if you copy, paste, and email the same plea for help (and bank account details) often enough, you're going to find someone gullible enough to send them to you - even today, when most of us are all too well aware of these emails and know how to spot them the moment they drop into our inbox (if they don't get spamfiltered out before then anyway). I also see how, before this kind of spam started accounting for a sizeable percentage of all email sent and received, and especially before email became a major means of communication in the first place, people might still have fallen for similar messages from faraway countries when they received them in letter form.

But this? A hand-written letter from Uganda, basically containing the same standard text ("I warmly greet you in God's name", and all that), snail-mailed to my office address? Surely today, with the benefit of our added experience of spam scams, the hit/miss ratio just wouldn't make it worth the effort - spam emails are cheap and literally send themselves, but with handwritten letters you also have to cover the cost of manually writing and (air-) mailing them?

» continue reading...
Snurb — Monday 28 April 2008 21:58

CFP for M/C Journal's Anniversary Issue: 'publish'

M/C Journal |

We're getting ever closer to the tenth anniversary of M/C Journal's launch in July 1998. To celebrate, the University of Queensland's Peta Mitchell and M/C founder P. David Marshall will team up to edit our mid-year issue, 'publish'. What's the future for academic publishing? How do we assess quality? Contributions to the editors, please...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE - 28 Apr. 2008

M/C - Media and Culture
http://www.media-culture.org.au/
is calling for contributors to the 'publish' issue of

M/C Journal
http://journal.media-culture.org.au/

M/C Journal is looking for new contributors. M/C is a crossover journal between the popular and the academic, and a …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Sunday 27 April 2008 12:56

From Cultural Studies to Cultural Science?

Creative Industries |

There's a quiet revolution underway - a revolution that could result in the birth of an entirely new academic discipline. Spearheaded by John Hartley and Stuart Cunningham in QUT's Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi), and in collaboration with an international group of high-profile researchers, they're investigating the potential for joining elements of cultural studies, evolutionary economics, anthropology, and other disciplines in a new field called cultural science.

» continue reading...
Snurb — Tuesday 22 April 2008 09:19

Mark Scott's Lacklustre Vision for the Future of Our ABC

Produsers and Produsage | Produsage in Business | Television |

Somewhat overshadowed by the extensive if occasionally perfunctory coverage of the 2020 Summit in Canberra has been ABC Managing Director Mark Scott's own ideas paper, "The ABC in the Digital Age - Towards 2020" which was released last Thursday.

Scott also posted a kind of executive summary of the paper to the ABC's 2020 Unleashed site: here, he resorts to time-honoured platitudes about how in future "we will be saturated with choices about what to watch, listen to and experience; it will be like trying to hold back the ocean with a broom." (Huh?) His solution: more …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Sunday 20 April 2008 18:59

Australian Journalists Incapable of 2020 Vision?

Politics | Industrial Journalism |

A quick addendum to my last Gatewatching post, which discussed why in the face of a journalistic environment more concerned with scoring points than reporting on the issues of the day it's not such a bad idea if politicians choose to converse with citizens outside of the media glare: from what I've seen so far, quite a few of the journalists reporting on the 2020 Summit have similarly succumbed to the temptation to file lazy stories poking fun at summit procedures rather than investing the time necessary to inform the rest of the country about what's actually being discussed …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Thursday 17 April 2008 11:16

Consulting Citizens away from the Media Glare

Politics | Produsage Communities | Industrial Journalism |

(Crossposted from Gatewatching.org.)

There's been a bit of discussion amongst political bloggers about a post by PollieGraph's Rachel Hills which pointed out that Liberal leadership contender Malcolm Turnbull had her - and other journalists - on 'limited profile' on Facebook, because of her status as a writer for New Matilda (also noted over at Larvatus Prodeo). Some of the discussion about this has been fairly predictable - with the Libs plumbing untold lows in their approval ratings, it's easy to engage in some gratuitous pollie-bashing - but for once, I have to say that Turnbull's decision to keep the media at arms' length from any online discussion with voters seems like a pretty smart move to me.

» continue reading...
Snurb — Wednesday 16 April 2008 12:21

Social Networks on Ning: A Sensible Alternative to Facebook

Produsage Communities | Produsers and Produsage |

(Crossposted from Produsage.org.)

As I've said before, I'm no fan of Facebook - in fact, I think that ultimately, it is no more than a poor caricature of what social networking can be and do. Clearly, that's not stopped the site's rapid growth, but as Facebook users themselves have had more time to come to terms with the environment they're now operating in, I think it's in good part responsible for the fact that in some key territories, Facebook usage numbers have now plateaued and even declined.

The main problem here is with the thoughtlessness with which Facebook …

» continue reading...
Snurb — Tuesday 15 April 2008 20:25

Vibewire 6: Final Thoughts

Politics | Produsage Communities |

So, the Vibewire e-Festival of Ideas is over. I really enjoyed the discussion over the past week, and I've just posted some final thoughts for what it's worth.

Our discussion of democracy and social dynamics reminds me of the work of French author Pierre Lévy. In his book Collective Intelligence, he suggests that

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 11 April 2008 11:08

Vibewire 5: From 'Bad' to 'Good' Elitism?

Politics | Produsers and Produsage | Wikipedia |

Another quick rumination in response to the Vibewire e-Festival of Ideas discussions. This connects very directly to my research for my latest book [weblink:475] - chapters 5 through 8, on Wikipedia, folksonomies, and related issues around knowledge management and knowledge organisation, all deal in some detail with the question of how to come to an arrangement between 'folks' and 'experts' which both respects expert knowledge and asserts the equipotentiality of contributors who are not certified experts. Here's what I wrote on that point - comments welcome!

It's interesting that the question of experts is coming up here - it's something I've thought a lot about recently, especially also in relation to the Wikipedia where that problem has been a point of ongoing discussion. There are plenty of good arguments in either direction here (let experts have far greater say than average people vs. follow the common-sense consensus of everyone) - personally, my preference would be for a middle way which respects expert knowledge but also doesn't accept it unquestioningly just because someone has a degree and a position of authority.

» continue reading...
Snurb — Friday 11 April 2008 10:56

Vibewire 4: Collectives, Institutions, Hyperinstitutions?

Politics |

The Vibewire e-Festival of Ideas fora are really taking off now. In response to my post about new forms of organisation the other day, Tim Grey, Vibewire's National Editor, asked for clarification on exactly what I meant by 'institutions'. Here's my reply:

Tim, I think the question about what exactly we mean by 'institutions' is a really good one, too. I do agree that there are many differences between the different institutions you mention (government, NGOs, parties, corporations, etc.), but I think many of them are ideological or procedural rather than fundamental.

To clarify what I mean by institutions …

» continue reading...

Pagination

  • First page
  • Previous page
  • …
  • Page 239
  • Page 240
  • Page 241
  • Page 242
  • Page 243
  • Page 244
  • Page 245
  • Page 246
  • Page 247
  • …
  • Next page
  • Last page
Blog
INFORMATION
BLOG
RESEARCH
PUBLICATIONS
PRESENTATIONS
PRESS
CREATIVE

Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

» more

Books, Papers, Articles

Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

» more

Opinion and Press

Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

» more

Creative Work

Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

» more

Lecture Series


Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

Bluesky profile

Mastodon profile

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) profile

Google Scholar profile

Mixcloud profile

[Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence]

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 Licence.