Month: June 2024

Replied to Secret, Safe and Informed: A Reflection on Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and the Collection of Data by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (readwriterespond.com)

There have been a lot of discussions lately about Facebook, social media and connected society in light of the Cambridge Analytica revelations. Here are my thoughts on what it might mean to be more informed consent. Secret and Safe?
At the start of Lord of the Rings, Frodo Baggins inherits a ring fr…

Doug, I was looking back at a past post today, and was reacquainted with your DML Central post on the ‘Brief History of Web Literacy’. You attempted to map the eras associated with the internet:

A few years ago, Doug Belshaw made an attempt at mapping the internet. He divided it into five eras:

  • 1993-1997: The Information Superhighway
  • 1999-2002: The Wild West
  • 2003-2007: The Web 2.0 era
  • 2008-2012: The Era of the App
  • 2013+: The Post-Snowden era

I have been thinking lately, with fake news and data breaches, maybe we are entering a new era, what Belshaw mooted as an ‘informed era’.

Source: Secret, Safe and Informed: A Reflection on Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and the Collection of Data – Read Write Respond by Aaron Davis

I was left thinking that in addition to the ‘informed era’, we may have entered a new era with AI?

Bookmarked M.I.A. Launched A Clothing Line To Block 5G On The Alex Jones Show by Danielle CheloskyDanielle Chelosky (stereogum.com)

A couple of years ago, M.I.A. compared Alex Jones’ Sandy Hook lies to celebrities advocating for COVID vaccines. Last week, the British musician went on Jones’ Infowars show to promote her new clothing line that claims to “preserve your privacy, autonomy, and rights over your body and your data.”

Source: M.I.A. Launched A Clothing Line To Block 5G On Alex Jones’ ‘Infowars’ by @stereogum

Where is Chuck from Better Call Saul?

Watched 1985 film directed by John Hughes by Contributors to Wikimedia projects from Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
On the New Music Friday podcast, discussed The Bleachers origins as a soundtrack for an imaginary John Hughes film. (Read Yasmeen Gharnit’s attempt at matching up of John Hughes films associated with Strange Desires.) I was left intrigued at thinking about the Bleachers through this lens.

I grew up with Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Uncle Buck, Home Alone and Dennis the Menace, but for whatever reason, I never borrowed The Breakfast Club (or Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles) from the video store.  I recently watched The Breakfast Club for the first time. It was an intriguing film, basically set in one space, similar to Reservoir Dogs. (I imagine that both films have been adapted this for the stage since.)

It is intriguing watch these films with hindsight, as Ringwald touched on in her 2018 essay rethinking her three films in a post-#METOO world:

John’s movies convey the anger and fear of isolation that adolescents feel, and seeing that others might feel the same way is a balm for the trauma that teen-agers experience. Whether that’s enough to make up for the impropriety of the films is hard to say—even criticizing them makes me feel like I’m divesting a generation of some of its fondest memories, or being ungrateful since they helped to establish my career. And yet embracing them entirely feels hypocritical. And yet, and yet. . . .

How are we meant to feel about art that we both love and oppose? What if we are in the unusual position of having helped create it? Erasing history is a dangerous road when it comes to art—change is essential, but so, too, is remembering the past, in all of its transgression and barbarism, so that we may properly gauge how far we have come, and also how far we still need to go.

Source: What About “The Breakfast Club”? by Molly Ringwald

There is something fantastical and absurd about all these films. But on a serious note, when were smoke detectors invented and where is the duty of care with leaving the students unattended for large swathes of time?

Listened 2024 studio album by Charli XCX by Contributors to Wikimedia projects from Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

I drink, I smoke, I use autotune

Source: TN:138 Charli XCX, George Daneil & A.G. Cook

Charli XCX’s comment on autotune on the Tape Notes podcast sums Brat up for me. On the one hand, Charli XCX cares, she cares enough to know that she wanted something other than her previous album, Crash, but she also does not seem to care enough to worry about how she might be perceived in supposedly turning from the mainstream. As Alexis Petridis suggests, Brat is something of a ‘palate cleanser’.

Satisfying the contract she signed with Atlantic as a teenager, 2022’s Crash was a conceptual go-for-broke by a pop star who had made her name as a refusenik, save a few uneasy youthful flirtations with the mainstream. She swapped her avant garde collaborators for blue-chip songwriters, mastered slick choreo and duly interpolated old dance bangers. It worked, becoming her most successful album yet. Having simply decided to be successful and then pulled it off, most artists in her position would surely keep at it. Not Charli, who has since admitted that she couldn’t even listen to some of Crash, nor stomach the rictus-grin promo. The sleazy grind of Brat, her superb sixth album, is the palate cleanser, albeit one that tastes like cigarettes, vodka and chemical afterburn.

Source: Charli XCX: Brat review | Laura Snapes’ album of the week by Alexis Petridis

I feel that there is an element of Ian Brown about it all. This is who I am, this is what you are going to get. I am sure there is more to it, but that is certainly how it feels.

Brat wears a prickly carapace as lure and defence. Unlike the crowdpleasing Crash, the textures here are defiantly underground – panel-beating, serrated, darkly bubbling with acid – made with the likes of Daniel, AG Cook, Easyfun, Hudson Mohawke and Gesaffelstein. It plots Charli’s history with dance music, from lifelong Aphex fan to bloghouse teen and PC Music doyenne with a sincere respect for trash.

Source: Charli XCX: Brat review | Laura Snapes’ album of the week by Alexis Petridis

As an album, Brat is rather lean, there really is no fat anywhere. Charli XCX manages to fit 15 tracks on one vinyl disc. I imagine there maybe some remixes drawn out produced from some of these tracks, as there are so many threads that feel that they could be teased out further, as was captured in the PARTYGIRL Boiler Room performance. However, as an album, everything feels like it is in its right place.

What was interesting was that the singles did not really lay out the narrative for me. I was circumspect on hearing ‘360’ and ‘Von Dutch’. I entered Brat as a ‘return to the club’ and wondered what that would mean.

i was born to make dance music.. i came from the clubs.. xcx6 is the album i’ve always wanted to make.

Source: Charli on Twitter, Feb 25, 2024

Yes, there is a clear palette 808’s and 909’s throughout, something discussed on the Tape Notes podcast by Charli XCX, ‘Alex’ Cook and George Daniel. However, as Jem Aswad suggests, “there’s a lot more more besides.”

The album changes moods surprisingly smoothly with nearly every track, not just musically but lyrically: The songs swerve between boastful swagger and shriveling insecurity and vulnerability, and are autobiographical in their conflicted feelings about fame, success and her own worth.
…
But “Brat” would be a masterful album even if all the lyrics were simply about clubbing — it’s melodically and musically sophisticated, with remarkably detailed production. As always, she’s a serial collaborator, and A-list coproducers here include Cirkut, George Daniel, El Guincho, Gesaffelstein, Hudson Mohawke, Finn Keane and others, and A.G. Cook is back in the copilot seat, bringing his shimmering arpeggios and countermelodies to a majority of the songs.

Source: Charli XCX Launches an Exhilarating New Chapter of Pop With the Innovative ‘Brat’: Album Review by Jem Aswad

In some ways, I wonder if ‘the return to the club’ is a distraction in the same way as St Vincent creating a ‘Toolesque’ album? Just as I was unsure about St Vincent’s initial singles, I too was not sure about Charli XCX’s initial releases, however in both cases hearing them as a part of a whole seemed to make more sense.

Charli XCX goes in and out of thoughts and experiences. One minutes she is talking about jealously, then regret, then her own ego. For me, it is an album album, with great tracks, made better as a whole. With this in mind, it is interesting listening to it alongside Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department. I feel both grapple with life, but each in a different way. Petridis argues that Charli XCX grapples with being human.

Most of her superstar peers are busy making unrelatable music about how hard it is to be famous. Yet Charli has never lost sight of how hard it is to be human.

Source: Charli XCX: Brat review | Laura Snapes’ album of the week by Alexis Petridis

Brat though is more than just an album, it seems to be an attitude. There is talk of a ‘brat’ summer, whatever that actually means. For me, this attitude was something that started with George Daniel and Charli XCX’s remix (or reclamation) of Caroline Polachek’s ‘Welcome to my Island’. With Charli’s added “bitch” to the chorus hook, it feels like she is graffitiing a piece of art, making it her own. I cannot hear the original without hearing Charli XCX’s statement, what is heard cannot be unheard.

Place between AG Cook and Caroline Polachek

Continue reading “🎵 Brat (Charli XCX)”

Watched
Not exactly sure how I ended up watching Rick Beato’s interview with James Maynard Keenan, but I did not regret it. I was intrigued by the discussion of the three bands and how the combination of musicians in each allows for a different side, perspective.

The T-Shirt.

However, the thing that really left me thinking was Keenan’s reflections on touring. He discussed the reality of not being able to eat after 3pm and why even though every dietician would cringe, he then eats a meal at 12pm, after performing.

I have to eat either at three o’clock or not until 11 30, after the show, because you can’t eat too close to the show, because I’m carrying it around and you risk your reflux and now you now you’ve compromised your voice for the next three shows. So I have to eat early in the day, knock that out, and then after the show, if you have talked to any dietitians, they’re like, “you’re eating at 11 30 at night or midnight what’s wrong with you.”

Source: Maynard James Keenan Interview (Tool, A Perfect Circle & Puscifer)

This reminded me of the sacrifices that Kate Miller-Heidke makes as a performer.

Watched
I watched the performance of I’m Just Ken from The Oscars with my daughter and then showed her November Rain to explain the significance of the guitar solo. Her comment within seconds of the solo in November Rain, “why is he smoking? Smoking is disgusting …” I will trying to provide her a lesson in culture, instead she gave me one.

This was after she came into my office the other day concerned about a video that came up in YTKids. I was worried and asked her to show me. It was Van Halen’s Jump. She was really concerned about David Lee Roth doing the splits in leather pants. I had never really noticed that before, really I could never get past the hair.

Replied to Experiential Learning and AI: Redefining Education Through Immersive Experiences by New community features for Google Chat and an update on Currents (wiobyrne.com)

This powerful convergence of experiential learning philosophy and AI technology promises to reshape education in the coming decades. As AI continues advancing, understanding its applications in creating immersive, data-driven experiential learning environments is crucial. However, a lot more discussion is necessary as we explore the profound implications this convergence could have for individuals, educational systems, and humanity at large.

Source: Experiential Learning and AI: Redefining Education Through Immersive Experiences | Dr. Ian O’Byrne by Ian O’Byrne

I remember being in a discussion about devices a few years ago (probably ten) and I asked the presenter about the pedagogy underpinning the technology. I was told that technology is pedagogically agnostic. This has always lingered with me. On the one hand, I can understand the point, that technology makes learning more doable, but there is also a part of me that feels like an application that actively promotes surveillance clearly says something about the type of learning occurring in the classroom. In regards to things such as chatbots, I can appreciate the argument that it makes the learning more doable, but, as people like Dan Meyer highlight, are we happy with this learning? For me, this is why the Modern Learning Canvas has really stayed with me as a way of thinking about technological change. Too often it feels like the conversation around technology is in isolation, whereas the canvas invites you to think about all the different facets.

Bookmarked The machine stops (adactio.com)

Self-hosted sabotage as a form of collective action.

Smarter people than me are coming up with ways to protect content through sabotage: hidden pixels in images; hidden words on web pages. I’d like to implement this on my own website. If anyone has some suggestions for ways to do this, I’m all ears.

If enough people do this we’ll probably end up in an arms race with the bots. It’ll be like reverse SEO. Instead of trying to trick crawlers into liking us, let’s collectively kill ’em.

Source: The machine stops by Jeremy Keith

I am assuming that this is why some spaces, such as ABC News, stopped publishing their content through RSS? We certainly are in strange times.

Replied to The Feature is a “Dumpster Fire” by wiobyrne (digitallyliterate.net)

Welcome to Digitally Literate, issue #397. Your go-to source for insightful content on education, technology, and the digital landscape.
This week I posted the following: Experiential Learning and Its Synergy with Artificial Intelligence – Anna CohenMiller sent me a request to get my thoughts abou…

As this technology advances, consumers will face new decisions about the products they purchase and the level of AI integration they are comfortable with. Just as we currently evaluate the specifications of a new smartphone before upgrading, we will need to understand the capabilities and potential implications of these emerging AI components. Do we want devices that can learn our preferences and habits? That can engage in open-ended dialogue? That can autonomously generate content alongside us?

The line between convenient digital assistant and autonomous artificial intelligence is blurring. Navigating this new landscape will require diligence from both companies and consumers to separate substantive technological breakthroughs from empty marketing claims. We must think critically about the roles we want AI to play in our lives and products.

Source: The Feature is a “Dumpster Fire” by Ian O’Byrne

I love how this newsletter starts out with Microsoft’s announcements, only to then for Recall to be recalled. I was left thinking about your points regarding comfort levels and thinking critically regarding the emerging AI components. For me, this reminds me of Doug Belshaw’s eight essential elements of digital literacies. Reviewing the list, I feel that I see a lot more dabbling with what is creatively possible and how to cognitively work through various challenges, but outside of my feed I am not seeing much critical conversations or setting up of cultural expectations. This makes me wonder if their is some sort of hierarchy of change in regards to the elements?

Liked https://danmeyer.substack.com/p/teachers-arent-your-customer-support (danmeyer.substack.com)

If you are only engaging five students in a class of 30, you are by definition not personalizing learning for the other 25 students. You are not addressing their individual needs. You’re creating more work for teachers, also, treating them like tier-two customer support representatives, asking them to handle whatever problems your technology can’t solve along with whatever problems your technology creates.

Khan and other advocates of personalized learning will frequently disclaim that they aren’t trying to replace teachers. I appreciate that, though I’m worried about that possibility like I’m worried I might medal in the decathlon in the Olympics this summer. I do not, however, appreciate the role they imagine for teachers: a coercive force in the lives of students who need much more and much better support than personalized learning offers them.

Source: Teachers Aren’t Your Customer Support Representatives by Dan Meyer

Liked Adobe’s Enterprise-First Ambitions Led To This Mess (Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet.)

To me, I think there is a firewall of trust between product and business model that needs to be maintained, and Adobe has failed to do so. It’s not that Adobe necessarily made a mistake with its terms of service. It’s that goodwill around Adobe was so low that a modest terms change was nearly enough to topple the whole damn thing over. Adobe needs to get over its focus on B2B and realize that it is a B2C company whether it likes it or not, and price and focus accordingly. Cheap education pricing will not win over the next generation of creatives forever.

Source: Adobe’s Enterprise-First Ambitions Led To This Mess by Ernie Smith

Bookmarked Do the benefits of ice baths or cold water immersion outweigh the risks? by Shelby Traynor (ABC News)

 Alice has been doing ice baths twice a week for the past four months, and the effect still hasn’t worn off.

“It’s such a mental thing,” she says.

“For someone who’s an over-thinker … being in the ice forces me into feeling rather than thinking, because you have to feel, because it’s cold!”

Source: Are ice baths good for you? Dr Norman Swan investigates by taking the plunge By Shelby Traynor for the Health Report

The ABC Health Report dives into the ice bath. They explore the research into the supposed benefits to the immune system or muscle recovery.

Nick Cave has also shared his thoughts on ice baths, although his are more natural, rather than a tub full of ice on a beach:

In icy water, with our adrenaline and endorphins running riot, we are returned to our innocent, primordial selves via an internal ecstatic screaming to be born defiantly afresh. We become tiny creatures in the shock of nature, and, Freya, we are _made_ happy!

Source: The Red Hand Files – Issue #288 – What makes you happy? by Nick Cave

Liked Increasing your ‘serendipity surface’ by Doug BelshawDoug Belshaw (web.archive.org)

Expecting your career, social life, or significant relationship to develop in new, unexpected ways when you do the same things over and over again is, after all, how Einstein defined insanity. Increase your serendipity surface!

Source: Increasing your ‘serendipity surface’ by Doug Belshaw

Bookmarked You Are What You Read, Even If You Don’t Always Remember It (blog.jim-nielsen.com)

I cannot remember the blog posts I’ve read any more than the meals I’ve eaten; even so, they’ve made me.

It’s a good reminder to be mindful of my content diet — you are what you eat read, even if you don’t always remember it.

Source: You Are What You Read, Even If You Don’t Always Remember It by Jim Nielsen

In a short post, Jim Nielsen reflects upon the purpose of reading, that being to expand your thinking. This thinking was in part inspired by Dave Rupert’s discussion of ideas over facts and how we check these.

The goal of a book isn’t to get to the last page, it’s to expand your thinking.

Source: How do you verify that? by Dave Rupert

This reminds me of something Amy Burvall once suggested:

“in order to connect dots, one must first have the dots”

Source: #rawthought: On Ditching the (Dangerous) Dichotomy Between Content Knowledge and Creativity by Amy Burvall)

The challenge that both Nielsen and Rupert touch on is that we are not always conscious or critical of the ideas (or dots) as we consume them, even so they make us who we are:

I cannot remember the blog posts I’ve read any more than the meals I’ve eaten; even so, they’ve made me.

It’s a good reminder to be mindful of my content diet — you are what you eat read, even if you don’t always remember it.

Source: You Are What You Read, Even If You Don’t Always Remember It by Jim Nielsen

This is based on a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

For me, the notion of unconscious ideas harks back to something J. Hillis Miller once said about the ethics of reading:

As we read we compose, without thinking about it, a kind of running commentary or marginal jotting that adds more words to the words on the page. There is always already writing as the accompaniment to reading.

Source: ‘The Obligation to Write’ by J. Hillis Miller

Liked https://view.nl.npr.org/?qs=5534ee38af86a9e7b5aae43d166384e73063a23a58640b5e9483bcc4f7e0ed71f89084614acc019c24233e0feb71f8fa671cbcd3a1e85fa7bebafabd0f1c421fa78a48acc6ab6d0ead31237b011e22176ef0fa77d12391ea (view.nl.npr.org)

The terms of nostalgia are always defined by the present day; they reflect ideals that may seem out of reach except by going backward, but which still uphold convention. Nostalgia in 2024 for 1990s television or goth/emo music, for example, fetishizes the ways in which those pop-cultural realms fetishized weirdness and rebellion; yet it doesn’t suggest ways in which weirdness or rebellion might actually transform the world. The Hellmouth in Buffy remains at least partially closed; the black mascara of the goth is removable. I Saw the TV Glow presents these manufactured signs of difference as hints of something deeper that will require much more than a horror-movie storyline or a wailed pop chorus to fully enact. While looking fondly to these signifiers, it asks for more. That’s why, for all of its fun strangeness, this film is ultimately more serious — more political — than it might seem at first.

Source: Returning to the past to battle nostalgia (and other demons) by Ann Powers

Bookmarked My Post-cPanel Toolkit by ReverendReverend (bavatuesdays.com)

I spend less and less time in cPanel managing my online presence. I’ve moved bavatuesdays off cPanel 10+ years ago given my blog demanded a bit more juice than shared hosting could provide resource-wise. But once my go-to site went off cPanel, all the other projects I’d created with WordPress over the years were beginning to break due to major version updates and plugin/theme incompatibilities. It’s a trail of web tears if you let it go too far, so I’ve been converting as many of those sites as possible to static HTML over the years.

Jim Groom reflects upon his post-CPanel toolkit. I was particularly intrigued by the comments on email:

After DNS, one of the features folks might need is email. But email on shared hosting has always been a bad choice, and that is increasingly becoming the case, so much so that Reclaim is strongly considering discontinuing shared e-mail support for all shared hosting accounts. Why is hosting email on shared hosting a bad? Well, because there are tons of spam houses out there that monitor and block servers that send out what they consider spam (which is not always the case), which leaves small hosting companies like us playing whack-a-mole on the regular just to keep basic email working. And being a small company we have none of the leverage of a Office 365 or Gmail, so it’s truly a losing battle to ensure email running well on shared hosting. In short: don’t run email on your shared hosting cPanel server. And if you are anathema to the free services like Gmail  and want to get serious out security and taking ownership then take a look at Proton Email.

I wonder and worry when my old “Sunday Drive” blog will just stay in the garage and not even get registered anymore?

Watched Looking for Alibrandi (film) by Contributors to Wikimedia projects from Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
Rewatching Looking for Alibrandi, I feel that there are films, such as Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet, that manage to transport your back to a particular time and place through the soundtrack. I feel that this is different to say Donnie Darko whose soundtrack feels like it is designed to construct a particular past.
Watched American Sniper by Contributors to Wikimedia projects from Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
American Sniper, based on the memoir American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History (2012) by Chris Kyle with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice, provides an insight into the conflicted nature of and sacrifices associated with war and challenges with returning back to society.