If you’ve never heard of Noam Chomsky hes widely known as an American linguist, philosopher and political activist. Born in 1928 as a Jewish person growing up in Philadelphia he experienced first hand social and political upheaval of the 30’s.

From a young age he identified with anarchist politics writing an essay on the spread of fascism while being only 10 years old. Eventually he became one of the most vocal opponents of the Vietnam war.

The 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The political economy of the mass media was written by Chomsky and Edward S Herman. This book was later adapted into a film in 1992 by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick.

The film largely explores the ‘propaganda model’ there are five points to the propaganda model and they mainly revolve around control. Control by public bodies, private corporations and other news sources.

Manufacturing Consent points towards a very subtile type of propaganda. One where we are persuaded to think in a particular manner influenced by the media. Its a very delicate kind of persuasion, in a way its more whats has been selectively chosen for print and whats been left out.

Its interesting to think of news as being less than correct and furthering the interests of sponsors and advertisers in developing an appropriate platform.

It also brings into news orientated websites and blogs into the spotlight too and it’d be interesting to look at how blogs fit into the propaganda model.

From a design point of view in a way your always looking to communicate a feeling or sense of value. Your manipulating your visitors opinion in just the same way. Its not considered propaganda but more a sales pitch.

Anyway maybe next time you watch the news its some food for thought!

Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media is a post from: The Typhon

I came across an article yesterday published on the site about Twitter. Twitter is whats known as ‘micro-blogging’, in that your limited to a specific number of characters so theres only so much to be said in so few words.

Some people I know do use Twitter and its interesting to see how their habits differ, when it first came along I generally think people were more enthused about logging in and using it. In a lot of ways it reminds me of the ‘mood’ status on LiveJournal where rather than reading a full post a quick summation is enough to get the overall tone of the post.

Other people I know are still furiously tweeting away and have used it to chat and meet new people from across the globe who are also users, in a way a less efficient version of MSN messenger.

But getting back to the article it basically stated that although teens use Twitter no one is actually viewing their profile and therefore not reading their tweets. Even though Twitter can be seen as a fad and its questionable how long it will hang around I do think that this is something symptomatic of the internet.

I tend to think that the internet encourages us to become slightly narcissistic just because we’re on the internet we have a tendancy to think that everyone will be interested in what we’re doing and thinking almost every second of the day when in reality nothing could be further than the truth. When you start a new website people don’t just find it because its there, you have to engage in promotion and SEO to make people find your site.

On top of that why should people be interested in what your doing specifically over someone else? What is the purpose of your site or what your saying? I’m not really interested to know that your sitting on the toilet or that your changing your car tyre or doing the dishes via your Twitter page.

So next time your thinking about your website spare a thought for those illusive lesser spotted ‘visitors’, why they’re there and why they should keep coming back.

On the internet no one can hear you tweet is a post from: The Typhon

At the time they were really expensive items that were the latest technology, today we look back on them as a relic of pre-disk reading technology. They are by modern standards bulky tapes of a low quality which degrade over time.

My collection was about 30+ videos mostly of cartoons and films, I was looking into what to do with them and came across a few suggestions but mostly this was – sell them on ebay – give them away to charity. I tried selling them on ebay and even at a cut price I’ve only managed to sell two and I consider that in itself an achievement.

Its amazing to think how much VHS has devalued so quickly, if you do go into charity shops VHS aren’t actually worth anything at all maybe 50p at most. When you think about it we were spending a minimum of £15 per video if not more at the time – I think one of the reasons why DVD is so cheap now is that we’re all suffering from ’seen that paid the expensive price tag’ syndrome. In that we all know 10-20+ years down the line my DVD collection is going to be worth 50p each when we’re all using the next big thing in terms of movie data storage.

I’m sure that people who work in charity shops can see people coming with VHS a mile off and hope they dont venture in to give up a donation that isn’t really worth anything at all since not many people have working players anymore. So I started looking into getting VHS recycled.

What I didn’t realise that with this option there many plastic pieces within the VHS itself – the outer casing, the wheel mounts for the film, the plastic windows that let you see inside the tapes. Then theres also the screws which hold the whole unit together and the box. With that in mind there is no easy way to recycle your old VHS tapes, so even though you could put them in to be recycled they may not make it.

In the US they have a special VHS recycling program where convicts do community service to disassemble the tapes for recycling. I do think that it’s a good idea but when you consider how much time it’d take to take apart one VHS and then consider my 30+ collection of tapes and then multiply that by everyone in the UK, well quite frankly thats a lot of tapes!

I’m always surprised with such a high volume of VHS and a lack of demand more isn’t done about the waste that they generate. I know that its a problem with all kinds of technological formats – we throw one out without thought and replace the old with new but next time your about to chuck out that old pc / television / moblie phone remember about where its going and if there isn’t a better destination.

The environmental cost of VHS is a post from: The Typhon

The other day dusted it off and tried it out, sadly no luck the black screen of death stared back at me from my TV. I then went to the internet and tried to find some way of getting it to work – it was suggested using rubbing alcohol, or surgical spirit on cotton buds would do the trick.

So a cleaned console and cartridges later and still no luck the black screen of death was still there, it was at this point I realised my old friend was for the chop. I was kinda sad that I hadn’t looked after it better but it seems that after feeling no power surge or regular use the SNES had given up the ghost. Some sites say that the Nintendo’s CIC chip can sometimes give way due to age and lack of regular gameplay and that was probably it.

The patents for the SNES, NES and Sega Genesis have all expired which means that knock off consoles that play Nintendo games are now produced legally. They’re easy to get hold of relatively inexpensive and the key thing being that they’re new – even if you do buy a second hand SNES console its difficult to know if it’s actually gonna work until you get it home and test it out.

The lure of new equipment was too tantalising and so I decided to buy one called ‘Retro Duo’. So far I haven’t read any reviews of buyers in the UK who’ve had them imported however they do play SNES, NES and Famicom games. Hopefully my collection of SNES games will live again for the Retro Duo.

If its one thing I have learnt then its to keep those games and consoles clean! Also regular use helps to keep them fighting fit. Seeing as how the Retro Duo can play NES games it’ll also open up a new world of gaming to me that I previously didn’t have and I’ll also be able to go back and buy all those games I couldn’t afford when I was a kid.

It is strange the amount of feeling we attach to inanimate objects but sadly the day has come for me to bin my SNES hopefully you looked after yours better than I did.

The quest for SNES gameplay is a post from: The Typhon

More recently I came across the trend of making money from blogging, as a long term blogger it was difficult to imagine how you could monetize what is essentially a hobby but people do do it. What I found more interesting was the idea that rather than creating legitimate blogs upon a certain subject some individuals choose to pretend they are someone that theyre not in order to appear more knowledgeable than they actually are. The term for this I’ve come across so far is a flog or fake blog.

Possibly the most disturbing case of a flog I’ve found so far is the Hunter College fiasco where International Anticounterfeiting Coalition or IACC sponsored a college course. Students were encouraged to partake in what was described as guerrilla marketing, they created a fake blog of a fake student to create a story encouraging other students to buy certain types of branded products in favour of others. You can even still read the fake blog online, students decided to make the blogger a bubbly blonde haired girl to make her seem more realistic.

This raises all sorts of ethical issues about the college accepting money to engage its students in what was essencially a marketing exercise, the notions of students tricking other students who were unaware of the tactic and also the manner in which the course was taught. The problem is that this sort of thing happens all the time without many internet users realising it. Is there a way to tell a fake blog from a real one?

A lot of the time yes there is but internet users are one thing and Google is another. Google says that these flogs can be caught because the quality of content on a flog wont be as good as on an actual blog. I think that depends on the writer if a flog writer is a better more articulate writer than the blogger it may rank higher in Google.

I’ve never really cared about selling stuff from my blogs they’ve always been something very personal to me and I think thats part of the problem with people who blog for profit especially if their site is a flog. Blogs come across as having people writing them, they engage their readership in a way no advertising campaign could the credibility of a real person adds to the power of a blogs message.

Do Fake blogs harm bloggers? is a post from: The Typhon

In some ways you can see why a kind of immediate risk is that everyone out there in internet land can see your home and potentially access points to your property, just having images of your house online even if people don’t know thats where you live can make you feel vunerable. Has life online gone too far?

Streetview has also of course given rise to impromptu captures of some rather embarrassing things such as those highlighted in The Times Online’s article ‘10 bizzare sights in Google Streetview’.

There are also some technical limitations to streetview – you can only go where the Streetview photo cars have gone, in a way this feels like being in a video game where you reach the edges of the map of an apparently free running game. However I do think one aspect of Streetview thats become overlooked is the removal system, Google are all too happy say how ‘easy’ it is – they even appeared on Newsnight on BBC 2 to explain how simple the process is, but what about all those people who don’t have access to the internet. For example what if my Grandmothers house appeared on Google Streetview, she doesn’t use the Internet and shes also very old. Its unlikely that she’d have the choice to remove her house from the system unless myself or one of my family members did it for her. Maybe if she had the Streetview system explained to her she might even worry about people being able to view her house online, the the UK’s privacy laws aren’t there to protect the majority of citizens but the most vulnerable members of our community such as children and the elderly.

It is questionable the amount of ‘damage’ a project like Streetview will do – after all whats the difference between someone coming along and painting or taking a picture of your house and uploading it on the internet as art. Maybe its just more sinister that a company would choose to do it and it makes us wonder about their underlying motives.

Whatever the outcome its unlikely that people will stop protesting, it’ll be interesting to see how Streetview progresses in the future and how from a historical point of view it provides snapshots of the kind of lives we live today.

Google Streetview comes to the UK is a post from: The Typhon

Anyway although I’d never actually read Watchmen – I’ve read other books of Alan Moore’s there are quite alot of them! I was aware of the story prior to going into see the film.

Watchmen is essentially the story of a group of superheroes who find that the realities of life are much harder than life in comic books really makes out. I’ve always loved that about Moore’s writing that he takes certain characters and gives them dimension rather than it being a flat story of good vs. evil. Quite often you end up sympathising with the bad guys or rethinking your opinions of the good as the story moves along perhaps without even realising it. It reflects the lapses in judgement that we all have as people on a day to day basis. The characters of Watchmen are no exception to this and the story takes twists and turns through various flashbacks and happenings during real time showing how the past has affected each person.

Each character represents different viewpoints or aspects of the human condition such as youth, love, truth, violence. Here these options constantly clash with each other giving the story its momentum and questions such big issues as what it is to be human.

If your unfamiliar with Moore’s work this may come as a bit of a shock to the system, it isn’t a traditional good guys vs. bad guys story. With its foot in a alternative past during the cold war nixon era its distopian view of the past offers us in the future an insight into where we are now. Life will always be difficult but people can and do strive to adapt.

Watchmen is also a visual and auditory feast, playing off the traditional bright coloured superhero costumes and a soundtrack which perfectly captured the feeling of the film. I’d recommend going to see it even if quite a few of the critics have berated it.

For example one review stated “The set pieces are surprisingly flat and the characters have little resonance. Fight scenes don’t hold a candle to Asian action. Even the digital effects are ho-hum. Armageddon never looked so cheesy.” Read the rest here

Who knows if we’ll ever get to see anymore Alan Moore films in cinemas I for one hope so, even if they did take out the giant time inter-dimensional squid at the end.

Watchmen the movie is a post from: The Typhon