Michael Jackson was “black”

The Mash:

MICHAEL JACKSON WAS ‘BLACK’

MICHAEL Jackson was a black man, it was claimed last night.

Actor Jamiee Foxxxx stunned the audience at the Black Entertainment Television Awards by announcing the late singer was ‘one of us’ before introducing a series of tributes performed by people who, according to experts, were definitely not the same colour as Michael Jackson.

It had been assumed that Jackson was adopted by a black family who covered his face in boot polish and shoved him on stage where they used ropes and pulleys to make him dance.

Scottish Roundup

Scottish Roundup. Here.

Britblog Roundup #228

Britblog Roundup #228. You know it makes sense.

Young people excluded from politics

ePolitix is reporting that young people feel excluded from politics:

Some 76 per cent of young people feel they cannot influence government decisions, a poll has revealed.

Research published by the Youth Citizenship Commission also found that 82 per cent of young people don’t trust politicians to make the right decisions for them.

Pirate Party goes from strength to strength

Pirate Party Sweden is on the way up:

And one Swedish opinion poll yesterday shows that the Pirate Party gains another four percent in Sweden. It will now be impossible to create a new government in Sweden without the Pirate Party.

I don’t have any details but I assume the 4% increase is on the 7% they got in the Euro election, in which case they’re on 11%.

And it appears that PP.se might have done even better if it hadn’t been for electoral irregularities.

The Pirate Party demographic

Who are the Pirate Party? That’s to say, what sort of people are members of, or vote for, the Pirate Parties in various countries.

I think the answer is hinted at in a previous post that says:

If your daily life is not interwoven with the Internet, many of the issues involving the Piratenpartei [the German Pirate Party] might be quite invisible for you.

In recent years a new culture has grown up around the Internet. Many young people have grown up in this culture, having known nothing else. But the Internet culture isn’t limited by age; there are many people over 30 who’re part of it, particularly people who’re IT professionals.

The Internet Culture is not merely about having broadband:

So, we in fact are witness of a new type of ‘Digital Divide’ which is not measured in terms of having access to broadband Internet or not. Being a DSL subscriber but in fact being limited to painstakingly operating [an] email account due to lack of Internet savvyness does not put you on the right side of this new divide.

So what does a typical member of the Internet culture look like? If you’re one it’s likely that…

You keep in touch with your friends using the Internet, using it for example to arrange to meet people; these days you probably use facebook, you’ve migrated from other social networking systems you’ve used in the past.

You don’t think of Internet-mediated socialising as different to or separate from meatspace socialising, in exactly the same way that someone 20 years ago wouldn’t think of a phone call as much different from talking face-to-face.

There are plenty of people you know IRL but interact with mostly on the net.

You know what IRL means.

You regularly communicate with people who live in the same house as you via a computer on a different continent, and think nothing of it.

The Internet is a normal part of your everyday life. You think the music industry’s desire to cut off people’s net access for filesharing is completely disproportionate.

You use Wikpedia on a daily basis and understand this joke.

You contribute to Wikipedia on occasions.

You know what 4chan, Slashdot, Reddit and lolcats are.

You seen umpteen mashups of the scene in Downfall where Hitler loses it.

You think copyright laws that prohibit mashups are silly.

You use Twitter; or if you don’t, you’re comfortable about trying it out, and can quickly learn to use the system effectively.

You read blogs and comment on them. When you comment you use html tags for emphasis. You don’t need to be told which html tags you can use or how to use them.

You know what an “a href” is, what it does and how to use it.

You’re comfortable with referring to a colour as eecc33, and have a reasonable idea what that colour looks like (it’s a sort of mustard yellow, BTW).

You may have a blog yourself. Or several blogs.

You subscribe to several mailing lists.

You use social networks such as Facebook. You know why MySpace has lost ground to facebook over the last year or so (it’s because of the garish colours and automatically-playing-music that MySpace users customise their pages with).

You think Internet entrepreneurs are cool. You use terms like “eat your own dogfood”, “open source”, and “obsolete” (as a verb). Unlike George Osbourne, you know what these terms mean.

You use Firefox. Adblock plus is cool. IE is for losers.

You think Sony CEO Michael Lynton, who recently said nothing good has ever come from the Internet, is a clueless fuckwit.

You have negative emotions when you see the acronyms “RIAA”, “MPAA” or “DRM”.

You like music, but hate the music industry.

You play computer games, either on a PC or a games console. You think the criticism of computer games — that they are are harmful because they take you into a fantasy world disconnected from reality and make you commit violent crimes — is absurd and makes about as much sense as the same criticism applied to novels (which it was in the 18th century when novels first became popular).

You think the mainstream political parties — in Britain, Labour and the Conservatives — don’t represent you, don’t understand you, and don’t care about people like you.

Ten years ago you were probably male and used to hang out on Usenet; now, you’re just as likely to be female, and may well not have heard of Usenet.

Have i got this list mostly right. Do you think that some of these items are wrong? Are there any things I’d like to add? Let me know.

Bill Thompson on Digital Britain

Bill Thompson gets it on Digital Britain:

A digital britain is not one in which we are all sitting glued to our screens watching the same sort of television programming that we could have had on a cathode-ray set in the 1970’s, downloading blockbuster movies or listening to more dull music made by rich popstars whose only real interest is their property portfolio.

It is one in which universal access allows us all to be fully-fledged citizens of a networked world that offers opportunities for creative expression and communication instead of the passive consumption of packaged content. There’s a glimpse of that world through the Digital Britain report, and it is one that those of us who already live a networked life need to clarify, share and work to build.

German Pirate Party

IPKat has a summary of the rise of the Pirate Party in Germany. It suggests that the real digital divide is not between those who have broadband and those who don’t, it’s between those who understand the Internet and those who don’t (my emphasis):

Whoever defines himself as part of the new digital era, equipped with some sort of an own blog, a RSS feed aggregator, and with accounts on major social websites like Twitter, Facebook and the like will find it extremely easy to tune in on a broad flow of information concerning the Piratenpartei and their political issues and make contact with relevant people, if so desired. However, the profile of the entire matter in Germany’s mainstream media is fairly low. Yes, now there is some media coverage, but in most cases merely on the inner pages of newspapers or in the late night hours on TV. If your daily life is not interwoven with the Internet, many of the issues involving the Piratenpartei might be quite invisible for you.

So, we in fact are witness of a new type of ‘Digital Divide’ which is not measured in terms of having access to broadband Internet or not. Being a DSL subscriber but in fact being limited to painstakingly operate the own email account due to lack of Internet savvyness does not put you on the right side of this new divide. And, let us face it, many IP experts and professionals effectively today are still on the wrong side of that divide.

Hence, a worst case scenario might see the Piraten clientele breed on some sort of IP aboli-tionist revolution without traditional IP circles even duly taking notice.

The do-understands include most people aged under 30. The don’t-understands include most politicians. (my emphasis

Roundups

Scottish Roundup and Britblog Roundup #227

Universities

Over the next few weeks, almost 400 000 students will graduate from our Universities. Many of these will not find jobs at all, or end up working in jobs that they could have started at the age of 16. My prediction is that this Summer at long last, schools will finally begin to question the accepted doctrine of encouraging every pupil who can spell their own name to rush blindly into taking on £20 000 worth of debts in order to gain a worthless degree from an institution that should never have been allowed to call itself a University in the first place.

Yes.