Your Opinion Is Wrong™

Prompted by Christop's recent post (and after following links as I tend to do), I ended up reading an article (http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html) about the Facebook/Myspace thing and how it seems to reflect the class division in the U.S. Not entirely relevant in Australia, I know, but still interesting to read. I didn't realise this, but Facebook was actually started as a private college network that was opened to the public relatively recently. You learn something new every day.

One paragraph stood out to me, though:

"MySpace is the primary way that young soldiers communicate with their peers. When I first started tracking soldiers' MySpace profiles, I had to take a long deep breath. Many of them were extremely pro-war, pro-guns, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, pro-killing, and xenophobic as hell. Over the last year, I've watched more and more profiles emerge from soldiers who aren't quite sure what they are doing in Iraq. I don't have the data to confirm whether or not a significant shift has occurred but it was one of those observations that just made me think. And then the ban happened. I can't help but wonder if part of the goal is to cut off communication between current soldiers and the group that the military hopes to recruit. Many young soldiers' profiles aren't public so it's not about making a bad public impression. That said, young soldiers tend to have reasonably large networks because they tend to accept friend requests of anyone that they knew back home which means that they're connecting to almost everyone from their high school. Many of these familiar strangers write comments supporting them. But what happens if the soldiers start to question why they're in Iraq? And if this is witnessed by high school students from working class communities who the Army intends to recruit?"

It's interesting to note that this might be evidence of a lack of organisation with the U.S miltary/government - while they seem to be perfectly willing to control information, they don't seem to be very good at controlling it in a timely fashion. You'd think that somebody would have seen this coming.

On the other hand, it could just mean that the higher-ups assumed it'd work as a fire-and-forget (excuse the terminology) propaganda device. It would appear an attractive idea to those who are in charge of recruitment, especially if they believed so much in their cause that they weren't willing to consider that the grunts in Iraq may actually begin questioning their purpose.

Not that I'd actually know how all of this works. It's likely that none of it's anywhere near as simple as that...

So I'm getting the playing bass with cello-bow thing down...how it sounds seems to depend a lot on how steady my hand is - there doesn't seem to be an easy way around it.

Uh. Lucas, Pete and I are working on a song I came up with and have been for the past month or so (since Pete started playing for us, really). It's not an easy one to play - structurally speaking - but from a technical standpoint, it's not too much of a challenge for any of us on our respective instruments. I guess this'll help us focus more on listening to each other instead of ourselves.
Apparently our neighbours don't mind, either. Turns out they actually were digging the song, from what they heard of it. Good to hear we're not pissing them off. Yet.

I'm also getting into the habit of doing the looped samples thing again. It's been two months since I moved and I think I've run out of excuses as to why I can't. I need to re-establish some sort of work-ethic (as if I had one before). A track I'm working on that I ditched has been brought back - I stopped working on it as it sounded too annoying. Seem to have changed my mind - I think I can see it taking shape quite quickly. I'll have to force it onto Lucas/Gareth/anyone else who can be tricked into standing still for more than a minute.
Work has been interesting. The entire team has been thrown around a bit, but I think we've kinda settled again. Anyone who is reading this would probably know what I'm talking about, so I'll leave it at that.

I ended up voting for absolutely nobody, too - Cecil was thrilled/possibly surprised by this news. Apparently I don't talk about myself enough.

Had to go back to my mum's place to vote, as I'm still registered as living in Greenacre - we ended up 'voting' as a family. I think I should begin to be worried about my mum's attitude towards it - she didn't seem to realise that you pretty much walk in, get your name signed off, then walk out. She seemed to be under the impression that you had to make it look like you were actually voting, that somebody was specifically watching you, ensuring that you ticked a box and submitted it before you left (as if the majority of the people in the room had some sort of authority to enforce the voting procedure). If her attitude does reflect that of the masses, then manipulating a population is frighteningly easy to do. Forget about chipping the population, forget about CCTV, forget about the Panopticon system (theoretical or otherwise). Nnnnrrrgh. At least Pref understood how one avoids voting - and why one would. Good thing, I was beginning to doubt if I were biologically related.

I'm hangin' out for the Futurama movie. Dooga mentioned that he'll be DVDing it to me shortly. He and Craig keep talking about it and how cool it is. It's frustrating.