"Developing connections between critical theory and HCI is a major
undertaking that will likely require much work. This workshop is
designed to bring together some of the people interested in doing it."
from the British HCI mailing list.
I stole it from a very clever selection of maps on b3ta, where it was posted by this bloke (i think).
This summer Manchester city council were planning to put an urban beach on the grass outside Urbis.
Anyone who knows Manchester will know that this would be right on top of the hundreds (really, hundreds) of teenage emos who come to hang around on a Saturday afternoon like a black clad Biblical hoard.
(Don’t let that sound like I’m sneering, I think they are a fantastic sight to behold – they’ve taken over a place and made it their own, and they don’t do any harm except wear out the grass (and the contrast to the official “euro pavement latte” image Urbis perhaps wants to project is enjoyable and instructive.))
So two campaigns sprang up, for and against the beach, coming both from within the emos and outside them.
This was played out on two Myspace pages, and, by the sound of some of the posts, some bad feeling in person.
In the end, the British summer put paid to the beach, but this blog post (whether true or hoax) gives a taste of the arguement:
"We received this in a mesage:
"Hey,
my dad works for Manchester Council, and he said that whatever petitions are going on or w/e, the beach is definately going ahead. Apparently part of the reason they're building it in the first place is to try and get rid of people making the Urbis area look untidy, drinking and basically just being nuisances on Urbis.
The council are basically just seeing it like "The people who sit on urbis don't own it, and they have no say in the matter". Work starts really soon i think." "
If nothing else, all this reminded me of how much of teenage life is spent hanging around, and that we all needed somewhere for that purpose.
And just to prove I haven’t quite recovered from my own Bonkers One Man Crusade:
it’s worth contrasting the activism of the Urbis Beach Battle with the spurious tosh peddled by the government’s e-petitions site. Which one seems more vital?
I’ve now had three petitions rejected by the government’s online petition service:
table tennis hour
found the mighty megopolis of Leddchester
serve real ale at all state function, so we can prove to the rest of the world that as a nation we can organise a piss up in a brewery. (The closer we get to 2012 the more we are going to need that one.)
I’ve even nominated the petitions site for the Scatter exhibition, though it’s not clear in that context that I meant it to be scorned.
As well as being “humorous” my petitions have been rejected because they have “no point about government policy.”
I’d take issue with that – they have point, put satirically* – but first I really need to ask myself why I’ve started on this bonkers one man crusade.
It might be because political power happens in smoke filled rooms, not chat rooms.
If you want to alter government policy you pay a lobbyist, who hangs around in the right bars and restaurants in London till the right minister walks in, sidles up to them, presses the flesh and gets you a meeting.
If you are well enough connected or have enough money, your voice gets heard and government policy gets changed the way you want it**.
Power is analogue, not digital.
If you doubt that, ask yourself where you think the consultants from MySociety spend their time? Exeter maybe, or Dumfries?
Did they win the case, and the contract, to provide Web 2.0 services to Her Majesty’s government by bookmarking things on delicious?
This is such a simple truth that I have to question the good faith of the people who are peddling nonsense like the e petitions.
They are lying to us.
Not about whether Tony Blair reads or cares about the petitions, no one is daft enough to believe that.
But lying to us about how power works.
And that is not very radical at all, is it?
On the other hand, I may just be turning into “Bonkers of Huddersfield”.
*though as the aliens advised in that Woody Allen film "You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes."
** That’s why each US congressman has $20 million spent on lobbying him or her every year.
The Arts Council is getting a new central London head office, which "will also provide a hub and a resource for the nine regional offices."
Since the London Olympics are going to reduce each regional office to one bored clerk writing a cheque every April to pay half the electricity bill for a theatre, I think the Arts Council can save themselves a few quid on that part of the design.
“I will do the next best thing...block it out!”
In the fantastic* Simpsons episode Who Shot Mr Burns Part One, C. Montgomery Burns’s most dastardly crime against the town of Springfield is to block out the sun with a giant umbrella - “owls will deafen us with incessant hooting...”
I read in the paper this morning that one plan to save us from global warming is to block out the sun with giant umbrellas in space.
If that happens, please please please please please can they be called Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie.
*For anyone who I’ve droned on to about TV, I never said it was rubbish, just that watching it makes us stupid.
Leddchester.
Leeds-Huddersfield-Manchester.
I’m going for a night out in the Eastern Borough this evening, on the dilapidated Crossrail link.
As I was walking past the Cornerhouse this morning my mobile phone rang.
It was the dentist, reminding me I had an appointment tomorrow.
Nothing sinister about that, you might say.
But then I noticed a message asking me to accept a Bluetooth connection from Channel 4.
And the first thing I did was look around to see where it was coming from.
