MediaVidea

Oh, yes, we need S.O.P.A: Stop Outrageous Political Assholes.

From an interesting conversation on Hacker News

Vinay Rai, the censorship crusader India doesn't need, is a journalist (edits a Weekly Urdu publication Akbari) on his 'quest' to rid online websites of 'bad stuff':

WSJ: Why didn’t you notify the social networking Web sites of the content and ask them to remove it – many sites offer such functionality?
VR: I did not deem it appropriate to approach foreign companies myself. I put my point across to the government who, in my view, is the best body to pursue this with multinationals.

and,

WSJ: How often do you visit these sites? Do you have a Facebook account?VR: I’m not too active on social media. I registered on Facebook over 2 years ago but deactivated my account a few months later. This was because my inbox was flooded with external applications, requests and games sent by unknown users via the website. Since I wasn’t too familiar with the content, I deactivated my account.

WSJ: How did you collect information from Facebook pages and groups if you weren’t a registered user?VR: Several readers of our newspaper, Akbari, alerted us to defamatory and abusive content on these social networking sites. Being a journalist, I pursued the matter. Furthermore, you don’t necessarily need to register to browse content on groups and pages on Facebook.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby) wrote this letter to his daughter in 1933:

Things to worry about:
Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship

Things not to worry about: 
Don’t worry about popular opinion
Don’t worry about dolls
Don’t worry about the past
Don’t worry about the future
Don’t worry about growing up
Don’t worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don’t worry about triumph
Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don’t worry about mosquitoes
Don’t worry about flies
Don’t worry about insects in general
Don’t worry about parents
Don’t worry about boys
Don’t worry about disappointments
Don’t worry about pleasures
Don’t worry about satisfactions

Things to think about: 
What am I really aiming at? How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:
(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?
With dearest love,
Daddy

Via (Lists of Note)

No, Dev-D, Candle March Marches, and Rock Fests don't quite cut it. Not even Anna Hazare, who seems more and more, a sad, old man, surrounded by a cabal. In an India of surging middle class and expanding surburbia, always copying and aspiring, you see hints of counterculture on the edges - in naxalism, Irom Sharmila...

Read this great post by Sam Smith titled, 'The Post empire survival guide'. If Indian is going to be like America, we Indians might also would want to know what happened to the great American Dream. Remember the cliche, 'what goes up must come down'. From the article:

Create a counterculture. It worked in the 1960s and it work again. You don't have to be a prisoner of the dominant culture. You can help create an alternative, just as the young did in the 1960s, without money or power. And without a counterculture there will be no significant change. The Occupiers are a great start. Take it from there.

My favorites from an excellent ongoing post at Journalism.co.uk, which is crowdsourcing memorable journalism job questions:

...was once interviewed by an editor who took a piss in his office's en-suite toilet, door ajar, still asking questions.

and this one:

 'what is your management style?' could not resist saying 'Genghis Khan' got the job.

and this one:

Write your own obit, 500 words or less.

There are just so many good ones there.

Read more

In a delightful short post on The Economist's More Intelligent Life website, Tom Standage says that civilization's best invention is writing. And I agree. Writing makes you think better. Writing makes you question things.  Writing...okay, okay, over to Tom:

It is not just one of the foundations of civilisation: it underpins the steady accumulation of intellectual achievement. By capturing ideas in physical form, it allows them to travel across space and time without distortion, and thus slip the bonds of human memory and oral transmission, not to mention the whims of tyrants and the vicissitudes of history.

Read more

The American Psychological Association reports that writing in a public blog can help teens tackle social anxiety better than keeping a private diary. It also says that offering commenting and discussion space on the blog brings in support and diverse (and often positive) statements from readers.

Study found at

Yes, how about a social work curtain? Cue image of a man intently facing the screen at work, and instead of work it is just Facebook that he is gawking at.

Found at

The Church of Kopimism, which is a faith and philosophy based on file-sharing, is now an 'official' religion in Sweden.  Maybe meant as a Scandinavian send-off to all the organized religions of the world, Kopimism has a main document, in which you shall find the 100 tasks you need to do to attain #g_d. From the list:

001. Obtain the Internet.
002. Start using IRC.
003. Group and birth a site.
004. Experiment with research chemicals.
005. Design a three-step program.
006. Take a powerful stance for something positive and essential.
007. Regulate nothing.
008. Say that you have to move in two weeks, but stay for seven months. Come back a year later and do it all over again.
009. ROTFLOL.
010. Relax, you’re already halfway there.
011. Just kidding.
012. Don’t think outside the box. Build a box.
013. Support support.
014. Organize and go to parties and fairs.
015. Start 30–40 blogs about the same things.
016. Drain the private sector of coders, graphic artists and literati.
017. Create a prize that is awarded.
018. Express yourself often in the media, vaguely.
019. Spread all rumors.
020. Seek out and try carding, and travel by expensive trains. Don’t order sushi.
021. Start a radio station.
022. Everything you use, you can copy and give an arbitrary name, whether it’s a news portal, search engine or public service.
023. Buy a bus.
024. Install a MegaHAL.
025. Make sure that you are really good friends with people who can use Photoshop, HTML, databases, and the like.

Via 

Everyone is a troll nowadays. Including all the glorified TV News anchors forcing down or throats their biased, belligerent opinions, believing their half-assed reasons (boosted by their right connections in positions of power) are the only ones that matter. Read this essential post on 'Foxnewsification of news'. It is about American news media, but it pretty much applies everywhere else. The part that I like most:

Fox News killed the internet trolls. All of them. Or, you know, Fox News gave jobs to a few of them and legitimized the rest creating what I like to call “The Foxnewsification of mainstream media”. These days, MatrixMansplainers really mean what they are saying. Their sexism, racism, hatred, bigotry, their anger are not just argumentative tactics, they are legitimate drivers for policy making.