chris caines

25th anniversary the other day of the french secret service bombing of the greenpeace boat Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour. I can still remember the outrage people felt, how obviously french products disappeared from  the shops (cigarettes, cheeses, wines). Certainly Gitanes and Gauloises never returned though the wine and cheese certainly did and I wonder how many people alive at the time remember it at all, I’d certainly forgotten all about it, though I think it formed a lot of my underlying attitudes about France. In retrospect it also   seems like the last gasp of the french flexing old colonial muscle in the pacific.

I was looking through the fantastic archive of Australian music videos on youtube and was reminded of what a blossoming of indigenous rock/pop there was in the 1980s. Seems to have ended with the Yothu Yindi hit in 91 and nothing like it has resurfaced since.

This is No Fixed Address from the 1980 film Wrong Side of the Road that gave them some profile.

This is Coloured Stone from 1984 – Black Boy.

Them also doing Dancing in the Moonlight from 86.

The fabulous Warumpi Band doing Black Fella, White Fella from 87.

And the original of My Island Home from 88.

Kev Carmody with Thou Shall Not Steal from 89.

Archie Roach, Down City Streets from 91.

I was lying on the couch at the beach shack the yesterday, reading after having just had breakfast, when my phone rang. It was a journalist from Adelaide radio wanting comment on something related to mobile phones.

“You are a expert on mobile phone culture right?” he said.

I told him I was driving and would ring him back later, he gave me a number I didn’t write down. I felt a little ashamed to lie to him, but also a little self righteously glad and I realised then how my attitude to dealing with journalists and the media had changed over the past few years. Even though I’d worked at a few other Universities, after starting at UTS 5 years ago I came onto the media radar strongly, firstly around blogging and then around mobile cultures.

Even when these calls started running at five or six a week (and I felt like I had to spend time preparing for the radio and TV spots) I felt like this is what academics were supposed to do. Contribute to the public conversation, be a public resource in some small way speaking through the media. Which is how I ended up on 2UE during the Cronulla riots debating the content of the text messages flying back and forth. But also how I ended up in the Courier-Mail entertainment section before Christmas pontificating on the way young people interact with the world through mobile devices.

I’ve stopped returning the calls now, disillusioned with the idea that participating was doing anyone any good except for the media companies hungry for free content from “experts”. For a while I had an ABC-only policy to callbacks but even that got tired after a while. In short I was worn down by the ceaseless inanity of the requests and the conversations, the clueless journalists with no idea about what they are asking or who they are talking to, keyboards clattering away in the background as they soundbite your impromptu spray delivered from the office chair.

The guilt I still feel about having taken this attitude is related to two things, firstly if no-one participates in the endless spectacle for these reasons all you end up with is people with a particularly crazy axe to grind like Hetty Johnson. These people make great media fodder, always up for an outraged/combative quote. And the second reason is that media is of course a kind of public space, especially in terms of broadcast media where public airspace is used under publicly granted license. It feels wrong not to contribute in some small way if you have the opportunity, leaving it to the news pros and the axe grinders they feed on, but for me at least I’d prefer that feeling than opening the floodgates again.

Ken Robinson at TED a couple of years back on the difficulty the edu machine has with creativity.

image by y-not?

My friend Maria is currently trying to do a outdoor locative project here in Victory Monument while the protest rages around. The flickr feed of recent images of the protests is as good a place as any if you want to see what is going on on the streets.

Michael West from Fairfax turns a report in Maquarie Bank earning forecast into a rant about what we should be getting from all the banks we the Australian Taxpayer own/guarantee now.

President Franklin Roosevelt explains the banking crisis in 1933 to the american public via his “fireside chat”.

FDR_Fireside_Chat_Banking_Situation_03-12-33.mp3

By the time I wake up tomorrow we’ll possibly know whether its Obama or McCain. I was reading Alan Kohler this morning talking about the dismantling of the Reagan program that began in the 80s, the setting up of the way modern financial markets work, the erosion of the New Deal that was in itself setup in the wake of the 30s depression. Something on the radio this afternoon reminded me about the Savings & Loan crisis in the US in the 80s (which fed into the 87 crash) that eventually lost Reagan office & how similar it was to what has been playing out in wall st more recently.