Battle Poverty With Technology

30 easy ways…

I picked out some you guys might not have heard about before. Follow the link for more. Also, if you visit that link you will actually donate in a way as well. The site is donating money for every visitor, so just click.

Also, if you haven’t heard of Kiva, check it out!

1. Give social media votes to articles and news dealing with poverty.
2. Lend $1 to an entrepreneur in poverty for every new person who subscribes to your blog in a given time period. You can adjust this number to more or less, depending on how much you want to give and how many subscribers you already have.
3. Invest 5% of online eBook or service sales from your blog into a Kiva.org loan.
4. Donate spare or old technology to a family living in poverty (an old computer, for example).
5. Donate $1 for every 1,000 page views or visitors to your blog or website in a given time period (i.e. one month).
6. Join or create a Facebook group dedicated to reducing poverty.
7. Use Twitter to share a good article on poverty (and reducing it).
8. Use Twitter to share one important fact about poverty.
9. Invite 5 friends to join Kiva.org and create a lending group.
10. Share Blog Action Day posts in Google Reader.
11. Send your favorite poverty-related website some SEO juice by linking with good anchor text.
12. Create and share a desktop wallpaper to remind people about the battle to solve poverty.
13. Donate your freelance skills (i.e. web development) to a poverty-fighting organization.
14. Create a Flickr photoset of images that tell a story about poverty.
15. Sell unneeded items on eBay or Craigslist and donate the proceeds to battle poverty.
16. Create a video to raise awareness about poverty and share it on YouTube.
17. Donate unused hosting space to a poverty-battling organization.
18. Email your local representative about your ideas on battling poverty in the area.
19. Use your blog or website to tell the story of someone who overcame poverty. If your site is about online business, for example, you might tell the story of an entrepreneur who lived in poverty during a period of their life.
20. Encourage your blog’s reader-base to donate or lend to battle poverty today.
21. Lend 50 cents through Kiva.org for every person who comments on your next blog post. Make sure to tell your readers that’s what you’re doing, as you’re bound to get more comments that way. If your readership is small, you might raise the amount to $1.
22. Give a poverty-battling organization some free advertising on your blog or website.
23. On October 15th, submit 15 articles on poverty to your favorite social media service.
24. Send a fantastic article on poverty to all your StumbleUpon friends.
25. Shout an excellent article on poverty to your fans and friends on Digg.
26. Have you heard about 1% for the Planet? This year, try 1% for Poverty with your blog or website’s earnings.
27. Participate in Blog Action Day! (if it’s still October the 15th, it’s not too late).

Immersion

Okay, so kids are into videogames. Let’s make it look dark and scary. Gray tinged background. Creepy light on faces. Find the most effed up kids you can find. Scare people and parents. Maybe that’s reading too much into it. Maybe it’s someone who just wanted to make a video of the stupidest looking kids playing games. They searched long and hard for these children. Cost them 3 nickels too!

That zombie girl was listening to some bad Russian rap. I have no idea what game she could possibly be playing. Maybe she’s watching TV? I’m convinced some kids are watching TV.

I’m obviously not impressed by the video. Does it do anything for anyone else?

Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal. (Albert Einstein)

Surveillance Abroad

The authorities may lawfully conduct searches and electronic surveillance against United States citizens in foreign countries without a warrant, a federal appeals court panel said on Monday, bolstering the government’s power to investigate terrorism by ruling that a key constitutional protection afforded to Americans does not apply overseas.

Well, constitutionally that makes sense.

“The Fourth Amendment’s requirement of reasonableness — but not the Warrant Clause — applies to extraterritorial searches and seizures of U.S. citizens,” the judge wrote.

In-Class Notes Clue Train

Can companies have a human voice?

Communication is more than one way.

1. “Markets are conversations”

-Why do we care if companies have a human voice and are “genuine”? Isn’t the end result parting you with your money? If they can talk better, they can sell to you better. Why do we want them to be able to get to us easier?

So what, it feels nicer to be sold to? That’s it? The end result is selling…but that’s not a conversation. That’s the nice PC-corporate word. “We’re having a conversation”–it sounds so much nicer for everyone, it sounds less like business and more like they care. This type of rhetoric that plays on the pathos is dangerous.

Rather than saying that the group you are trying to “target”/hunt/get, businesses are encouraged to think about engaging this group and having a “conversation” with them. –Can you actually change the thinking? Is a rose by any other name…Are they thinking differently, treating consumers less like targets and more like individuals and people, or is that just nice and cuddly.

If part of the relationship involves marketing can that really be a conversation? Marketing is trying to get someone to do something. That’s not the same as communication. What if all communication is marketing? Once markets are conversations, people are commodities. If conversations are markets, then who is having the conversation, obviously, the commodities (the people/consumers).

If corporations are starting to talk like people, do people start to sound more corporate. “You need to think outside the box”…”What are your target projections for this month?”

Either the Cluetrain guys are naive, or the big companies are outmoded dinosaurs which are waiting to die out.

Is the public really looking to talk to the companies?

What of companies like Google or Ben&Jerry’s, who treat their employees well, give free ice cream for voting, have slides ..

Marketing and trust problems. 1999-a lot of anxiety, can’t trust government, even till now. It’s more than just “We dont like our government” but more of a deep-seated paranoia that “nothing govt does is good for people”. There is the distrust of media -rush to war on Iraq. It doesn’t matter where you are on the political spectrum – you suffered from distrust.

Social networking was a response to trust. It’s not a part of government or media. You build it from the ground up. Can they be solutions to economic distrust? Ebay, has technical solutions to trust factors. Social networks reinforce different trust netwroks from the bottom up. Any company who tries to install this, will fail. We have to be in trust relations. Old model of markets – buying and selling in a local market – you weren’t treating them as consumers – You buy my apples, I buy your corn. I know your family and kids. Build trust from the bottom up.

Cluetrain guys thinks that now markets will build themselves this way.

Blahblah market blah blah conversations blah blah please hold blah

72. We like this new marketplace much better. In fact, we are creating it.

73. You’re invited, but it’s our world. Take your shoes off at the door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!

74. We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.

False prophet of the internet age. Deluded in the idea of the meek inheriting cyberspace.

What do you mean we are creating it? What about digital enclosure? What about websites tracking your interests and selling them to companies? What about Facebook owning everything you put on there, even if you take it off? What about warrantless electronic wiretapping? The Patriot Acts? We’re helping big corporations get more out of us, sure…but creating it?

“Immune to Advertising”? Check out Emotional Branding or how about Born to Buy. Sure, maybe you are immune when you are an adult that was not brought up around advertisements or markets, but not when you’re young and you’re getting a very expensive education from companies.

(CBS) In 1983, companies spent $100 million marketing to kids. Today, they’re spending nearly $17 billion annually. That’s more than double what it was in 1992.

Marketing firms and advertisers are looking to a younger demographic, increasingly targeting tweens and even younger children. And these kids have huge control over the flow of parents’ spending, statistics show — 8- to 12-year-olds spend $30 billion of their own money each year and influence another $150 billion of their parents’ spending.

Sure, you as an adult can be immune to advertising…but if children were so immune why would the companies spend so much money on making these children loyal from such a young age? They’re investing in their future consumers.

Markets aren’t really conversations. I don’t really know what ClueTrain means by this. That the CEO is talking to his consumers? That WalMart is treating their employees right? It seems like going through the internet is the best way to ignore conversation, considering you don’t have to see someone. It’s not like someone coming into your office demandning answers. Demanding discourse.

I think it’s important for our class to move into the direction of the market perspective. It is unavoidable as somehow it seems to me that everything on cyberspace is commodified. Everything is for sale, and everything is an object.

In-class notes Gamer Theory

Lukacs  – you can tell a lot about society by looking at their art.

Deluze – cinematic – thinking and affect are arranged in mass-cultural societies. In movies things are cut and spliced, in ways that we don’t experience them, but after seeing them, we experience that cutting in our lives.

Wark – videogames do this too. We can form social criticism without high art, we can do it with the cultural form of games. Not a theory of videogames. Rather, videogames as a theory of society. Videogames to approach society.

It doesn’t matter if most people play or play games. Without the society, video games would not be possible. Thus, the games shed light onto the ecosystem that made them possible. They illuminate the world that gave rise to their possibility.

Game theory has a long history in political theory. Military and strategy games. “War games” WWII. Econimics too is modelled in games; rational choice scenarios. Modern movies, “check” and “mate” without a chess board.

Society as created by the military entertainment complex.

Social theory of technological and social relations configured in the time of the dominance of the military entertainment complex.

Topology and digitization.

Wouldn’t different games give us different windows into the world?

Boredom is productive. Boredom creates designers. We need to go back to the game.

Boredom is connected with surplus.

Protocol is more important than law.

We’re just not used to looking at life topologically.

I don’t think I will ever understand why those Twilight kids want to drink blood

I feel like a swollen, bloody chipmunk. I’m not allowed to spit so basically I’ve had the taste of blood since 11am yesterday in my mouth. My mouth hasn’t stopped bleeding. Rather unpleasant. I keep swallowing so much blood. Can’t eat much else. I wonder how much nutrition it has. I accidentally bite down on the thick blood clots in my mouth. They curl around my teeth. I bite, they bleed and feel so ickie!

The blood clots are way too chewey. Ew. They also wake me up at night.

Sleeping sucked because I’m a side-sleeper, which was impossible. My chipmunk cheeks get in the way. The worst though was the fact that I kept waking up at night because my mouth would be full of blood and thick squishy blood clots, and I was choking in my sleep. I’m pretty exhausted now. I think my pillow has blood on it.

Speaking of blood, yesterday I couldn’t swallow for many hours and after the surgery I went to Wegmans to get some meds. Unfortunately, the gauze soaked all it could, and as I was paying for my drugs, blood just began coming out of my mouth. Slowly, but it was pretty obvious. Terrible. I couldn’t swallow any of it, and neither I could spit it out (because that is just gross to do in public). I just held a tissue to my mouth till I got to the car. I must’ve scared so many kids. Sorry little guys!

In-class notes Gamer Theory

Topological theory – continuous surfaces. Properties remain the same, but it changes shapes.

World is gamespace.

Troll-Blockers

5 Ways to Stop Trolls From Killing the Internet

You might not be aware of this, but there are a lot of dickheads on the Internet.

Since this phenomenon seems to get worse with the size of the crowd, it is theorized that we will reach a critical mass; an Asshole Apocalypse, if you will. That’s when casual Internet users–and the corporations who want their business–will step in.

There are ways to solve this crisis, but I’m telling you now, you won’t like some of them.

Go read the full article.