So I’ve submitted two proposals for ETCON 2003 – one on ‘Personal and Mainstream Publishing’ and one on ‘The Despotism of Social Software’. I have no idea whether or not they’ll be even vaguely interesting to the parties concerned, but I guess I’ll find out soon enough…
When I decided to put a new picture of myself up on the Mirror Project I decided to write a little text to accompany it. The text is stunningly anodyne:
My daily trip to work involves me getting the number six bus from Elgin Avenue. The bus travels down towards Warwick Avenue and the around towards Edgware Road.
Being on the bus is peaceful and productive – normally it’s the only time when I’m away from computers and keyboards. I tend to take the opportunity – like so many other Londoners – to read a book and listen to some music…
On this morning, the air was clear and fresh and the light was bright. I sat right at the front of the bus, and found myself looking at myself clear as day in the reflection. Behind the glass – a black screen. Behind the screen – the driver… Behind me you can see other people on their way to work… You can see other buses too…
For an automated service that does little more than aggregate a few useful tools – most of which were already present in sites like Blogdex – Technorati is surprisingly clunky and weirdly formed. I mean, for a start it has somehow managed to come to the conclusion that my site hasn’t been updated for the last ten days. That doesn’t seem entirely likely to me… If only Mr Morgan would pull his finger out…
Oh for god’s sake. There isn’t a Santa Claus. It’s your parents. They do it all. Ok? I mean, come on… How thick are you people?
So it’s coming up to Christmas and all over blogdom people’s sites are juddering a bit as they try to balance work, Christmas shopping, party-season-stuff and seeing their families. Personally I’m planning to go at least partially offline for a couple of weeks, catch up with my reading and try and assemble some coherent writing out of some of the ideas I’ve been having recently. This having been said, I imagine that posting to this site will probably slow down considerably in the short-term, but everything will be back to normal and bright and sparky early in the New Year… Assuming – of course – that I ever recover from seeing Greg Dyke dancing to Dee-lite’s Groove is in the Heart at a Christmas party a few days ago…
While I’m doing the gay thing, and more to remind myself than anyone else, here are a few of the stories that I got this morning when I did a search for ‘gay’ on Google News – just to show the battles are not yet won and that there is still a weight of prejudice and misinformation that must continually be fought…
I suppose this is an example where a politically neutral examination the transmission of a viral entity through a network suddenly takes on a huge weight of real-world issues and commentary and ends up looking totally different. Jason Kottke has written an intelligent post about the spread of HIV through the gay community outlining some of the areas that one would have to examine more fully before it would be possible to make a statement like: “Although he was considered part of a high-risk group, HIV is host agnostic. With just a slight twist of events, the virus could have first found its way into the straight communities of North America.”
All well and good, except that analysing anything to do with as emotive and politically volatile as HIV or ‘gay culture’ – however indirectly – may end up accidentally buying into some of the language and unspoken ideologies that have been weighed against same-sex relationships. I’m just going to highlight a few of the unspoken assumptions and issues that I see emerging from Jason’s post – while appreciating as I do so that it clearly wasn’t his intention to say anything politically dodgy.
Jason asserts of Gaetan Dugas, alleged Patient Zero within American soil: “since Dugas was a homosexual, he probably got it from another homosexual who got it from another homosexual, etc. By the time it got to Dugas, AIDS was probably already established in the gay community; he just accelerated its progress.” Clearly being in a high-risk group (gay men having unprotected anal sex with a variety of partners) it is likely that he would have contracted the disease through his relationships. But the assertion that since he was gay he caught it from other gay people doesn’t follow and gets dangerously close to supporting the ‘gay plague’ position that was prevelant when I was a frightened teenager growing up in rural Norfolk. In fact he or one of his partners may very well have contracted it from another person or species of animal of sexuality unknown. More importantly large numbers of people contracted the disease through infected blood transfusions or by blood contact via injury.
And if he did contract it from another gay person that doesn’t mean it was established in the gay community. If it was a disease that jumped species, then it’s just as plausible that he contracted the disease from a gay member of the ‘farming’ community. All these community structures have frayed edges and bleed into one another.
Which brings me to another point of argument, the stereotype of a community of ‘promiscuous homosexuals’ as if this group existed world-wide as a uniform monoculture. Actually instead this community was to a large extent culturally isolated among a particular metropolitan liberal west coast culture of gay men – and even then probably amounted to just the most visible and socially active component of the gay people in that area.
This gets even more complicated when you bring time into the equation as well – because it’s not promiscuous homosexuals that spread diseases – it’s nothing but particular exchanges of bodily fluids – and in the age of the readily-available condom, that translates to the statement that it’s ignorance and lack of information that spread diseases (not the gender or sexuality of the people concerned at all). I know for certain that there’s a generation of gay people today who have loads of sex with a large variety of people but manage to do so while being very much less likely to contract or spread STDs simply because they are more careful.
Which brings us right down to the crux of the matter – when Jason asks whether the partners of straight people are “more or less likely to spread the disease through their own promiscuity than the partners of promiscuous homosexuals” he makes at least one implicit accidental move that throws his whole post into question. Because if we are isolating homosexuality as a risk-factor in the spread of veneral disease then we also have to consider that gay women are far far less likely to contract or spread HIV than almost anyone else. Because the issue here is not that promiscuous homosexuals spread disease, it’s that people who have had unprotected anal sex are more able to transmit HIV than other people – whether they be straight, gay, men, women or anywhere in between…
Inspired (a long time ago) by a conversation with Matt Webb and Dive Into Mark’s History of the tilde, I started researching the history of the exclamation w00t and it’s two parallel analogues woot and whoot. Then I got hideously distracted and my plans to write the definitive work had to be abandoned. So instead, you’ll have to make do with this graph of the incidence of the three different terms on Usenet over time – figures courtesy of Google Groups‘ search results pages…
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There’s a larger version of this graph available here.
Right. It’s done. Finally. The wait is over. Almost eighteen months after I first swore that I’d sell my soul if someone would give me an iBook, I’ve finally snapped (like a twig in a blender) and actually gone and bought one. So I’m now typing this weblog entry on the keyboard of a 12″ 800Mhz G3 iBook with 640Mb of RAM and a 32Mb Video card. Bow down in jealous awe.
While doing a routine purge of my computer I stumbled upon three graphs made to illustrate the difference between an increased marginal ‘effort’ cost and an exponential one. This is a flashback to a now old argument about whether or not usable systems should scale badly in order to counteract large volume-abuses of a system.
If this graph shows the effort needed to accomplish a certain number of things on a normal website…
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Then this one would show what would happen if the accomplishment of each ‘thing’ required extra effort – say if it required a small additional amount of financial cost…
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The problem with that system would be that your ability to abuse through volume is directly proportional to how much money you have. The rich (effort or financial) get to flood the system however they want. But a system that self-consciously scales badly in terms of user effort would look more like:
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I don’t really want to comment on it any further, but I thought it might illustrate the concept I was talking about a few weeks ago.
