Green Balloons Over Tehran

Long live creative dissent. As the government cracks down on protests in the streets of Iran, some creative protesters take to the roofs to launch green balloons over those streets. Adapt!

The Revolution Will Be Tweeted

When the US State Department asks you to hold off on scheduled maintenance because the fate of a critically important nation is at stake ... you've arrived. Just a short couple months ago, I was confessing to not really grasping the obsession with Twitter. Well, suffice it to say that the role Twitter has played in the dissemination of information in an otherwise media-blacked-out Iran over the last couple weeks has fully dispelled any doubts I had about the power of the tweet.

Now that the only news coming out of Iran is coming from citizen journalists - protesters and bystanders alike - using their cellphones and twitter feeds, the importance of microblogging should be obvious. But even a week and a half ago, after the election but before the government moved to total media lockdown, the tweets were making themselves heard. Here's an article from stodgy old media stalwarts, The Wall Street Journal, talking about how twitterers were able to push fellow media dinosaurs CNN into better/more coverage of the protests in Iran. Not only did CNN step up their coverage after the online public shaming, they published a stroke job of an article about the emergence of twitter as a news source. This made me wonder what the media landscape will look like in the future if major media felt compelled to respond to trends and popular demands on twitter. Will our news be dictated by those savvy enough to manipulate and mobilize microblogging? The obvious concern for critical consumers of media is the legitimacy and reliability of this potentially massive stream of information. How do we know what's True and what's unverified, unreliable, or even false, manipulated, or engineered?

The picture at the top of the post is from twitterer Iridium24 via The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish. Sullivan is a credible journalist and has been compiling what he considers to be legitimate tweets. Is this the model of the future? Will the modern journalist essentially be a credible librarian, collator, and dispatcher of the data collected and broadcast by the people on the streets? The journalist becomes the editor and the reader becomes the journalist? If you consider journalism to be a skill at all, then there are ramifications from this transformation that extend beyond the idea that it's good to have more people reporting and disseminating news.

Rachel Maddow talked to another tweet gatherer,
Nico Pitney from the Huffington Post, on her show last week about his role in gathering information from the streets of Iran, while in his office in New York:



Since that interview, the media situation in Iran has devolved to the point where these twitter feeds, flickr and youtube images, and other transmissions are literally the only news coming out of Iran other than the obvious propaganda of the government. This type of proletariat micromedia may literally be the last hope of the people. But unfortunately, it might also spell their doom.

Check out this fascinating lecture that technology expert Clay Shirky gave last month, before the Iranian election. It's 17 minutes but I highly recommend you watch it because I can't quote it all:



In discussing the phones, cameras, blackberries and other tools being used by people on the streets to record and report elections in first Nigeria and then the United States, Shirky notes that "these tools don't get technologically interesting until they get technologically boring. It isn't when the shiny new tools show up that their uses start permeating society. It's when everybody is able to take them for granted... Now that media is increasingly social, innovation can happen anywhere that people can take for granted the idea that we're all in this together. And so we're starting to see a media landscape in which innovation is happening everywhere and is moving from one spot to another. That is a huge transformation."

Huge indeed. That got me thinking: could the technology era create a sort of reverse Big Brother situation? In a totalitarian regime, everyone assumes that the government is always watching and awareness of that dictates their behavior. Could the proliferation of cell phones capturing video and the transmission of information via text, twitter, etc., create an environment in which the police, the military, the media, the government, assume they're being watched and have their behavior dictated by the cameras being turned on them? Of course, this phenomenon must compete with governmental secrecy, spying, torture, executive privilege, etc. (and that's just in the US), so it might not be a net gain. But at least it might not be a net loss for the people. Power to the people, 140 characters at a time?

Later in the lecture, Shirky tells the story of how the BBC found out about the massive earthquake in China via twitter, before the US Geological Survey had anything up online about it. He points out that "the last time China had a quake of this magnitude, it took them three months to admit that it had happened. Now, they might have liked to have done that here, rather than seeing these pictures go up online, but they weren't given that choice, because their own citizens beat them to the punch. Even the government learned of the earthquake from their own citizens rather than the news agency." And remarkably, China allowed this reporting of the people to go on. But then the people pushed it further and successfully shamed the corrupt local government officials who had let the collapsed school buildings be built under code, which had resulted in the deaths of the children. This sort of bottom-up power dynamic was happening in China. As in Tiananmen Square China. So, eventually China shut the protests down and arrested the people. And after analysis of the transformation of the technology and media landscapes, they recently decided to shut twitter down (on the 20 year anniversary of Tiananmen Square massacre). They could police the internet with The Great Firewall of China, the best in the world, but they couldn't handle Twitter, so they had to shut it down entirely. "The transformation to amateur media [was] so enormous that they can't deal with it any other way", says Shirky.

But short of Chinese level censorship, how does a government control the message in this modern media environment? It's near impossible - which brings us to Iran's dilemma. My guess is that Iran will be forced to make a decision: whether to follow China's lead or not. And the decision they make will determine the outcome of this revolution. I'm guessing that they're going to choose lockdown and that the situation is going to get worse. But it's also the case that Iran doesn't have the same type of infrastructure, the massive firewall management that China does. This would prevent them from shutting down parts of the internet effectively or immediately. It may end up having a devastating effect on their economy, as well as eliminating any remaining pretense of democracy, both of which would further fuel revolutionary sentiment. Twitter could bring down the whole Iranian government.

RIP Neda

Shame! Shame! Shame!

Shame on the murderers in Iran.

Will this be the face of change in Iran? If you can stomach it, Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic is hosting some serious coverage of the events unfolding on the streets of Iran on his blog, The Daily Dish. Saturday's death toll is between 19 and 150, according to dinosaur media outlet, cnn.

Meanwhile, in Iraq, at least 67 people killed in a suicide bombing. Not a good day for peace in the Middle East.

OK Go Animation Video

I'm in the process of handing out my resume in an effort to find some supplemental employment, and it occurred to me that I hadn't posted this animation on which I did some graphic design work. Some work. Robin's the real genius behind this stuff. (and yes, I'm starting my job search the same week that US Unemployment hit a 25 year high.)

update: the embedded video is not working, so here's a link.

Bacon Paper Pig

So, you see, it's a pig made out of paper. And that paper has bacon printed on it.

Dan Nolan Art @ Bukowsi Tavern (Inman)

Should you find yourself in the Inman Square neighborhood of Cambridge and were interested in seeing the new baseball paintings, feel free to stop by Bukowski Tavern, centrally located on Cambridge Street.


If you're a buyer, get there quick. The one at the top of this post sold in less than a day and a half. They're cheap. Here's what they look like hanging:


You can also visit old friends, Business Casual Stag Devil Death Boy, Den and Maggie:

Sonia Sotomayor- SCOTUS Nominee, Yankee Fan.

Finally, a proper Yankees fan on The Bench. For years, we've been represented only by that despicable, if hilarious, arch-conservative, Antonin Scalia. Not only is he conservative, but he's from Queens! What kind of Yankee fan comes from Queens?!? The newest nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, grew up in public housing in the South Bronx. Now that's a Yankees fan we can trust. Her confirmation will secure our passage out of a nightmare era in which political representation of Yankees fans was limited to Scalia, Rudy Giuliani, and Ari Fleischer on the right, and Joe Lieberman and Hillary Clinton on the ... well, on the right. Sotomayor will now be the true face of the Yankees. And it's pretty clear that anyone who opposes her confirmation to the Supreme Court, or who roots against the Yankees, is a racist, misogynist, neo-con.

"Welcome to New Orleans", said the black hooker shoe.

That's the shoe that's black, not the hooker. I don't know whether or not the hooker was black. It was this black shoe in the corner of our hotel room that welcomed us back to wonderful New Orleans for Jazzfest 2009. And it is this shoe that welcomes you back to your VTK New Orleans Jazzfest photo diary. We left it there all weekend. I suggest you leave it in your heart for the remainder of this post.

On the other side of that curtain was Bourbon Street itself. Talk about your centrally located hotel rooms! The trick to being able to sleep when you're located right on Bourbon Street? Stay up later than anyone who might wake you up.


Another view (check out all the beads on the roof):


And this was our local corner establishment right downstairs, where we kicked off our first day of Jazzfest with a nice spicy bean bloody mary. (note MC Smackdown's outfit (right))


And this is literally 20 seconds and 20 feet later - my first spilled drink. First sip = first spill. Nice. Relax a minute. Business Casual Stag Devil Death Boy seemed to think it was pretty funny.


It was fantastic to return to the Fairgrounds for this year's Fest after a year's absence. We were welcomed by New Orleans native and goodtime trumpet player Kermit Ruffins. I always try to catch Kermit when in town.


As usual, we saw tons of great music by bands we had never heard of and whose names we could not possibly remember, including these dudes who pumped out some great old timey jazz:


And a good interview with this guy, whose name I know for sure: Allen Toussaint.


A definite musical highlight was Neil Young playing on the main stage. Click on this panoramic stitch-up for a sense of how many people were there. We were about a football field away and the crowd spilled out well to the side of what my camera could capture in three photos.


And a definite musical highlight of the musical highlight was hearing Neil end the show with a cover of the Beatles' "A Day in the Life".



And in the Heritage display, there was this:


which really needs no further explanation.


What might require further explanation is this:


which was a shrine to one of the "stars" of this year's Jazzfest, Jon Bon Jovi. I tried to explain to Dd that it was sarcastic, but she didn't believe me and was sure that the woman was just a crazy Bon Jovi fan. She herself is a Bon Jovi fan and attended that particular show, which, I'm told, was good.


Beignets at Cafe Du Monde in a black dress. Before first bite (above) and after first bite (below).


Irishing up the Cafe du Monde coffee. Tip to the uninitiated: don't wait in the obscene line in the morning/day. Go at night when you need a little juice to get you going for the evening round.


Dice.


Tip # 2 for the uninitiated: save $ by buying beers at the local market and drink them outside of The Apple Barrel on Frenchmens Street in the middle of the night. Tip 2.2: do not attempt to do this while sober. Tip 2.3: tip 2 + tip 2.2 may = oxymoronic.


Note MC Smackdown's outfit again. 4 nights later, still rocking it.


Rocky rocking it. Jazzfest is a heavyweight fight. If you've made it to the end, you've got enough points to win and you just need to make sure you stay on your feet.


The day after we won the fight, Mac-D and Dd headed home and MC Smackdown and I stuck around for a day to relax a minute. I took advantage of the free day to take a lazy, hungover stroll around the French Quarter to snap some photos of the buildings that I always seem unable to find time to photograph. Enjoy:





























I will now field any questions and will be unable to provide answers to any of them.

VTK Hits Local Cable Access

Many VTK readers may have already seen these videos on my microblogging endeavors, facebook and twitter. But for those of you who haven't, please enjoy parts one and two of this odd interview of me by a local art show host on CCTV, Cambridge Cable Television: