The llama is a quadraped

it has two eyes, a forehead and a beak for eating honey

this may be helpful – from Brenda

found this article that a mass comms lecturer has published: thought of you

Hopkins, K. and Matheson, D. (2005) Blogging the New Zealand Election: The impact of new media practices on the old game. Political Science, 57, 2, unknown.

Its not on the main Library database tho”. Obviously in the pols journals?

This is weird…

I found a couple of blogs where people swore by drinking their urine. One is here which is a woman’s account of her experiences, and onother here is where the blogger describes urine therapy from a homeopathic point of view.

Is there still hope?

My cynicism about the role of youth in engaging in political activism to challenge the issues that threaten our freedom and safety is not supported by a well written and detailed report about youth activism and Global Engagement on the One World website.

The report argues that “Those who see portents in the shape of things to come—of an unfolding shift in generational consciousness, a gathering global rights movement, the flowering of flexible, Internet-based activist network—may in the end prove to be prescient.” This comment is immediately qualified with the comment that “we do not yet know enough to tell, and we will not, as long as we lack a dispassionate exploration of what young activists are doing to address transnational problems, and why.”

This article combined with the Coleman reading suggest that we’re not all going to hell in a handbasket because the youth of today can’t be arsed getting involved politically, but instead posits that young people are willing to engage politically, but if the elites continue using the traditional means of political socialisation they will fail. They need to use a contemporary approach, and just having a “hip and groovy” new website with txt abbreviations won’t work. They need to engage with their audience using Web 2.0 paradigms, and our role (us old campaigners) is to provide guidance and leadership that encourages and supports the next generation of radicals as they fight to make the world they inherit one that works for them.

Is a top-down view of knowledge possible?

David Hawaianburger claimed that a top down view of knowledge was impossible, and that all knowledge should be filed under “miscellaneous” in the digital world. I wonder if it is possible to actually have a common view of knowledge outside of the digital world.

OK, I’ll explain.

I believe that knowledge is dependent on being acquired by a sentient being, specifically human beings, to exist because knowledge has to be known, otherwise it is information. Because everyone has different levels of knowledge, and because knowledge is a concept rather than a tangible thing, you cannot look down on knowledge and view all knowledge.

And most knowledge needs to be digitally filed under miscellaneous because what specific information is retrieved, how it is applied and how it is understood is dependent on the context of the user. For example, the knowledge that “William the Conqueror defeated Harold in 1066″ might be retrieved by one person as “famous Williams”, by another as “events of 1066″ and by a third as “English military defeats”.

So that piece of knowledge can’t be filed under “Williams” because then nobody will know what happened in 1066. It needs to be filed under miscellaneous because that allows individual people to search for that information so they are able to convert it into whatever knowledge they need to provide them with the understanding they seek

More to follow

The digital divide

is it real, and is there a disadvantage to people who are on the wrong side of the divide?

Knowledge management tools

So can knowledge actually be managed? And is Wiki a form of knowledge management? Someone who has an interesting perspective is a dude called Zoli, and a link to his log is here: Knowledge Management Tools

The young are asleep?

I hit adolescence and the trauma of independent thought in the early 70s, a time when “student” was synonymous with “radical”; a time when around the world predominantly young people took to the streets to demand changes to a world that was wrong. Whether it was the Vietnam war or the environment, protest and activism against the status quo were central to being young. life. Then the war ended and the hippies put away their flowers for mortgages and a job in the city which left my generation in a vacuum. Our older brothers and sisters had been the rebels; they had made love not war while they smoked reefers and tuned in, turned on and dropped out, but what had they left for us? Free love became solo mums and Bob Dylan discovered Jesus, and we were left with the Village People, Thatcherism, Rob Muldoon and Ford Cortinas.

Then things started to change. We weren’t ready to be good kids, we wanted to change the world, fight the good fight and best of all, be disapproved of for more than just drinking and driving. I can still remember the day, when as a 16 year old  I was sent a cassette tape of a new band from out of the UK called the Sex Pistols. I wasn’t sure I liked the music, but I certainly liked what they were saying, which was an acoustic “fuck you” to everything our parents stood for, and best of all they showed us that flower power had dried into dust, and the hippies were no longer the lucky ones, but the lost ones. We weren’t sure what punk was, but when Johnny Rotten spat the lines “I am an anarchist, I am the antichrist” I knew what he meant, and he spoke for me. From the Pistols it was a short and wild ride to Patti Smith snarling “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine” as she gave our rebellion eloquence and meaning.

In 1981 the final piece in the jigsaw puzzle that was the meaning of our lives came together – Piggy Muldoon announced that the Springboks were to tour New Zealand. All the old radicals came out of hills and communes, but we forgave them and embraced them because now they were OUR radicals. When John Minto and Tim Shadbolt stood on a makeshift platform in the Auckland University with megaphones, and when Hone Tuwhare read his poetry, they were calling US to action. We had a fight on our hands, and we were going to change the world. We were young, we were angry and we demanded that the grey old men in government answered to us. And they did. I will never forget watching Nelson Mandela released from prison to a South Africa that was changing forever, and feeling that it was my hand pulling the door open for him.

Now its my generation who have succumbed to mortgages and SUVs, and it’s our turn to sit in the complacency of comfort as we hope like hell that terrorists never hit us, or that we will somehow dodge global warming. Once we stood for something, but pragmatism and consumption have broken our anger, and we have become used to squandering children’s futures on ourselves, and we don’t want things to change. Once we stood up for what was important, yet Apartheid is trivial compared to the issues the world faces today.

Never before has anger and activism been more important. The USA is running amok, global warming has begun its devastation and 25,000 children die every day because they don’t have access to clean water. Apartheid didn’t affect my life, but my generation stood up to the injustice it embodied. The problems the young people face will impact on their lives severely, yet they are sitting back in designer-labeled indifference as they dutifully engage in the rampant over-consumption that keeps my generation rich.

What the hell has happened to the young radicals?

Coleman’s article

As a Political Science student I found Coleman’s article extremely interesting, and I suspect he is pretty much on the money. Numbers of people voting is steadily dropping, and young people are less likely to participate through belong to political parties etc. However he argued that young people are more likely to participate politically through demonstrations and protests,  something I disagree with. I believe youth activism is on the decline with young people choosing to participate through withdrawal of action. I think they see political elites as having little relevance to their lives and being unlikely to listen to them.

This is potentially a major problem because democracy is dependent on participation by the people to succeed. I suspect the elites need to find new ways to engage young people, but is a blog the answer?

Knowledge is human

Information is a box of bits, but when a human gets his or her hands on that box of bits it becomes knowledge, but because information usually comes from people, does knowledge exist before information? Does all information start out as knowledge?