The Week That Was
Neil Finn: “Hey, I am quite enjoying the feeling of being unpopular. There is something liberating in it.” Neil is in a battle of small phrases on the battlefield of the print and TV media. Neil: use the power of the intarwebs to fight back at ‘em!
It seems my twittering on the Eurovision song contest has inspired Paul Foster to blog. Dude, I thought you were all over this European Union stuff!
New word: obscurantist. Used both by Paul Keating in relation to John Howard, and by Thomas Freidman in The World is Flat. The good news is that I’ve finished the book. It seems that both sides of Australian politics may be grokking the need to invest in education.
Lessons learnt: Stockholm Syndrome and Lima Syndrome. I realise the key variable here is time, and that the emotional hold works both ways.
Two key editorial comments in the last day put a religious slant on the use of technology: Howard Anderson in Computerworld IT in “A cynic rips open source” and Michael Singer in “Why doesn’t Microsoft Have a Cult Religion”. Microsoft, with thousands of bloggers and far-reaching impact, does not really foster a cult-like following. In Australia, it is called the Tall Poppy Syndrome.
The culture of information exchange with Microsoft is extremely open. Anti-obscurantist. It is difficult for cults to survive where knowledge is spread. Putting spin and machiavellian manipulation just doesn’t work. I think Microsoft is missing a cult following because it not obscure enough.
Maybe that is why the spinmeister Tony Blair and over-spun Scooch are the losers of the week. As quoted from Chris Saad over on the Particls blog: Rupert Murdoch on Media 2.0 ‘Media companies don’t control the conversation anymore’