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Jamaican Gang Culture And South African Drug Culture – Unreported World
As I write this I am happy that I have been to watch quite a few interesting documentaries at the Frontline Club. The two most recent were made for Channel 4’s Unreported World. This is channel four’s “acclaimed foreign affairs series” and covers a number of topics. The two documentaries I watched were South Africa: Children of the Lost Generation and Jamaica: Guns votes and money.
Both are investigative observational documentaries showing the progress made by the journalists as they try to uncover the stories that other documentary channels cover. The South African documentary gave an insight into the drug Tik and how, although it is mainly affecting those in the slums is also coming to the wealthier white areas as well. It is well shot and there are a few interesting interviews that give us a good insight into the problem.
When it comes to the Jamaican documentary it is interesting because of the way it has covered the gang and gun culture found in certain areas. The documentary maker and his crew were fortunate to find people that would allow them to come into this gang culture and learn more about the daily lives of these people.
During the Questions and answers session we learned more about the process, how they did some forms of pre-production before arriving, how they had difficulties speaking with Police but how the gang members welcomed them in. When asked how they were allowed to film the gangs they couldn’t really explain it. They did express disappointment, especially for the Jamaica story, on how they had been unable to cover the police point of view, and how the documentary would have gone in another direction.
Watching documentaries is a passion of mine so getting to listen to and meet the people who create these documentaries is great. Hearing the questions that people ask is also interesting because of the little details you learn through the in-depth knowledge certain of these individuals have.
Getting the laptop back (possibly)
Tomorrow I should have a clearer idea on why the laptop decided to die on me but a phonecall yesterday points towards dust. I’m not sure what the dust may have destroyed but that’s what may have caused the fault.Â
Without the laptop it’s been an interesting week. It’s seen me playing witgh two versions of linux and portable devices such as the N95 and the touch. Both have their merits and it’s got me thinking about phasing out laptops from my use of the world wide web. What if i could get all podcasts, all e-mails and media content to both these devices without a computer?
With Nokia podcasts I can get all the audio files, with interbine I can get all the videos. With S60 I get some browsing for flash content and with the ipod I get a nicer display for browsing content. Both are easy to carry. Â Both charge quickly with the right charger.Â
At the same time neither of them has a good typing keyboard, being perfect for short form but a nightmare for writing a blog post for example. With time the experience should improve.Â
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The Culture of Hashtags
Yesterday I noticed that the blog posts I write in Hugo via Vim are uglified on Mastodon and Calckey. By uglified I mean that the neat and tidy key words that I use as tags are converted into hashtags on Mastodon and Calckey and this makes me both sad and angry. It makes me sad because hashtags are a way of spamming conversations, and of allowing people who are not invested to participate in conversations.
The second reason is that hashtags are ugly. It’s like wearing socks with sandals, it’s like wearing cycling clothes at the cinema. It’s a bad habit that needs to stop.
The History of the Hashtag
Originally Twitter was a web based, and SMS based platform. With SMS you can’t use HTML tags, so you need a symbol to differentiate between words and normal content.
For a long time Twitter was just text. With time people started to interact and so we said we need to use @ replies to clarify who we are speaking to. This was fantastic because it made answering much easier. We had to remember the username, type at username and then the message. Eventually this was made more efficient. We simply pressed the reply icon and that was that. Quick, efficient, and great for conversation.
The preceding paragraph is to show that I am not resistant to all change.
The Hashtag was different. The hashtag made it possible to spam conversations, and to pretend you were deeply engaged within a community when the opposite was true. People create content, but rather than engage with the community, and invest their time in creating human connections, they spammed hashtags in the hope of hitting something. Imagine a child throwing stones in a lake. At first one at a time, and then handfuls. That’s how hashtags are used.
The Metadata Discussion
Back in the 90s, I remember reading articles about SEO and about metadata in pages, and web etiquette. I can’t find the articles now but the idea was that if you create content, you add metadata in the appropriate metadata field in the head of the document. You do not add several lines of white text on a white background to game search engines. To some degree that’s what metadata is. It’s white text on a white background. Hashtags are spam.
But Hashtags are Visible
Yesterday someone argued that we need to use hashtags because they’re visible, and this argument is crap. I know, I could say flawed, but I prefer to use the word I chose.
One of the reasons that I love Hugo as a Static Website Generator is that I think of the keywords I want to add as tags within the Frontmatter of the documents I create, and they will automatically populate the article, as well as pages with lists of every article with that keyword. It’s clean, it’s efficient, and it’s effective. Scroll to the bottom of this page and you will see the visually appealing use of tags, rather than the scruffy use of hashtags.
Hyperlinked Words To Replace Hashtags
What differentiated the Hypertext Markup Language, from other languages is the hyperlink. The hyperlink allows us to say “This word, in that context links to these documents”. The very idea of hypertext is that you can give behaviour to a key word or phrase, and link it to something else.
The way hashtags are used today, they are being used as hyperlinks, or threads, to connect content together. Hashtags are used as metadata and since 1976 or so conventions have existed to describe how to most effectively use that metadata. By using hashtags we are ignoring the beauty of hypertext but we’re also forgetting rules that were common sense until 2007 when the hashtag was suggested for Twitter, and then recycled on other social media websites.
The Trigger for this Post
What triggered me to write this blog post is looking at the articles I am sharing from Hugo to WordPress, and from WordPress to the Fediverse. The neat and tidy posts that I write with tags in the write place, are uglified by Mastodon and Calckey. It makes me appear sloppy and amateurish, but it also makes Mastodon and calckey look bad.
What I want
What I want to see, and what I expect, is for tags, that are created as tags, for example from Wordpress, Hugo and other sources, to be kept as metadata rather than spam data. I want tags and categories to be shown as tags and categories, rather than the mess of hashtags.
I was so horrified when I saw the hashtag mess at the bottom of my WordPress to Fediverse posts, that I considered dumping the fediverse entirely.
Visible, By Being Active
Someone on techhub social asked “but how will you be visible?” if you don’t use hashtags. The answer is simple. By tooting on Mastodon, by posting notes on Calckey, by answering toots by others, by devoting more than 30 seconds to the social network. We’re not fighting against an algorithm here, we’re conversing with a community. Hashtags don’t build community, the dilute it, by making people with no dedication more visible than people who see social media as a lifestyle.
The Bard Answer
Yesterday I gained access to Google bard so I asked bard
What regex would I use to convert hashtags to keywords in ruby on rails?. I could create my own calckey or mastodon instance, where, instead of seeing hashtags, we see hyperlinked words that guide us towards other posts with the same keyword. If I can’t influence the culture, away from a bad habit, then I can create an instance where that bad habit is invisible to me.
And Finally
I am not arguing against the use of metadata. I am not arguing against keywording. I am not arguing against threading. I am arguing against having metadata that should be in a dedicated field, to be displayed clearly. I use keywords for every blog post I write. I like keywording and I like cataloguing content. I am a media asset manager after all. I am a video after all. I have a passion for documentary.
My argument is not with organising information. My argument is with the sloppy, amateurish use of hashtags, when we have better tools available. 33 percent of the web uses WordPress, and WordPress uses tags and categories succinctly.
Video piracy in the 21st century
A few days ago I was watching a Magnum PI episode where Higgins had a film camera pointed at the television screen to record a game of snooker broadcast from “half way around the world” by satellite.  Today I noticed this article speaking of the way in which twitter’s Periscope app and Meerkat were used to pirate a fight.
Piracy is nothing new but the simplicity with which people can pirate and share content has evolved. Piracy required rolls of films at first. These rolls had to be developed and then copies had to be made. This could take several days. VHS came along and made it easier. With several VHS decks you could make several copies at once. Steve Jobs is well known for the boot leg tapes he had of music concerts. My generation streamed live music concerts using mobile phones. Football enthusiasts used satellite receivers and streaming software to re-distribute live football matches years ago. This is true both for european Football and American football.
The live streaming of broadcast content is now so simple that multiple people, using social media, redistribute content as it happens. There is no lag time. There is no exclusivity possible. PeriscopeTV and Meerkat have made it very simple to share live events circumventing the gate keepers.
Gate keepers provide the highest audio and video quality possible for their customers and for this reason they are safe for now. The pirated copy has low video and audio quality and is filmed by a mobile phone camera. Social networks such as Twitter and sporting organisations will need to strengthen their collaboration. Both of them can and will benefit from joining forces. If PeriscopeTV and Meerkat both get paid by the Fight promoters to carry the signal as premium content then the pirate streams will be of less interest. Price will have to reflect the platform on which content is being shared of course.
Dissertation Results
Today is a great day for a number of reasons. The first of these is that I woke up early, which means I slept enough. The second of these is that I dropped into university and was sad to see all those empty bedrooms, which shows there are some good memories from halls. The key to today was getting my dissertation grade.
That’s the reason I dropped by the uni. Tired of the anxiety and worry of grade results I heard from a friend that the results were there. I went and checked my grade and in the process saw quite a few others. One friend I traveled with got a 70 so I’m really happy for him, this being the top grade out of those I looked at.
I found that I was in agreement with the feedback I got, mainly that I should have concentrated more on the socio-economic side. Part of the reason I didn’t was that it was hard to find data on this topic. If I did the exercise again I would work harder on doing better.
Another good piece of news is the following. My MacBook Pro and the software I ordered have been shipped and they should arrive around the 11th of June. I’m really happy and looking forward to this. It means I have a new toy professional tool to play study with.
I dropped by the apple store and took advantage of the wifi at the apple store for a few instants and did the geek thing, watching a mediocre presentation of Imovie. I think I’ll try to get to one or two more advanced shows, see what secrets I can pick up in the process.