Recently I have noticed that there has been growing angst on the web towards scientologists. At the moment I am reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and it’s a fairly interesting read. Have a look at these articles that have been floating around on Digg:
I could go on and on. Between them these articles have over 25000+ diggs. So why the sudden angst with the Church of Scientology? In trying to make sense of this I went to google trends. Have a look at this below:
Notice near the “F” the scientology search is beginning to spike after a few lean years. Google trends is showing an emerging trend here which I think can be explained by the interest in Digg and Reddit (there are just as many rants on scientology there as well). Here we see the tipping point in action. So who was the ‘Maven’ or ‘Salesperson’ who tipped the story. I really think it was syndicated news. Consider doing a scientology search of google news. The recent hacking and war declared by ‘Anonymous‘. But, you can’t ignore the attention it got on Reddit and Digg. A group declaring war on the Scientologists has gotten the attention of the world and all of a sudden all this stuff about them has appeared in social media.
If you search through Digg and Reddit for most popular you will see what I mean. This is power of the tipping point. How a few people can take a few small actions and create such a big fuss. There is a model I studied in the final year of my Bachelor’s degree called the ‘Viable Systems Model‘. One of the underlying concepts is this idea is that complexity (or variety) can be managed by requisite complexity. That is, you can manage complexity so long as you have the power to manage it with a smaller ‘viable’ unit. This is a horrible oversimplification of the model but it proves my point! When something like this springs up on social media sites you have this knock-on effect and all of sudden the few people who started this have attracted the attention of ‘diggers’ and reddit users to the extent that a spike in traffic has been generated.
Whilst I am against the concepts of Scientology as I consider myself a Christan you have to wonder if such attention grabbing tactics are balanced. As I said over 25000 Diggs is an awful lot and I stopped at page 3! Such influence shows me that the media sites on the internet are open to biases and the whims of people. On the other hand it shows us just how powerful social media can be. Do yourself a favour search for Scientology on Google and note the fourth listing and the news. The power of the tipping point in action!
According to this news article the latest round of research is telling us that Australia has 18 cities out of the top 50 least affordable cities in the entire world. The shocking statistic for me was that the place where I grew up, the sunshine coast, is the 2nd least affordable in Australia and the 7th least in the world! I was gobsmacked! This was the place where my parents bought a house for five figures in the early nineties. My how times have changed. The average style of home is somewhere in the $550,000 range and that’s not even that close to the water. I remember when Mooloolaba was a bum haven with a shop that sold bongs. Not so anymore.
One positive for me is that at least the world’s most expensive city wasn’t in this country. It’s actually Los Angeles. For residents of L.A. I am sure this is an honour they could do without. We aren’t too far off with people on the Sunshine Coast having to pay more than 8 times what they earn to get a mortgage. To be honest, I will continue renting … for the moment.
I just read this article from news.com.au that says Wii doesn’t burn fat as fast as some people think. I am here to tell you that they haven’t gone more than three rounds on Wii Sports Boxing. That is a killer. An absolute killer. I played a six year old at it the other day and I felt like I was going to die. I know, I know … but at least try it to see if I am wrong.
This post was originally posted on disintimedia.com (now dead)
Recently I was going through my old computer stuff and found Directors Chair an interactive game starring Jennifer Aniston and Quentin Tarantino. Now I am all for interactive content but I was wondering how possible it would be to have interactive content that actually put you in the directors chair. We could have a less cheesy experience than that game. Yes, I bought it. I know.
The bottom line here is that we need something better than multiple angles. Now that the thought police are cracking down on youtube and using original content for different kinds of things I wonder is there any future in interactive and user generated media content that’s of any worth?
I seriously doubt it. I mean the bottom line here is I am asking for movies which I have the right to reedit, work collaboratively on and go live in utopia. I guess this post is really about what happened to making movies more interactive and user generated and where are we going from here? I mean half the stuff that’s on youtube is less than remarkable. You could hardly say the web is helping. I think we are not heading anywhere nice. Probably more made for TV snake movies?
This was originally published on the now defunct disintimedia.com
Thanks to the persistence of online commandos we now have the latest Futurama DVD being released tomorrow in the US. Bender’s Big Score was actually released today not tomorrow in the US. It was cancelled in 2002 after the executives at Fox stopped making enough money on it. According to the NY times:
The story, full of elaborate twists, is essentially a time-travel tale loaded with flashbacks to the original series and more than its share of inside jokes, many requiring freeze-frame study to appreciate fully.
All this because we all complained and bothered them until something was done about. This is a lesson on perseverance! I am also thinking of Jericho, Farscape, Stargate and to a lesser extent world series cricket. Professor John Scott told us: the most power form of power is collective mobilisation. He was right.
This was originally posted on the defunct disintimedia.com
