Week 8 Tutorial Task

In the tutorial this week we were asked to do the following:

Sign an e-petition

Being that I have never signed an online petition for anything before that wasn't KFC Burger related, I decided to approach a more serious matter... The inclusion of LAN Multiplayer in the upcoming Blizzard release Starcraft 2, along with 179000 others. Like most other online petitions I've seen, I'm not entirely convinced that many people are concerned with this issue.

The petition can be found here.

Respond to a professional blogger at a major news site.

Every day on news.com.au I read the title of their blogs. Usually it is something scandalous from Bossy and then a bunch of gear about raising your kids right. However, today Splat!'s blog post was titled "Death metal in the desert".

This immediately made me think of a fantastic documentary ( produced by Vice magazine and vbs.tv ) called Heavy Metal in Baghdad, a great watch if you haven't seen. Completely irrelevant to the pictures of abandoned planes in the desert that Splat! ( Evan Maloney ) was referring to but I felt it necessary to at least draw his attention to some real death metal in the desert.

What is Barak Obama up to today?

@barak_obama hasn't tweeted since signing up despite having almost 68,000 followers.

In similar news Barack Obama held a press conference on the 23rd of September, the transcript of which can be found here.

He also appeared on Letterman the other night, here are some highlights

Find out who your local, state and federal representatives are.

State - Timothy Nicholls

Federal - Wayne Swan

Look up the Queensland or Australian hansard to find the last time your local member spoke in parliament.

Tim Nicholls spoke on the 16th of September regarding the sale of public assets.

What do you think of the Australian Government's plans to censor the internet (the so-called "Clean Feed")?

In a previous post I touched on my thoughts toward the clean feed, and to be honest I haven't heard much about it since it was brought to the public's attention ( read : my attention ) a couple of years ago. I think it's a horrible idea and none of the reasons 'for' this change appeal to me in any way. I don't like the idea of anyone censoring what I can view in any media be it film, music or the internet. Above all else the idea of a "channel based" ( for lack of a better description ) internet seems incredibly greedy and just another way for THE CORPORATE HATE MACHINE to control my life.

What place does censorship have in a democracy?

Democracy
1 a : government by the people; especially : rule of the majority b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections

In this article ( taken from Sydney Morning Herald website) Margo Kingston speaks about Censorship in a democracy, with the specific example of Harmony Korrine's film Ken Park which I've watched recently. She talks about the need for classification not censorship and also states "Democracies survive and thrive when they find ways to look at things that are confronting or disturbing or ugly or strange." which explains how I feel about someone making the decision for me as to what I can or can't view.