Wenn es angeblich nicht auf die Größe ankommt – worauf dann?
„Er steht einfach nicht auf dich“ – Warum ist Klartext so schwer?
Kann ich durch Petting schwanger werden?

… sind einige der brennenden Fragen, die – nicht nur – Jugendliche interessieren.

Beim Basisworkshop – Wochenende zum/r Sexualpädagogen/in am 28./29.3.2009 gibt es die Grundlagen zu:

-Kommunikation über Sexualität und Partnerschaft
-Biologische & psychologische Entwicklung bei Jugendlichen
-Schwangerschaft und Verhütung
-Rechtliches: Was ist erlaubt? Reaktionsmöglichkeiten auf sexuellen Missbrauch etc.
-Sexuelle Identität, Hinterfragen von Klischees
-Sexualität in den Massenmedien, Vorbildwirkung
-Planung & Durchführung von Workshops, Auswahl von passenden Methoden

Sexpädition – steig jetzt ein beim Aufklärungsprojekt von Studierenden für Jugendliche! Setz dein Wissen aus dem Studium zusammen mit einem engagierten Team um.

Komm zum Infonachmittag am 10. März von 16-18 Uhr im Raum V134 (Vorstufengebäude der Uni) um Details zum Ausbildungs – Wochenende und zum Projekt zu erfahren, in die Methoden reinzuschnuppern…

Bei Fragen schreib an: raphaela.rainer@edu.uni-klu.ac.at

i started collecting new and exciting chocolate bars (especially kit kats, they seem to be doing the most experimentation in flavours) when fono was in nigeria and had no chocolate. i'd go on hunts at pacific mall to find him something he hadn't tried, so that he'd get an extra special surprise in his care package. it didn't help that alex and helen brought me all sorts of new flavours of kitkats too (green tea, lemon cheesecake). as you can see, it's become a bit of a habit now. fono now has quite a collection waiting for him when he gets here in a few weeks.

if anyone wants to try some of these (i recommend the cookie dough and honeycomb), let me know and i'll bring you some back in december!

[click image for full descriptions, and more exciting chocolate bars]

plazes: yet another way for self-surveillance mechanism that also incorporates the every addictive element of collection that turns games like world of warcraft into crack.

basically, you collect internet access points, and it plots it on a map and you can show your friends and have it automatically update to your msn or skype name. part of the fun is getting ones that no one else has yet. i wish i had this when i was traveling (esp in nigeria). i wouldve levelled up for sure.

i talked to greg early this morning about jack layton being on facebook. he told me kinda fearfully (or maybe its just me projecting) that he thinks facebook could get so big it just never goes away. like email or msn messenger. he pointed that facebook is moving upwards, age wise, which is usually an indication of the ubiquity and maturity of a technology. everyone i know knows of someone's parent joining, and a lot of older people i wouldn't expect to join now have facebooks. and then there's all the canadian politicians. its always the kids who are early adopters, but once your grandma is on it, its totally part of the everyday.

once facebook reaches a critical mass and has so many people, says greg, why would anyone switch? it would be nearly impossible to compete with facebook once everyone is on it, since any SNS's value is mostly derived from the size and activity level of its user base. besides, why would you give up your 7000 wall messages and 500 meticulously tagged photos that your friends tagged of you. it's not like switching from msn to yahoo messenger, cuz you have digital artifacts and relationships that aren't really portable. sure you can import your photos to something else, but you can't reproduce the social capital created by having your friends tag you in photos and then being able to show off on your profile, the fact that you not only have friends who you do cool things with, but lots of friends who take the time to tag you in a photo.

on the other hand, toronto has the biggest facebook network in the world, so greg's experience could either be the leading edge, or an exaggeration of the rest of the world's use. they don't use facebook here in perth like they do in toronto, where they are absolutely nuts for it. you meet someone once and they add you. you went to school with someone when you were 2 and you havent seen them in 20 years and the add you. people who wouldn't even talk to you at the mall add you (this has happened to me). here in perth, on the other hand, no one really cares. even at uni.

the red bull looks like apple juice, or pee, rather radioactive yellow like the stuff in canada.

i found an amazing article today on the political economy of facebook, myspace and the other usual suspects written by ryan bigge (former adbusters staffer before kalle lasn went apeshit).

basically, bigge argues that use of social networking sites can actually be seen as unpaid work. in using such facebook et al, we're essentially producing a stream of self-surveillance that can be monitored, repackaged and sold. for example, taken collectively, we're voluntarily producing huge databases of our preferences that are a marketers dream (think recommendations on amazon.com - customers who bought this also liked...) its the darker side of web 2.0's utopian wisdom of crowds that created wikipedia. but also more broadly, the entire value of facebook is entirely in its users and the networks they've created, without any financial compensation. writing in the same vein as bigge, Fred Scharmen notes that even on flickr, the users are creating all the content that drives visits to the site, which in turn provides the eyeballs that can be sold to advertisers. did you know myspace also claims ownership of its user's profiles? so even your online identity is commodifiable content.

the big takeaway for me though was the realization that this could be why we all resent facebook, but still use it. we're aware on some level that something isn't right, that we're giving away something we shouldn't be. but if we opt out and refuse to use facebook, we're essentially a nobody. as bigge puts it: "In this environment [Facebook et al.], the digital enclosure generates increasingly polarized options: either the constant, self-generated surveillance of the type described by Stites or the self-negation (“You don’t exist”) that social network avoidance entails."

bigge also points out the gaming-elements in social networks that make them similar to WoW which i mentioned earlier, and brings this into his analysis of the political economy of social networking:

But digital gardening, like its soil-based equivalent, requires commitment and effort. The
question becomes: are MySpace users at all aware of the political economy of the space in
which they operate? As Kline, et al. (2003) demonstrate, the line between work and play in
the video game arena grows increasingly fuzzy. Wittel (2001), meanwhile, argues that “The
assimilation of work and play corresponds with the blurring of boundaries between work
and private life, between colleagues and friends.”

One can draw parallels between the effort required to invite friends into your MySpace
network and the repetitive work involved in collecting gold in online gaming environments
like EverQuest or World of Warcraft. Cassidy (2006) quotes different Facebook users:
“I remember people competing to see how many ‘friends’ they could
accumulate and how quickly, and tracking how many ‘friends’ they shared in
common with other ‘friends’,” [Olivia Ma] said.

Hilary Thorndike, a schoolteacher who graduated from Harvard in 2005 and
still uses Facebook, has more than eight hundred friends on the site. “I always
find the competitive spirit in me wanting to up the number,” she wrote in an
e-mail.

Williams (2005) underscores this narrative of accumulation:

Seabron Ward, 19, a student at the University of Colorado at Denver, said that many students consider it a status symbol to build a big friend list. ‘This one guy on my list has a thousand,’ she said, a bit enviously. ‘I only have 79.’

so while the gaming element explains why we're all addicted, the problematic political economy of facebook is what makes us hate it.

behold, jack layton, leader of the NDP (one of the major federal canadian political parties) has a facebook.

i wonder what his policy is on friending. will he just add anyone who adds him, or do you actually have to have met him or know him? and is it his profile as jack layton the person, or jack layton the politician? he has over 2000 friends, but his profile is private, so maybe its personal. but on the other hand, his image shows him in the role of the NDP party leader. hmmm. i dont envy the context fuck he has to navigate.

i wonder if he thinks about losing votes if he doesn't friend you back.

UPDATE: fono tells me that olivia chow, stephan dion and stephen harper (ew) are there too.

i just got the audience feedback from the panel i was on at sxsw. overall, most of the comments were pretty good. but my jaw dropped when i saw this...two people asked why the panel was all women. another said "don't invite these soccer moms* again."

wow. somehow i don't think the numerous all-male panels got any comments like that. because those are normal.


(*soccer mom is another one of those special female-only put downs that have no equivalent male insult, like cougar or bitch, that are used to put women in their place.

also, i'm not even old enough to be a soccer mom)

i hung out with my new aussie friends last night, melody and jen. we were gonna see a movie. we even bought tickets. but then after two beers at the mall, jen said "lets go to a gay bar instead." so jen sold our tickets to some confused asians waiting in line.

so we went to a bar in northridge, the funky part of perth. there was a 10 dollar cover unless you wore a "uniform".. so we got a bit dressed up but the bouncer guy was like no thats not good enough, even though i had an army jacket and bandana. but he let in some guys barely dressed in uniforms (or dressed at all, really) so jen was like wtf this is lame and we left. clearly they were only letting hot boys in for free. we were not impressed. i think jen wanted to pound them.

then we almost got a massage from some sketchy asian place next door but they wouldnt show melody their certificates so we didnt (not for you! not for you!)

then we took jen home but jen was locked out so she climbed onto her roof and somehow got in by removing some of the roofing tiles.

then me and melody went to her place and i met her neighbour the israeli surfie who had pink little kids pillow and duvet covers.

the end.

i'm obsessed with how people (myself very muchly included) are obsessed with facebook and world of warcraft. meta-obsessed, if you will. i became fascinated with both independently, but the more i use both the more i see some interesting similarities between the two (and a lot of interesting contrasts, which i will probably write more about later). the main similarity is the addictive game elements in both, even though facebook is not officially a game.

i had this revelation as i read this line from the semiotics of simcity "The moment [the game] is no longer interesting is the moment when all its secrets have been discovered, its limitations exposed"

both world of warcraft and facebook are so addictive and absorbing because the limitations of both are few and ever expanding. world of warcraft has an insane amount of armor/weapons/clothes/pets/food to find, monsters to kill, lands to visit, and quests to complete. and once you're done all that, you can get the newly released expansion pack. similarly, facebook offers the promise of finding or being found by a new friend, or having another photo of yourself tagged, or being mentioned in a note, or having something new written on your wall. but in both facebook and world of warcraft, its no a known, specific goal that is appealing, but the endless stream of new and unknown potentials, of rewards that we can display for everyone to see, but only by continuing to log in. these rewards big enough to keep us interested, but small enough to leave us unsatisfied. and we keep at it because if we don't, there's the possibility of missing something.

this type of collection-based game design has becoming increasingly popular too... think nintendogs, animal crossing and of course pokemon. its interesting to see it employed in a non-game website such as facebook.

in an even further blurring of games and "real life",justin hall, one of the pioneers of blogging, created a game that kind of runs between WoW and facebook. he calls it passively multiplayer online gaming. basically it keeps track of what websites you look at and you level up based on certain criteria, such as how many reference sites you look up. its super alpha right now and appears to be down as i write this, but check it out. its a really interesting idea.

i'm doing research on the culture of facebook in attempt to narrow down my thesis topic, and came across doc mara's genius description of facebook friending "as a quick consumption deal rather like Pokemon."

its funny cuz its true. gotta catch em all!

on the eve of fono's return to canada...eddie just told me that me and fono's old kensington apartment was destroyed by a fire. took 100 firefighters to put it out. those were fono's windows in the middle, mine on the top floor (photos stolen from blogTO). it was one of my favourite and most treasured spots... beautiful sunny windows, a third floor hideaway for thinking and dreaming as the streetcars clatter by... just steps from the lcbo, the best vegetarian restaurant in toronto and my favouritest crazy mash up market in the whole world. an eerily close call, even though we are both thousands of miles away.

whats even more eerie was that our crazy landlord was obsessively paranoid when it came to fire, verging on a total phobia. she had our tiny apartment stuffed with about 10 smoke detectors and had all these insane clauses in the lease that we couldnt use electrical cords or heaters or any electrical appliance that she hadn't personally inspected. she also talked about fire a lot, so she was probably thinking about it all the time. the word on the street was that her dad died in a fire in that same building years ago. i guess there are dangers to living above a sketchy restaurant. she must be freaking out right now.

i had my first food-based dumpster diving experience just 2 minutes ago as i walked by the garbage pile from the curtin career fair.

question: if one is a vegetarian for ethical reasons, is it wrong to eat a meat sandwich that one has rescued from the trash? hum.

today was some big festival thing were everyone came to campus to sell, promote, petition, advertise and generally participate in capitalism. it wasn't really announced, it just seemed that everything was happening all at once. there was also a career fair, car raffle, pinata smashing and free hot dog bbq (with of course no vegetarian option. this is australia).

the student guild guy gave me a cup that tells me when i'm drunk.
"but can't i tell when i'm drunk on my own?"
"no"
"okay... thanks"

then another student guild guy gave me one of those beer sleeves to keep my cold ones cold.

"thanks. i'll use this to keep my cup-that-tells-me-i'm-drunk cold"

i love australia.

i also helped out with a petition to the university to get recycling on campus. cuz they dont have any. its funny, the entire initiative is being run by canadians. i think its cuz we get angsty when we cant recycle something. "where do i put this? what? uhhh i guess ill just carry it around with me until i can recycle it."

most people were really happy to sign, but some people refused without giving a reason, even after a long conversation with them explaining the benefits. some even said "im against recycling." i mean, its not a controversial issue, like nuclear energy. its straightforward common sense that has many clear benefits, such as reducing the amount of stuff we have to mine, reducing the stuff we put into landfills, saving energy and thus reducing climate change etc etc etc. i can't even think of any cons.

baffling.