Twitter

If you are following our blog, follow on Twitter as well! Lots of interesting links that are relevant for our project are being shared through tweets from all four team members. Search 'Team Obsurveillance'.

links

Hey guys got a few links below of bbc news stories.. think they could relative to our narrative..

Also they are in the news at the mo so be good to have a quick look just incase we get asked next week maybe??

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7872425.stm?lsm: danger of surveillance society

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-11646562 : police filmed punching 'stabbed' man

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-11650112: woman killed accidentaly by US as she was held hostage

MASSIVE Progress!

Delighted to announce (as per our Tweet earlier) that today we made major progress on the narrative for our project. Nailed it in fact! It means we can really turn our focus now to the presentation in two weeks from today and start preparing straight away!

New story involves two Irish gangs, one Gardai Surveillance Unit, multiple layered surveillance feeds, multiple controversial info leaks and media cover-ups. Going to be awesome...

By sorting the new story, we also sorted a much more intuitive interactive element than previously envisioned; instead of sorting through live surveillance footage, the aim for the User is to find the truth in previously recorded footage. However the truth is never that simple...

Wikileaks Spokesman possible smear campaign

I remember this case being all over the news when I was on holidays this summer. The guy the article refers to is Julian Assange, he is the main spokesman for Wikileaks and sits on its main advisory board, he is also credited as being one of the founders of the Wikileaks website. Anyway within the space of about 24 hours a warrant for his arrest for sexual misconduct was very publicly issued, only to be revoked by the end of the day. Alot of people (including me cos im paranoid) think this was a smear campaign just to blacken his name, especially given the nature of the website, and the fact that prior to these claims Wikileaks was about to release alot of sensitive documents about the US. Anyway you can check out an article about thsese claims here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/aug/25/julian-assange-wikileaks-sweden-investigation

The article raises a few issues, like smear campaigns, which maybe we could bring into our narrative. It also raises a few questions about what makes the news, when this story broke it was the first time i could remember Wikileaks actually being featured on prime time television. I think this is a bit strange becuase given all of the documents Wikileaks have released, it takes sexual misconduct claim for them to become newsworthy.

Research Topics

regarding todays class a couple of things were brought up that we should really know about. the first link here is to the article which appeared in the guardian last week about how sensitive documdents were leaked via wikileaks about how the us ignored torture in iraq. you can read the article here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/22/iraq-war-logs-military-leaks

also brought up today was David Lyon, whose a professor of sociology and a leading expert in the field of surveillance and information society. he's wrote quite alot about surveillance society, ive put a link here which has a short review of his book "The Electronic Eye, The Rise of Surveillance Society". It also gives a brief background on David Lyon at the bottom of the article as well.

http://www.mightystudents.com/essay/David.Lyon.Electronic.51934

Met with Ronan Lynch of 'Tactical Control Force' today. TCF was an exhibit at the Fis in 2007 that won best in show, and Ronan was the programmer. Of particular interest to us was just how similar it was to ours, as it similarly involves current affairs, elements of media coverage of events unfolding, and a tactical control centre. However we found out there are significant differences; user interaction is completely different (TCF was really 3 games, Epifect will be a more serious, less fun, exhibit based more on the narrative and message), and the subject matter is not so stereotyped in our exhibit. Ronan was extremely helpful in giving us much advice. We meet again tomorrow, when he will show us files from the exhibit, including the video clips and the director file. Looking forward to it!

Posts

Ive just noticed that since I have moved all posts from the old blog at http://kenainiste.blogspot.com/ it says that I am the author of them all! Please note that I am only one of four contributors, and some of the posts below are from the others! To see exactly who wrote what, please check out the old blog.