Universe is a project designed by Webby Award winner Jonathan Harris’ in 2007, just before he made Whale Hunt.
I saw a video of him presenting Universe at TED in 2007. At the time of presentation for class, the simplicity, originality and slight genius of it came to mind.
The stories and images in Universe are sourced from Daylife, which apparently aims to enable news producers to make online news better. To quote the Daylife creators:
“With the ContentSense(TM) platform you can get millions of pages and hundreds of apps off the shelf, you can dig deeper to shape their practically limitless stream of photos, articles, quotes, and more into your own creations.”
Harris’ work is a unique way to source news, or whichever subject, person or place you may care to see.
How does this Universe work?
Divided into nine Stages: Stars (cryptic), Shapes (constellations of outlines), Secrets (salient words), Stories (sagas and events), Statements (things people said), Snapshots (images), Superstars (people, places, companies, teams, organizations), Settings (geographical distribution), and Time (how the ‘universe’ of this idea or person has evolved over hours, days, months, and years).
This technology seems able to have an impact on the future of online journalism, whether it’s to be positive remains to be seen. It would be great to have an engine to source feature pieces on any subject, but the continuous online news cycle may drive quantity and snap reportage over quality, considered writing.
With Fairfax laying off print staff, and SMH journalists filing for redundancy, whilst the money is best, should Fairfax pursue expansion into the online medium? Perhaps, but what if there’s a popular shift to Universe-style news engines; there’s no advertising revenue, yet news outlets across the globe are providing its content – surely a financial model, could and must be designed.
There are many questions. What if google were to unleash Universe on its servers? What if someone hacked into Government and corporate databases and poured the information into Universe?
Then we have the democratizing possibilities of the platform. In places such as Burma and Tibet, students and protestors are distributing images of their struggle to the world via mobile phones. Universe could collate these images to create a streaming visual rep of what’s going on in real time – this cause should be advanced by providing the world’s people with the technological means, not always easy.
Perhaps the UN should be distributing camera phones?
The ability of state authorities to suppress information is being challenged in the most dramatic manner since the advent of the printing press. This may be the democratization of the world’s people, united by truth against the decadence, corruption and greed of the global elite, in realization of a shared humanity.
This cause is aided by the news networks popping up on Youtube – Democracy Now, The Real News, Journeyman Films, Representative Press, Alternate Focus, ForaTV, linktv and the text based content of WikiLeaks.
What would happen if the news and culture sharing potential of Universe were plied with the technology of Photosynth to automatically construct a cultured virtual model of the entire world. You could ‘stroll’ down the avenues of Paris, pick up links from virtual ‘stands’ on shop fronts to receive local news, and anything we’d like to share, underground music perhaps?
As images become infinitely focusable, and content plied together in a smooth streaming way, everything will change.
For those who haven’t heard of this application; facebook has a program called ‘Compare People’. When you add it, you’re asked to invite 20 or so friends, and you’re adding it because someone invited you. See how they getcha?
Anyways, the idea is: “Compare people and we’ll show you where you fit”. Finally, inane, insane voting on topics formally found in myspace questionnaires. You pass through a range of questions and choose between two of your facebook friends.
Who is prettier? - I’ll go with the girl.
Who is more reliable? - Hmm, tough one. Two people I haven’t seen in years, nor have I had cause to rely on them.
Who is more likely to do a favor for me? - Ah ha, she did so yesterday.
Who is more likely to skip class? - I’m ranked #1 for this.
Who would I rather kiss? - Well, the girl I guess, but we’ve been friends for years, so that’s weird.
Who has a better smile? - Are people really judging the quality of my smile? Is happiness not enough for you facebook.
Who would make a better mother? - What a call! How would it feel to learn your friends have placed you 287th for best prospective mother.
Who would I rather be trapped on a desert island with? - Enough of this.
The beauty it is the email updates for your changing ranks. I don’t vote for people and all that, but the rankings are amusing.
Here’s one I received today:
Changes in your ranks:
#19 most tech-savvy (lost 2 places)
#23 person with the best smile (lost 1 place)
#24 best room-mate (lost 1 place)
#24 bravest (lost 2 places)
#24 kindest (lost 2 places)
How others compared you recently:
• “Who would I rather kiss”, you won 1 and lost 0 times.
Damn, it was a tough day out there. Lost places all over, but someone would rather kiss me than somebody else. Pondering that mystery sure passes the time.
I’m ranked #1 for these things:
More likely to skip class - Won 13 of 14 votes. Geez, these people ain’t recognizing my punctual dedication and such.
Rather travel with - Won 9 of 10 votes. ? ..
Am I more jealous of - Won 8 of 9 votes Random ‘myspace questionnaire jealous’ of a deadbeat who [allegedly] skips class, is far from outgoing and unfashionable.
I’m ranked last, at #172 on 2 counts.
More fashionable - Won 0 of 1 vote.
More outgoing - Won 1 of 7 votes.
I have been something of an internet addict for quite sometime, particularly since youtube. I can reveal the present tally is 6 040 videos watched. Messed up. In defense, most were probably news, football, music and skateboarding videos … and this excuses because … never mind.
Then facebook, which like most fascism, seemed to work pretty well for the majority of people, initially - until innate evils began to manifest, and you recognize the myspace age as an idealic utopia compared to the connection. Must delete.
The rest of my previous online time went to news sites, including: smh.com, New York Times, The Guardian and New Statesman.
Beyond blogging, I have gained just from websites people have named in class. Gold. Precious moments of life, traded for URLs. One site, Delicious. It’s genius. I’ve only just started using - can’t and won’t be quittin. No longer must I read and lose articles to the abyss, yet to make delicious friends, but it could happen.
Dahr Jamail, December 08, 2007. Author of ‘Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq’. The first section of the Question & Answer period - “How do we support the resistance in Iraq?”
Other topics covered in his response include: drivers of US foreign policy, the fate of Iraqi refugees and total civilian death tolls, resistance methods for US citizens against their Government, possibility of a US strike on Iran, depleted uranium and Gulf war syndrome, death squads in Iraq, US troop resistance, Iraq’s future and Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine.
The seven social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil:
Mindlessly taking the first small step, dehumanization of others, de-individuation of self (anonymity), diffusion of personal responsibility, blind obedience to authority, uncritical conformity to group norms, and passive intolerance of evil through inaction, or indifference.
People don’t talk about the Iraq war anymore. Have you discussed it with your friends recently? A tough issue to raise, you get a sort of, “Oh, why bring that up?”. Sigh, roll of the eyes etc. It’s an automatic response for most. Don’t think of that, the long war, an invasion and occupation that never ended, of permanent bases that are still expanding. It began when I was in high school, a lifetime ago. I was relaxing on beaches and skateboarding for the first three years. Then I studied journalism for two and a half years to now, played endless shows with my band, recorded demos and an EP, went on tour to Melbourne and Brisbane over and again, saw many Sydney bands as they began, travelled to the US itself for a music festival, lived in a few houses, and generally had a good and strange time of it.
For all of these years, that war has raged on. More than four thousand US soldiers have died, along with a few thousand ‘private contracters’, or ‘mercenaries’. More than this number have since commited suicide. Many were about my age. Their youth taken, lives destroyed, families torn apart; coming home missing limbs or sight, traumatized, unable to reintergrate, another generation of veterans, many initial casualties enlisting after 911 for nationalistic reasons, volunteering to fight for America’s freedom and security, and to bring the perpretators of September 11 to justice.
Now seven years since it began, the war in Iraq [and Afghanistan before that] has caused the deaths of over a million Iraqis, and an estimated three to four million internally displaced persons and refugees living in foreign countries. It has destroyed the country. Around 700 tonnes of depleted uranium has been used, which will cause cancer and birth defects for many years. The cultural history of a 7000-year-old civilization has been lost. Endless numbers have been sent to secret prisons and tortured, as so publicly green-lighted by President Bush.
This is the age that we young people have grown up in. We’ve borne witness to the deepest evils of humanity, of vicious blood-thirsty philosophies, media delivering clear yet distorted images of bombs exploding, stealth weaponry and shock and awe, civilian uprising and sectarian violence, suicide bombers of every age and kind, road-side bombs filmed and released on youtube - and this shit gets to you after a while. I live on the other side of the planet to Iraq. Yet I’ve been marked by this war. Once engaged with it, how could it not effect you.
But we don’t talk about it anymore. It’s been going for longer than World War 2. But we don’t much discuss it. I can dig why, we’ve grown up with this shit. There seems little reason to bring it up. You’re cast as something of a social weirdo if you rave on about it too often, and fair enough, I guess the conflicts of the day are never just talk for night clubs or dinner parties. Better left in uni tutorials or lectures. No doubt. But where is the wider dialogue? Every now and then, you may pass or even sign a Socialist Alliance (or some faction’s) petition to end the war in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or both, or some other reasonably just cause. But this ain’t action. 400 000 people marched in Sydney before Iraq was invaded. Why has this not happened every year since? As though the conflict and violence has become more socially acceptable.
I know that people care about Iraq. I’m not suggesting otherwise. My puzzlement is the cognitive gap we’ve developed. The mental cushioning of the letters I R A and Q. As said in a genius 80s sitcom, “Don’t mention the war!”
ze’ lego men. initial palin reception. jst jks. amusing if it wasn’t so serious.
Hello to you, thee unexisting, hypothetical readership. I’ve been struck from the internet of late, due to the defeatist and weak nature of my laptop’s power cable, its wires split and dashed upon the rocks of daily trevails.
Nevermind, I shall return to this blog tonight and unleash an offensive unimaginable to all but the most war-hungry and sharp-toothed of human kind. Our world is experiencing turmoils rought by failed doctrines and ideologies that ignore the universal nature of morality, and the inequality engrained into neo-liberal financial systems. Countless people with access to media portals are transfixed by the US election, at a time when the economic survival and health of several generations rests on a plan to bail-out wrong-doers to the tune of WWII expenses + extra, US allies become fair game for incursion, and both candidates sport advisors with dreams of full spectrum dominance, nevermind that the US owes China a trillion or so greenbacks.
Violence and violation of human rights must have no role in the new century, despite the decline and rise of empires, and propaganda machines spinning blood lust between people of equal kind and suffering, pinned as they are beneath oh too similar and openly interweaved authority, this is not the 20th C, the internet is here for a reason and just in time, like Dr Strangelove, the nukes remain unaccountable, no-one truly knows whom rest their fingers beside the button, and as the environment cedes and fails, oceans rising to the melt of three continents, and food and water become grounds for war, our commonalities as human beings must rise to a fore and forum greater than the oft-dubious UN, lest we rise upon our fellows, and allow criminals their escape to the tropic warmth of Alaska’s future.
This is babble, mos def. But it’s gonna be the way from now, and may it sharpen into real language with time.
