I haz no home internets :(
My broadband cable services are down entirely – internet (and thus our VOIP home phone), and, even worse for one particular reason, cable telly. Since our outside aerial fell down last year, we can’t even get free to air – we missed last night’s Doctor Who! And did you know that with Foxtel IQ that once you have been off the grid for over 24 hours, the box won’t let you watch your recorded programs?
Thank goodness for gmail and twitter on my new iphone, and for my netbook and friendly neighbours with WiFi – I can dip into the cyberwhirl occasionally. But this has been going on since Friday morning and “might” be fixed sometime today. So apologies to everyone I was in the middle of a conversation with, but the netbook is not ideal for keeping up with blog comments, or blogging itself (I wrote this on my desktop, transferred it to my memory stick and then uploaded it via the netbook), so I’m taking the universe’s hint and getting some fresh air today.
By the bye:
- DevenyTwit: Helen covered the aspects of offence caused by tasteless tweets comprehensively over at the Balcony, I just want to jump on some of the silly claims that some others are flinging around elsewhere about how being sacked infringes upon Deveny’s free speech rights:
1. Bullshit. Employers do not have to give you work. Depending on your employment contract, they may still have to pay you until your contract expires, but they do not have to give you work.
2. Freedom OF speech has never meant freedom FROM consequences.
3. Nobody has the RIGHT to have their speech disseminated beyond the public square by media platforms that they do not themselves own. Refusing to disseminate other people’s speech is not the same as suppressing it. The AGE is not obliged to publish every Letter to the Editor, and neither is it obliged to publish every column that its contributors submit.
4. Why yes, point 3 above is rather pointedly aimed at people who get bent out of shape about “censorship” when their comments on blogs are not published by the owners/operators of those blogs. - While talking about the dissemination of people’s speech online, let’s segue to the creepy way that Facebook is, without adequate notification (where’s the informed consent?), sharing more and more of your personal details with commercial entities when you visit other websites while logged into Facebook.
* Facebook: New “social” features secretly install malware
* Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative (some student hackers in New York are seriously looking into getting an open source social media network up and running – check out Diaspora)
Okay, I’m off for a walk.
Good! I had noticed the tigtog silence, and had been a little concerned that perhaps there was a problem. Which there is, but at least it is easily (!) fixed.
I missed one of the early ones and watched it on i-view later. Very good service. Dammit I was hoping to chat about Dr Who today. I hope your internet woes are fixed quickly.
Just wanted to link to Deveny’s own post explaining herself on Unleashed: I’m tough, but I’m sacked and I’m heart broken
For the record, I do think that the editor of The Age has been rather gutless in using this convenient latest scandal to terminate her services when she has been a valuable eyeball attractor for them for years. But Deveny thrives on being a polarising figure, a professional gadfly, and according to her own blog, she was well aware that the editor had the knives out for her, so why not be just a little more judicious? The Logies tweets were just the last straw, after all I suspect it was the ANZAC tweets that really did for her, and all that the next tweets did was push some prevaricators on the board over the edge.
This is why celebs/aspiring entertainers need to be clever, and do the the fun goofy/bitchy twitter stuff on unspruiked friends-locked accounts, and keep their open professional accounts that are meant to build a fan base for being fucking professional.
It’s been suggested by others that Deveny is naturally a better fit for an FM radio gig, and I think they could be right, and I hope she gets one so she can take her kids on holiday as promised. Society needs gadflys, irritating though they can be – the reaction to them is also often illuminating.