Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Murder by cybertext attempted in Britain

A British teenager created a series of computer-mediated stories and personae in order to convince another teenager to muder him. Promised cash, a meeting with Tony Blair, and a career in British intelligence, the older boy stabbed the instigator dangerously, but not fatally. The story spun by the would-be murderee included several MI5 agents, stalkers, surveillance schemes, dying friends, and cybersex.

Back to the cyberspatial Gothic: note the accounts of this story, emphasizing the role of the internet, especially chat rooms and cybersex. "Web friend conned into murder bid," says the BBC. "Virtual world," notes the Telegraph.

Little US coverage so far. Perhaps it doesn't hit the right memes - kids too old for the American emphasis on pedophilia in internet panic stories?

Note as well the quiet acceptance of surveillance in public spaces. Each story turns on the mystery of where the stabbing takes place, just out of the reach of cameras. Readers are placed in the surveillant position, scopophilically wanting to learn what happened in the hidden (private) space.

From the Telegraph, a sample of some of the discursive and multitasking flair:

Mark [was] oblivious to the fact that each contact was an invention.

Rather than chatting to a group of friends, he was actually in conversation with a single internet "buddy", John. The latter achieved the remarkable feat of switching seamlessly from character to character, adopting each one's literary foibles and relating the events of a fictitious life.

The multiple discources seem to be drawn from urban legend, spy thrillers, and internet culture.

Police assembled their account from files obtained from the would-be murderee's computer, an act of intense textual analysis and recreation.

The Web speaks keywords: Blogpulse phrase ranking

A new Website offers another way of letting the collaborative Web speak words to us. Related to Daypop's WordBursts, BlogPulse generates KeyPhrases, some of which are complete sentences, while others are fragments. More sense emerges from these than from single words in isolation, of course:

1. rumsfeld bans camera phones
2. charles de gaulle airport
3. how many members of the bush administration
4. michael moore won
5. alias season finale
6. big walk
7. interrogations and/or allegations of the prisoner abuse
8. top prize at cannes
9. training wheels
10. do you think we will find weapons of mass destruction
11. monaco grand prix
12. musical instruments
13. man utd
14. martial arts

Many opportunities for quick glimpses of the blogosphere, and for drawing connections.

Manchurian Candidate as science fiction

Donald Melanson points us to this interesting interpretation of The Manchurian Candidate (1962) as science fiction. I'd take issue with some of the conclusions, but it's an interesting genrethink.

Goth school grant returned in part?

A chunk of money was returned from a grant aimed at combatting teen Goths:

Almost half of a $273,000 grant awarded in 2002 to fight the Goth culture in Blue Springs has been returned because of a lack of interest - and the absence of a real problem.

Blue Springs received the grant two years ago from the Youth Outreach Unit, money the city and U.S. Rep. Sam Graves trumpeted proudly as a way to fight a perceived Goth problem.

But $132,000 of the grant was returned because officials never found much of a problem with the Goth culture, which some students called a fad that most people eventually outgrow.

Slightly more than $118,000 of the money was earmarked for therapy, assessment and case management, and the plans also included a series of town meetings to discuss the issue.

"It never happened because referring someone for looking, acting Goth is not a concept that ever got imbedded in people's heads," project manager Allyce Ford said of the therapy proposal.

(via Gabor Por)

Information operations: a new review

I've published a review of two recent books on information warfare over at Reason. While the focus of both is contemporary, each also offers a historical survey which is interesting for the history of information.

Camera/Iraq

Camera/Iraq is John Schott's latest project, a fine dynamic archive of imagery and reflection on the war in Iraq:

a special project of Carleton College's Cinema & Media Studies Department and Ratchet Up to gather articles, commentary and photographs about public and personal image practices associated with the War in Iraq. The site has begun with a collection of key news reports and issues, but aspires to include editorial and academic writing that puts the use of photographic images into a broader critical context. Camera/Iraq welcomes links, articles, commentary or images from visitors... The site is intended to be a clearinghouse for thoughtful discussion rather than a locus of invective.

Naturally it has RSS.

Today's wordburst poetics

Today's Daypop Wordbursts automatic verse, formatted arbitrarily into three lines:

asthma, motorists, unitarians, althoff, stockpile, firemen;
greenberg, bloated, ewan, mcgregor, splits, googol;
vm, cautiously, cryptics, largess, infringes

Some distinct sentences on the verge of emergence: "bloated ewan mcgregor splits googol."

No openly pornographic words, yet, although these serve well for literate erotica filler (which we leave as an exercise for the reader). Perhaps, like Metaspy, Wordbursts will offer filtered/nonfiltered choices,

Gmail Gswap

gmailswap has launched. For a crack at Gmail, people are offering:

In exchange for Gmail...

borrow a car for a week 05.19.04
a tour of Tokyo 05.19.04
a fog gun 05.19.04
read a poem on someone's radio-show 05.19.04
master the art of ordering dim-sum 05.19.04
2 tickets for the Charlotte Bobcats opening night, plus t-shirt 05.19.04
an ASCII-art thank-you note 05.19.04
a robot (doing something sad) drawn in MS Paint 05.19.04
Apple Pro speakers 05.19.04
admission to Boalt Law School 05.19.04
albums by The Streets, the Walkmen, and the Von Bondies 05.19.04
a pet mouse 05.19.04
music lessons - voice, piano, orff - in the Ottawa area 05.19.04
ten Japanese pesos

(sez Wired)

Casshern reviewed and explained

Chanpon is carrying a great review of the splendid-looking new Japanese film Casshern. Japanese scholar Debbie Shamoon explains the movie's background and plot, while paying tribute to its gorgeous imagery:

Not having seen it yet (when will a US distributor step forward?), I'm nevertheless fascinated by the seeming mix of cyberpunk and WWII tropes, the Frankenstein riff, along with an alternate history theme.

Cafe Story: short-shorts for the caffeinated

Caffeinators alert: Caffeine Society's Cafe Stories wants your short story about a cafe.

Be sure to note, or incorporate into the story, the name of the cafe and place where your story is set. By entering the contest, you give Caffeine Society the right to publish your story in an anthology and are eligible to win the $250 prize to be paid on publication.

There's going to be a book of these.

(thanks to Howard Rheingold)