Posted on Friday, September 30th, 2011 | Leave a comment

Today’s guest post is from Matt Williams, who has kicked the ‘Book to the curb…

At about 10.45am on Monday, and after the best part of five and a half years as a resident (or inmate) I closed my Facebook account and deleted the bookmarks, the apps and the links to other websites. I don’t think I’ll ever go back.

I’d been toying with the idea for quite a long time, having grown increasingly uncomfortable with the company’s attitude to data-security and its attitude to the userbase that have turned it into one of the most highly valued digital companies in the world.

The notion that ‘we’ the user, are not what Facebook has commercialised, that we are the product is one that I find uncomfortable, and that I’m no longer willing to be a participant in. Whilst I realise that many companies do this (I remain a user of Twitter and Google’s myriad products) – the pernicious way in which Facebook has sought to redefine my conception of online privacy and ‘ownership’ of my past is where we have diverged. Where Google’s privacy controls seem to be designed to help me limit what I share, Facebook seem to have moved in the direction of stripping privacy controls to their most basic functions. Likewise, Twitter’s privacy settings are quite simple and transparent – don’t say anything stupid because for all intents and purposes everything is completely public.

Facebook also stopped being that ‘useful’ – I didn’t get much return on the time I spent using it, my account was already fairly tightly locked and other than picking up on gossip about people I don’t really see or speak to anymore it was fairly impractical. I gave anyone I’ve recently been in touch with my email address and phone number – which are far better ways of keeping in touch anyway. My other issue was that it often became so self-selective that it took the joy of discovery away from my ‘creative’ life – the music I listened to, the films I watched, the books I read, the websites I visited etc etc were often dictated by what my friends with similar interests had been doing – it seemed to militate against spontaneity and exploration of creative boundaries.

I’m already noticing changes in my usage of the internet – I can’t check facebook on my phone or computer anymore and as a result my productivity seems to have increased. Like an increasing number of my people my age, especially those of us who sit behind a computer on a daily basis in work, I tend to use my smartphone outside of the office (my laptop is largely redundant these days) so I don’t tend to pick that up as often as I used to, and over the last few nights I’ve spent far more time reading and listening to music than I have done in a long time.

On the other hand, I can see potential problems from moving away from Facebook – I can’t see the pages for a large number of events anymore, and having some local promoters and groups in my friends list was quite useful. Hopefully more promoters and event organisers will start using public iCal files (or similar) in the future, especially as the trend amongst my peers at the moment seems to be away from Facebook – though I’m not sure this reflects the wider world to any degree.

Strangely enough, around 2 hours after I clicked ‘delete’, the news broke that Spotify will now be requiring new users to have a Facebook account to use the service. This led to an avalanche of criticism in my twitter feed, with many apparently deciding to close their Spotify accounts as a result of this decision. It seems strange to me that this deal has been struck, though there is some logic in it in terms of potential advertising revenue and user profiling – but Spotify/Facebook need to be much clearer about how much data will be shared between the companies, and in which ways the data will be used.

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Posted on Monday, August 15th, 2011 | Leave a comment

Guest post and info from Cardiff-based thinkARK on an exciting event they will be holding this autumn… In all our nightmares, we become trapped. Lost. Forgotten. But what happens when this nightmare becomes a reality? Between this world and the …

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Posted on Tuesday, August 9th, 2011 | Leave a comment

The rather wonderful Kickstarter project Womanthology finished yesterday, with in excess of $100,000 pledged towards making the project a success. Laura Morley, Womanthology admin and writer takes five minutes to chew the cud over this IMMENSE project. Over to Laura…. …

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Posted on Friday, July 1st, 2011 | Leave a comment

A guest post from Pam Hill about Cardiff’s community currency – the Taff! Pam Hill is a mum of five who is interested in sustainability issues. She’s a founding Taffs Leader and a member of Cardiff East Transition. Do you …

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Posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2011 | Leave a comment

Today’s View Askew comes from Gavin Porter, who is running the IdeasExchange project in Butetown this weekend…. get yourself there I’m really excited that our first IdeasExchange is taking place on #IDEX01 will be taking place on July 1st @ …

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Posted on Monday, June 27th, 2011 | Leave a comment

A quick guest blog from Teresa from Age Concern Cardiff & Vale of Glamorgan …. they need your help for a great project they want to run. Read on and see how you could help… Jubilee People’s Millions Next year …

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Posted on Friday, June 24th, 2011 | Leave a comment

James Hannam studied at the Royal Welsh College of Drama and lived in Cardiff for 7 years before moving to London in 2006. He releases electronic music as Culprit 1 and writes for The Fly magazine and US dance blog …

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Posted on Saturday, June 18th, 2011 | Leave a comment

Today’s View Askew is by Cyrus Mirzashafa, Cardiff born and bred film maker, about the process of making the video for band WE ARE ANIMAL’s track, Luminous Lights. The video was a creative rage, fuelled by coffee and dominos pizza …

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Posted on Wednesday, June 8th, 2011 | Leave a comment

Today’s View Askew is by Molly Rooke, a Taunton native who moved to Cardiff in 2007 to do a BA in fine art at uwic. Since graduating in 2010 with a specialism in printmaking, Molly has stuck around to pursue …

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Posted on Friday, May 20th, 2011 | Leave a comment

In today’s View Askew, Adam Corner talks about a recent visit to Uganda for climate change research Uganda. If you are anything like me (at least until about 6 months ago), then you probably don’t know much about the African …

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Posted on Wednesday, May 18th, 2011 | Leave a comment

In today’s guest post, Tom Betts tells us a little about the phenom of Chapter MovieMaker. This is an origin story: way back in 2002, I decided to make my first short film. I had a script about a young …

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Posted on Monday, May 9th, 2011 | Leave a comment

In today’s guest post, Huw Thomas talks films. It doesn’t take much to turn a good film into a bad one, and vice versa One of the comments on my last post here suggested that Source Code might offer an …

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Posted on Wednesday, May 4th, 2011 | Leave a comment

Today’s View Askew is from Laura Howe. Laura is from Ireland and has been living in Cardiff for 3 years. She is part of thinkARK, the Cardiff-based social design group. She’s talking about Papergirl Cardiff. Go go go! Papergirl is …

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Posted on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011 | Leave a comment

In today’s guest post, Oliver Hurley tells us about the idea behind local pubs blog Pint of 45 and some of the misadventures he’s had while drinking his way around Cardiff. Pint of 45 is, if nothing else, a good …

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Posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2011 | Leave a comment

Today’s View Askew guest post come from Ed Walker. Ed is a journalist working for Media Wales, running the yourCardiff community site and writing regularly for the South Wales Echo. When he gets chance, he also runs the fledgling City …

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