“Get on WhatsApp!” they told me. “It’s FREE!” they said. So I caved. Not one to miss out on a freebie I headed down to the nearest Vodacom shop to connect my BlackBerry to the internet for R59 a month to get WhatsApp for “free”. BIS the shop girl called it. You’re damn right it’s […]
social media
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
Why Zuma’s resignation is true if we say so
How do you get more than 350 000 visits to your website in just a few days? Claim that the South African president has resigned. Siyathokoza Khumalo created an online media frenzy with a blog post on November 3 facetiously titled President Jacob Zuma has resigned. Social media went nuts and the hashtag #ZumasResigned is still […]
Posted inGeneral, Tech
Who’s afraid of the cybermob?
Nothing quite affords anonymity like the internet does. One may choose to be anonymous there, and by its very nature you already are: a minute part of an enormous data set, where our merged identities form a gigantic collective, infinitesimal flashes of electricity, among trillions of others, in a remote server farm far, far away. […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Trying to describe South Africa without ‘overkill’
The novel I am writing has its opening scene in Cape Town on the day Mandela was released from prison. This manuscript is my project for the masters degree in creative writing programme at Auckland University in New Zealand. My protagonist, Ruth, is a young South African, and Chinese in appearance. She does not know, among […]
Posted inGeneral
Is state surveillance only about violating the right to privacy?
In a recent article (sent to me by an astute and observant friend) on “Totalitarian paranoia in the post-Orwellian Surveillance State”, the renowned “critical pedagogics” intellectual, Henry Giroux, dwells at length on the implications of state surveillance on the part of agencies such as the American NSA. Giroux provides a thorough analysis of the relation […]
Posted inGender violence, Media
Shaming rape survivors and other bull
“What a week for women! First, two of the (very few) prominent political mavens became kissing besties and then spectacularly not, and then that rape-cry-baby Michelle Solomon made a scene and had to be put back in her place by a good ol’ cigar-smokin’ man like David Bullard (for a bet it turns out, classic!) […]
Posted inTech
Facebook: A life laid out in linear form
Newborn babies have started appearing on my Facebook news feed, lovingly cradled by people that not too long ago (it seems) were holding bottles of cheap vodka with such tender care, playing disastrously drunken games of table tennis together, still in their first year of university, innocent and unaffected, with delusions of adulthood. I recently […]
Posted inHealth, Lifestyle, Media
Social media in healthcare and why the doctorsaurs became extinct
Sometimes I feel very alone and vulnerable here. You see, it is rare that doctors air their views on social media (SM), and I have done a fair bit of that on this forum. If you sift out all my posts pertaining to healthcare and read them in sequence, you will have a pretty representative […]
Posted inHealth
Beyond the ‘House of God’ – how medicine hasn’t really changed at all
In 1978, as I neared the end of high school and readied myself for medical training, a book called House of God (HOG) was published by a doctor under the pseudonym Samuel Shem. By the time I read it as an intern eight years later it had become a cult classic among doctors. Everyone I […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Pistorius case highlights the failings of social media
Oscar Pistorius is an inspirational icon whose fierce love for his woman inadvertently had nightmarish consequences. That’s what the cloyingly vociferous fans on his website would have us believe. Oscar Pistorius is an ego-on-stilts with temper issues which, due to his arrogance, inevitably resulted in violence. That’s what his detractors punt on social media sites […]
Posted inLifestyle, Media, Tech
The slow descent into social media’s superficiality
I think I know why social media is good for everyone. I just think I do, but don’t really. Besides being a vehicle for sparking Arab Springs, social media is first with the news and enhances your brand if you’re a journalist, editor, social commentator or political analyst. In fact if you’re none of these […]
Posted inNews/Politics
Is Oscar’s attorney really a star?
Why is the defence advocate, Barry Roux, considered a star by the faceless social media when a defenceless woman was killed? One realises there are sub-editors, and part of their jobs is just to make a sensational headline. But the story in reports like these celebrate Roux as if he were a chess grandmaster. The […]