Posted inGeneralTech

A day on WhatsApp

“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 […]

Posted inGeneralTech

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 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 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 […]