On Thursday Mum sent me an SMS from Rottnest, where she’s holidaying with my sister and her family. “Hi jill you are mentioned in todays Australian (Media Supplement, p. 7 on warblogs love mum” Auntie Joan saw it too, flying home from Tasmania, and Mum says Auntie Joan says I’m famous – I love my family 🙂 So anyway, having been kind of distracted the last few days I only just went hunting for the mention, and hey presto, here it is:
Weblogs do more than talk. They help to mobilise protest action. But Jill Walker, a blogger in Norway, has asked an intriguing question. She received her first SMS call to protest: an anti-war boycott of US products. “I read lots of American blogs and use lots of American web services,” she said in a post to her blog. “When people talk about boycott, do they generally include information and communication?” After all, the weblog as a genre itself was indigenous to the US. (The Australian 10/4/03, “Warblogs: Weapons of Mass Destruction“)
I like the thought of my brother-in-law, who sent me the SMS, sitting on a sunny porch outside a Rottnest bungalow reading a thrice-mediated response to that very SMS.
Robert
I guess you missed my comment of a few days ago, then. I posted a link to the article.
I love Rottnest, though I haven’t been back for a couple of years. Actually, it was about this time two years ago. My family and a few others stayed in Kingston Barracks for the weekend, and had a lot of fun (even if it was way too cold for swimming). Have you ever been? What’s your connection to Perth?
Jill
Oh! Thanks, Robert! And sorry for missing your comment – I usually do read the comments but, um, I’ve been kind of wonky the last week…
My Perth connection is that mum and dad are from Perth. They studied in Britain, wanted a year in another culture, learnt Swedish (on account of its being 1968 and social democracy and all being big) and moved to Oslo for a few years. (No, Oslo’s not in Sweden. They must have gotten distracted on the way over or something.) In Oslo I and my sister were born, then we all moved back to Perth for good. For good actually only lasted four years or so, at which point mum and dad decided to come to Bergen for a few months and ended up staying, merely returning to Perth to pack up the furniture, find an agent to rent the house for the next twenty years and give notice to their employers.
And yes, I’ve been to Rottnest several times – I got to go to school there for a few weeks as a kid, which was brilliant. I learnt to ride a bike on Rottnest! And my daughter ate her first mouthfuls of clean, beach sand there when she was half a year old 🙂 About time to go back, I reckon!
Apparently I look exactly the same now as I did when we moved here when I was seven. Comforting thought, huh?