All right, I’m finally bored enough to use this thing for gen­eral dis­sem­in­a­tion of info…

I’ll add a thesis rant so I’m still within the charter I ori­gin­ally set for myself (grin).

The first link is a Web archive of an e‑mail sent by News­day reporter Laurie Gar­rett about the WEF meet­ing in Davos, Switzer­land last month. It’s candid, fas­cin­at­ing and quite unlike most of what you usu­ally read about these things.

Laurie Gar­rett e‑mail

The second is an equally fas­cin­at­ing dis­cus­sion about how it ended up on the Web, Gar­rett’s reac­tion and the issues of pri­vacy and public space. To me though, they’ve missed the point about what con­sti­tutes “civic participation”.

Meta-art­icle about the distribution

Thesis rant: Just start­ing out on this weird little jour­ney. I’m invest­ig­at­ing mar­ginal iden­tity, spe­cific­ally what I’m call­ing edge iden­tit­ies, people nego­ti­at­ing mul­tiple mar­gin­al­ity… I usu­ally reduce this to: what do you do if you’re black and gay and the gay com­munity is racist and the black com­munity is homo­phobic? I think the usual answer people give (create a black gay com­munity) is really essen­tial­ist and non-con­struct­ive, and I’m trying to find other ways of think­ing about this. Right now I’m look­ing for (Aus­tralian) edge iden­tity authors, and apart from Chris­tos Tsi­ol­kas, Lisa Bellear and Tony Ayres, I’m having trouble. But I haven’t looked very far yet.

One other thing: Apart from the_christian, no one com­men­ted on my story pout>. I’m trying to work out whether that’s because a) it was pro­tec­ted and none of you read your friends page while logged in, b) you all very sens­ibly avoided a post entitled “self-indul­gent twaddle”, c) you don’t tend to read stor­ies that are linked because they take too long and you’re look­ing for a quick fix, d) you have too many friends to bother with widdle old self-indul­gent me or e) all of the above. Just wondering…