In 2009 Boom Publishers Amsterdam published the long-waited-for Dutch translation of Peter Sloterdijk’s Sphären lll. Schäume – Plurale Sphärologie. I was anxious to read it. Spheres lll, as I would call the book in English is the third book of the ‘Foam trilogy’, Sloterdijk’s opus magnum and treat to our understanding of humanity, communities and ‘being there’. For me, Sloterdijk’s writings have become and object to think with in terms of media, technology and culture. The trilogy has a straight forward set up Book l, micro spheres named Blasen (bubbles), book ll, macro spheres named Globen and book lll Plural Spherology named Schaum (Foam). That is the conceptual set up of the trilogy in which we must understand that the three levels of spheres cannot do without each other.

While watching Walter Ruttmann’s ‘Berlin: Die Symphonie der Großstadt’, it occurred to me that every day’s delusions, traffic chaos, rich-poor contrast, more or less obscure subcultures and all other archetypes as presented in this film about Berlin in the twenties of the last century, were not really different from contemporary life.

The three-month field research in Southern Africa that my girlfriend and I executed has sadly passed. After a gruelling five-hour traffic jam (during which a three lane highway was temporarily transformed into six lanes) had caused us to miss our plane, we managed to catch our connecting flight to Europe in the nick of time.

A bloody diaper of a baby. This gruesome photograph is well known throughout South Africa, as it is depicted in hospitals, police stations and other public buildings throughout its provinces. Originally targetting the belief that sex with an infant would cure HIV/Aids, the poster later was meant to open the general public’s eye concerning child abuse. This is not the only poster that will make your stomach make a 360. Here in Malawi posters that adress crime issues are graphic as well. On one poster we see a woman burning her child’s hand and on the other we see a man who has just defiled a small girl. Looking at these posters from my Dutch point of view, I cannot help but think that posters like that will never be hung up in the Netherlands. I have been trying to find out why I feel this way. I think there are a couple of reasons.

I’ve been sort of following WWDC, You know: what the sentiment was, what the novelties were and, obviously, what Steve Jobs oracled that fine day at the West Coast. Steve Jobs was, could it be any different, the ultimate keynote speaker and his brilliant master stroke that day was: “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device, we’re going to move your hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.” With this bright future claim, Jobs introduced, what Apple refers to as iCloud. And this is how it works: iCloud is integrated across Apple desktops and Apple mobile devices to ensure that all of your Apple computers can synchronize contacts, calendars, email, apps, music, photos, and more. Most likely, iCloud can be integrated not just in Apple machines but in machines that run on any given OS. So Apple is offering a fully integrated service while at the same time other companies offer parts of the service (i.e. Amazon’s latest music service, Google’s Gmail inbox, Youtube, Dropbox, Wiggio, Flickr) no one combines it all into one seamless service that also works across a set of hardware devices. And it’s free. Now, isn’t that nice?

One of our team members is on a mission…in Africa. Dennis Ringersma travels through Africa the coming three months, researching a new educational method on HIV/Aids. He will blog on his journey and experiences on edutoy.wordpress.com. As a simple way to do some ethnographic research I asked Dennis to take a picture each day of his journey of his ‘confrontation’ with (new) media. His first observation is from Malawi.

The big discussion in the media this weekend is: how dangerous are the groups of hackers attacking credit card sites or sites of the police. Yes, yes, you are right. It is against the law and it should not be permitted. But… I have the faint feeling that clever spin doctors are diverting our attention from something much more threatening. Something that has (or could have) much more influence on our lives and our rights as civilians. And that is: financial institutions, internet providers and social media deciding for us, without court decisions, which causes we can support. Now there you have something that, in my opinion, is much more threatening to free speech and civil rights than actions of groups of people reacting in their own way to these actions. Yes! I agree. What these hackers do is unlawful, but let’s remember it is their reaction to very questionable and unlawful actions by financial institutions and social media.

The BBC had a really funny program called Room 101 in which an eloquent and witty celebrity could throw things, ideas or people they hate, into the so called room 101. The title comes from the Novel 1984 by George Orwell and was the torture room of the ministry of Love. The best Dutch equivalent of the phenomenon “room 101” you might say is “the round Archive”  which refers to a waist bin. The great Dutch TV actor and terrible show host Joost Prinsen tried it too, but alas. It was no success because Joost Prinsen didn’t get the notion that it is the task of the host to let the guest shine and not the other way around. Weirdly enough I’ve never seen the version with Erik van Muiswinkel and Jannes van der Wal.