Terrorism is crossmedia

The shocking killing spree in Oslo is a stark reminder of the fact that violence is an extremely effective way to draw attention. Some of the media attention is due to the sheer number of casualties (77). However, Breivik is not, or not only, a psychopath going on a killing spree to satisfy a deeply felt need for revenge. While he probably used a ``rationalization’’ of the killing, his main intention seems to have been promoting his political ideas on multiculturalism. A killing spree by someone who looked reasonably normal beforehand is already very unsettling. Finding that it was meant to further stir up an emotional issue like immigration, and the treatment of the (perceived) cultural and political elite of society, makes it even more unsettling. I think Breivik was fully aware of this and made it central to his planning, because I believe what he did was planning a cross medial marketing campaign using an event as a medium to attract attention. In a perverse sort of way, he did this very well as he is so far out of the ordinary that he will not be forgotten in years to come. Needless to say, that should not be taken as a recommendation of his methods. Instead I want to begin analyzing what makes us so vulnerable.

Tagged with: terrorism, breivik, crossmedia, politics, politicians, wilders,

TIR/DEXA 2010, Bilbao and the Guggenheim museum

At the end of August I spend a week in Bilbao, sponsored by the MyMedia project in which I worked when I was still at my old employer Novay, thanks to Christian Wartena, my co-author and driving force behind the papers I presented. You can skip down if you just want to read about Bilbao and the Guggenheim, but I was there for the TIR 2010 workshop on text based information retrieval. The workshop was part of DEXA2010, itself part of a group of related conferences (DAWAK/ EC-web/ TrustBus/Globe/EGOVIS/ITBAM...) going on simultaneously and held at the Deusto University Bilbao. In practice, this just meant that that there were many different simultaneous tracks to choose from. Some of the most interesting talks were in fact in tracks of conferences going to as a whole. The general theme is databases, expert systems, data management, E-commerce and data manipulation but it has branched out considerably to the point where recommender systems, semantic web, bio informatics and Grid/Cloud computing have become important subjects. 

Tagged with: wilders, ec-web2010, dexa2010, tir2010, automatic text analysis, information retrieval, guggenheim, bilbao, conference,