JOIN SLLU ON FACEBOOK!

Click HERE

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JOIN SLLU!

SLLU is a group in Second Life. It was set up by people concerned with social justice issues and who also recognise the unique educational aspect Second Life brings to the internet.

SLLU is a "left unity" group. It comprises of people with allegiances to other left political parties/ pressure groups and of people with no direct allegiance to any. It is a true Left Unity group that holds democratic meetings in Second Life.

We also have music nights as well as educationals.

When "inworld" (inside Second Life) do search for the group "SL Left Unity"

Contact one of our group members - Eremia Woodbury; Plot Tracer; Forelle Broek and ask for details on how you can get involved!

SLURL to Unity Station, designed by Tooter Claxton, HERE

SLURL to our FREEBIE SHOP HERE

We also have a Facebook site - HERE

UNITY STATION

SLLU SHOP

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Creating Community

by Plot Tracer

A new culture/media

"A culture that took 200 years to build was torn apart in twenty," is how Paul Mason, in his book "Live Working or Die Fighting," describes what has happened to working class culture in Britain and the west through the processes Thatcherism and Neo-Liberalism have brought upon us. Living in post industrial Glasgow/ Scotland/ UK/ Europe/ US/ France/Spain/etc - the west - is a very different place than it was only a couple of decades ago. Community in housing schemes/ miners villages/ industrial towns/cities has been torn apart by low employment/ lack of shared experience (like the docks/ mines/ steelworks etc), the privatisation of the town centre and a new world of competition on every level has been borne. Working class community has been torn apart by policies such as "right to buy" and the outsourcing of work by the large industrial companies. And the sense of history that came with the assurance of the industrial plant where grandfather, father and son, grandmother, mother, daughter worked side by side has gone.

Mason also says that the fracturing of our society comes with "the culture of individualism born of technological progress. The communications revolution has created a young generation that thinks more individualistically, cares more about its individual rights than its collective ones, and is- to the frustration of union organisers- less inclined to join organisations. If the union way of life was in the [past] the only positive identity on offer to young workers, today they are adept at playing with multiple identities: Shenzhen shoe worker by day, World of Warcraft dwarf by night, retro-punk rocker at the weekend." People spend their leisure time in the new Cathedrals of consumerism – a Saturday trip to Braehead Shopping Centre [mall] outside Glasgow, or any of the large privatised spaces can show you that.

A TRIP TO THE PRIVATIZED, DEPOLITICISED, DEPERSONALISED NEW TOWN CENTRES SHOW HOW COMMUNITY HAS BEEN SHATTERED

Even sports and games are being pulled into private spaces such as the "Xscape" complex with such things on offer as skiing, "sky walks", cinema, football with Kevin Keegan, bowling etc. Communities in which we "come from" are no longer places where people live their lives out – some types of housing are seen as "stepping stones" on the property ladder. Small communities have people moving in and out within a couple of years. People move out of their communities to go (increasingly) to universities across the country, and then find work in new places. The community of family is being spread across the country/ across the world by the ease of travel and cheap flights.In this new fractured world, where do we pull together community? Belonging? Comradeship? Dialogue? Debate? The new "town square" is the internet. Though, that too is being fractured and privatised. For this piece I will not talk about the privatisation of the net, that is for another time, but I will briefly write about how community can be borne across what is there- new community that can exist regardless of the transient nature of modern living- new community that can exist between people who have never actually met, but share common interests/ beliefs etc.- also new community between political allies AND adversaries. A real dialogue with real people. Lawrence Lessig in his excellent book, "Free Culture" says about the west and the US from where he is writing, "We, the most powerful democracy in the world, have developed a strong norm against talking about politics. It's fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme. We say what our friends want to hear, and hear very little beyond what our friends say." He then goes on, "Enter the blog."

ENTER THE BLOG

Indeed. The blog is a place where people can write exactly what they think, and have debate/ discourse with people across the globe. Blogs allow for political discourse without them having to be gathered in a single public space – or at a specific time. Blogs can link to articles in other blogs, and debate and conversation can happen across the world. Commercial pressures do not exist for bloggers, they can obsess, focus, be serious, flippant, whatever. If a blogger writes one good story – that story could be linked across the country/world through other blogs and as the number of links increase, it rises up the ranks of stories. People read peer selected popular stories – and with new tools added to blogs such as Diggit etc, these peer selected stories get a larger audience again. Journalism is freed of all the constraints of commercialism and other issues that hamper the mass media. Lessig goes on, "As more and more citizens express what they think, and defend it in writing, that will change the way people understand public issues. It is easy to be wrong and misguided in your head. It is harder when the product of your mind can be criticised by others. Of course, it is a rare human who admits that he has been persuaded that he is wrong. But it is even rarer for a human to ignore when he has been proven wrong. The writing of ideas, arguments, and criticism improves democracy." Blogs are one way we can create dialogue with people across the world. People writing their political thoughts on their environment/ their immediate communities etc and linking them to SLLU aims and objectives – and creating dialogue between these blogs and other blogs across the world/ country, and not necessarily just our friends – can get our voice out across cyberspace(And with the tools you find on the web, you can advertise your blog online and in the new cathedrals of consumerism by wearing a teeshirt you have designed online with a suitable slogan your blog address emblazoned across it!).

BLOGS CAN BE USED TO HELP KEEP ISSUES IN THE PUBLIC MIND - NEWS CORPORATIONS THINK OF THE "BOTTOM LINE" RATHER THAN WHAT IS IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST TO DISSEMINATE.

Behind every blog/avatar is a real person

The term "cyberspace" suggests something unreal. A place where “unreal” people congregate. A place where the labelled "geeks" obsess and do things apart from real life. This is, in my opinion, like Thatcher and her cronies in the eighties when they said that degrees and courses that studied media were "Mickey Mouse degrees." Degrees such as Film/Media and degrees within the arts that encouraged critical thinking all came under attack. And to attack cyberspace and those who use it to communicate as geeky or as trivial, is attacking or at the very least, mistakenly trivialising the single most powerful communication tool thus-far created by humanity. A communication tool that goes across borders and is very cheap to use in comparison with all other communication tools people have come up with across the years. A communication tool that the corporations are exploiting to the hilt – sinking huge amounts of money/ research and legal fees into (from blog spaces through to forums and Cyber worlds such as Second Life). So who loses if the left succumb to the trivialisation/ labelling of cyberspace/ geekdom? Ignore the naysayers – I would not be surprised if the black arts are in play in rolling out these labels. After all, if a tool is shown to be effective in breaking down the barriers between the reader and writer of news/ political opinion – and in fact en masse we all become the active participants of the triangulation of news/ opinion, then who loses?
The citizen or News Corporation? In Lessig's book he writes about a scheme ran in San Fransisco for children of this new media world. "Media Literacy," as Dave Yanofsky, the executive director of Just Think!, puts it, "is the ability… to understand, analyze, and deconstruct media images. Its aim is to make [kids] literate about the way the media works, the way it's constructed, the way it's delivered, and the way people access it." This is literacy in the world where children (and adults) see on average 390 hours of commercials per year. It is important to understand the grammar of media. It is important to understand how to use that media. And it is important to understand that nowadays most people have the power in the gadgets they have in their every day lives to create media. Elizabeth Daley, executive director of the University of Southern California's Annenberg Centre for Communication and dean of the USC school of Cinema and Television says, "From my perspective, probably the most important digital divide is not access to a box. It's the ability to be empowered with the language that that box works in. Otherwise only a very few people can read with this language, and all the rest of us are read-only." Passive.

Creating communication

FACEBOOK IS ONE WAY TO CONNECT- BUT LET'S ENSURE THOSE WHO OWN DO NOT DICTATE WHAT WE WRITE

We can create a read and write political agenda – at the very least empower people to read and understand the tools that are used to mislead. At the very least show people how they can get their political thoughts into cyberspace with the use of their mobile phone/ video camera/ pc or one or more of the above. The tools are out there and are free. From blogger, through Facebook, myspace, Second Life, Youtube, etc. We have the tools to create a community of news gatherers/ commentators that can link across the world. I would like to suggest the SLLU run basic courses in using the tools and ascertain the skills party members have and can share with others to help create this new Scottish Activist Media. If anyone is interested, please contact me, Neil Scott through Second Life - Avatar name- Plot Tracer; SLLU blog – https://webmail.gccschools.co.uk/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.slleftunity.com/; Facebook – Plot Tracer; email – plottracer@googlemail.com /

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SLLU on Facebook

Join us on our new Facebook group -

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=21039455428

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OPEN LETTER TO LINDEN LABS

Dear Linden Labs

We have been a group within your medium for 17 months. We are a political forum, essentially using the forum as a way to link with people of our political persuasion across the world. We felt this media would be a great way to do that and have managed to link people across the globe. Members of our group believe in a method of education espoused by Paulo Friere, the South American educationalist, and we feel the virtual world created on your media allows that in a way few other Web 2.0 forums can.

Our most recent Charter and Aims and Principles can be found here: http://slleftunity.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-it-is-to-be-sllu.html

We have a number of concerns we would like to share with you and perhaps you could address those.

We feel the new TOS are pretty stringent, your Trademarking (TM) the term “SL” has surprised us. Our use of the term SL came before your TM was introduced – and we have used the term both inside and outside the media. Our concern, however is not the name or the legalities of using the term “SL” or the term “Second Life”. Our concern is that we are an anti-capitalist group who at times confront some of the corporations Linden Labs now seek to involve in SL. We have in the past supported an Italian IBM workers strike that used SL to highlight their cause, successfully. Would this supporting of a non-corporate, group who had no commercial relationship with Linden Labs against a corporation who have an interest in Linden Labs (and vice versa) breach your new TOS?


We also have in the past year confronted an extreme right wing, racist group made up of the French Front National and various other extremist groups. Would this type of confrontation lead us to be in breach of your TOS and mean the SLLU group and/or its members could be banned or deleted because our actions do not enhance your corporate image? Does our use of an “SL Associated name” mean that you could end our tenure in this world because of our confrontation of hate groups or unjust employers would be seen to be “advocating against any individual, group, or organization?”

We feel that we, the “residents” of your “new world” - OUR world and OUR imagination, as you have been telling us, have been asked in these new TOS to waiver more rights for no increase in service. We are extremely interested to know how Linden Lab as a corporation goes about justifying this action.

We feel that there are groups that have existed for quite some time in SL who will not meet your stringent rules on the use of the term SL. These groups have in turn brought people to SL, revenue for you, brought people together in common cause and enjoyment to many people. Are we to understand they now must comply with strange and whimsical usage rules or disappear? Our full name is Second Life Left Unity and there are many other groups who indicate they are operating in this Second Life environment with the words "Second Life." In fact, there are hundreds of "Second Life" organizations and clubs (including Assassins of Second Life, Second Life Mafia, Second Life Catholic Church, Second Life Ballet, Second Life Univ. of Technology, Second Life Live, Second Life Amazing People, and many many others). Why would the license not extend also to "Second Life"? And are you really suggesting organizations and businesses situated in the virtual world "Second Life" must change their names? What kind of enforcement and notice procedures do you anticipate for bringing residents into compliance with the new terms?

Of course, Linden Labs are not the only group to claim ownership of content of forums. This is, in our opinion, just the latest trend towards increased emphasis by corporations on ownership, control and product branding - which to many represents excessive intrusion, and a massive imbalance between corporate power and citizen or service user rights and power. Surely this runs contrary to the whole Open Sourcing ethos which LL once apparently endorsed? For years, Linden Research has been touting Second Life as a place, so, for example, Reuters in Second Life made sense, now it is Second Life the product and you seem to be trying to change people's perceptions based on market whims.

We also seek clarification on whether you have any kind of user data privacy and protection policy in place, where conversations or actions are deleted and will not be given over to marketing companies, corporations, courts or Governments? We have concerns that if not, that the collection and storage of user data could be open to massive and intrusive misuse.
This tool that has been created, ie the virtual world, could be used in such amazing ways in education, making links across the globe and for helping in human relationships etc. The potential is only limited by imagination as you imply in your marketing. But we fear the potential is being undermined by a want to unquestioningly comply with the commercial market pressures for conventional expansion by selling off to the higher bidder rather than considering the longer term interests of this unique service or of those who use/rely/love the experiences that are afforded by the use of Second Life. How does this fit with LL's previous stated support of the Open Sourcing movement?

We await a response with hope.

In peace

Second Life Left Unity.

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Social Networking, Online Activism and Confidentiality.

A discussion document by Higgledpiggle Snoats

• To what extent is the data that we disclose on online social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Second Life etc really in safe hands? This data, by its nature, can be easily stored and re-accessed on corporate servers. When we candidly reveal personal information, either in our public profiles or shared with other selected users, we often do so in an atmosphere of openness, safety and trust. But do we really question the consequences of what could happen if this information was disclosed to third parties, without foreknowledge or consent?

• Given the current trend of governments and corporations towards

• Ever-increasing culture of surveillance
• Monitoring of citizens, employees and consumers
• The collection and sale of ever-more detailed demographic and market data
• The post-9/11 shift towards declining enshrinement of civil liberties
• The creeping emphasis on individuals to be accountable to authority at all times

would it be naïve to expect that social networking sites could not or would not be used by either of these entities for data collection purposes to suit their specific agendas?

• If we accept that is is indeed likely that this type of data would be valuable to and sough-after by both government and corporations then it is wise to ask ourselves how great is the risk that this information could be misused? Are there instances where it might be dangerous to us as individuals to disclose information in the apparent safety of online environments?

• There is an often-cited argument which regularly comes up in relation to such privacy issues and that is ‘If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to worry about’. However, this puts a tremendous amount of faith in the automatic benevolence of governments and corporations – against the evidence of history. Information relating to a person’s ethnicity, sexuality, religion or political persuasion to name a few examples can and has been misused historically, and continues to be in the present time.

Some more obvious examples include:

• Nazi Germany
• The Soviet Union
• Pinochet’s Argentina
• Modern day China
• McCarthy Era US
• Modern day Burma

• All of the above political examples share a common factor: that of malign authority, and disdain for civil, political and human rights. In all of the above examples, personal data obtained by government has been used to persecute and discriminate, and in many cases imprison, torture and kill.

• Although many might assume that in modern-day ‘democracies’ these issues need not concern us, what actual assurance do we have that our stored data is protected from getting into the wrong hands? Those of us that still believe in individual privacy as a right need to ask ourselves ‘What in fact ARE our digital privacy rights’? Do we really know or investigate the extent to which our personal user data files are confidential, once on a company server?

• The above points are relevant to anyone with data privacy concerns. However, there are issues here, which are of particular concern to anyone using social media networks as tools for online activism and political organising. Given the previously outlined global political climate, it is vital that activists are fully mindful that any details they are sharing in online environments can be recorded, stored, and could have the potential to be used against them in the future, should the political climate continue its apparent trend towards increasing authoritarianism. In the absence of legal assurances that their data is protected – it is strongly advised NOT to share any information online, which you would not wish to be disclosed to unknown third parties without your consent.

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Facebook Union

This comment was received today. Perhaps some people in SLLU may want to follow this up? An SLLU Facebook Union branch may be an idea...

[[FACEBOOK UNION]]

I’ve heard this idea before. Who thinks there should be some sort of Facebook Union?

Essentially, it’s just like any other type of union. If one of us gets banned unfairly, we all stop using the site. They have to listen to the masses…

Many of us here are highly influential individuals, and we should all agree on the following:
1) Convicted individuals need a way to plead for their innocence and individuals who are not in violation of any rules should have restored accounts.
2) All rules should be stated clearly on the site, and non-damaging first-time violations of rules that are not made clear should be dealt with through a warning.

I’m going to be creating a Gmail account and all who are interested in becoming part of the Facebook Union can email me at facebookunion@gmail.com

All will be valued here.

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Face book update...

Yesterday, I wrote to all of you about the case of Derek Blackadder, the trade union organizer banned from Facebook for ... organizing.

You responded instantly and the word spread like wildfire. Within 8 hours, nearly 2,400 of you signed up to join the Facebook group protesting the ban on Derek.

Facebook has now removed the ban. We won.

Thank you!

Many of you also wrote to me expressing your views -- pro and con -- regarding Facebook.

I wanted to make clear that I was not endorsing Facebook as a tool trade unionists should use. To the contrary, I have published an article entitled "Bandwagons and Buzzwords: Facebook and the Unions" which takes an entirely critical view.

Others have different views. John Wood, who took the initiative to set up the Facebook group to protest the ban on Derek, has written a response to my article, which is worth reading in full. He too is not uncritical of Facebook.

A very large number of you wrote to me yesterday and of course that would be the moment that my email provider crashed. We're trying to recover all those emails now (and yes, I've changed providers since then). Your patience is appreciated.

So, thanks again for your help yesterday. Derek is now back online, doing what organizers do -- thanks to you.

Eric Lee

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Banned from Facebook

FROM ERIC LEE.

In a moment I'm going to ask you to support the most unusual campaign we have ever launched -- but first, some background.


Blackadder: Banned from Facebook Facebook, the social networking website, is getting a lot of attention these days. In the trade union movement, there are differences of opinion about how useful Facebook actually is. Some of us are making a real effort to find out by using Facebook as an organizing tool.

One of them is senior LabourStart correspondent Derek Blackadder, from Canada. Derek's day job is as a staffer for the country's largest union, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). He's one of the people who thinks Facebook is potentially quite useful for trade unionists.


Well, maybe not so much anymore.

You see, a few days ago, Derek was banned from Facebook.

I'll let John Wood from the U.K. tell the story in his own words:

Derek got a note from the good book, telling him he was trying to add too many friends, and should calm down a bit, or else. Now as a union organiser, he’s quite likely to want to add lots of friends - it’s kind of what he does. So he waits a bit and tries again, and is told he can’t add any more at the moment and to wait and try later. Fair enough. He waits a bit more and tries again, same message. By now, he’s probably frothing at the mouth and muttering "must organise, must organise", so he has another go to see if the coast is clear, and promptly gets himself a ban. That being a ban from Facebook itself - no more profile, no access to the stuff he’s built up, no appeal.

John has launched a Facebook group to sign people up to protest the ban on Derek. I am writing to ask each and every one of you to take a moment and sign up to join the group. If you are not yet signed up on Facebook, join the 60,000,000 others who have done so and sign up.


We know that this isn't nearly as important as most of the other campaigns we do on LabourStart -- and if you read all of John's article you'll detect a somewhat light-hearted tone.

Still, as social networks become more and more important, our access to them as trade unionists must be protected. These are early days yet -- I know that most of you are not yet signed up to Facebook. This is good time to see whether we can mobilize the kind of support -- the thousands of names -- that will force the owners of Facebook to reverse course and allow Derek to do what he does so well: organize.

Thanks for your help on this. And spread the word!

Eric Lee





This message was sent from Eric Lee , 51 Briarfield Avenue, London, UK N3 2LG, United Kingdom.

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