Zwei Interviews und eine Buchbesprechung
1

Wie das Web 2.0 «Öffentlichkeit» neu definiert
Mit Youtube, Facebook, Google und Co. verändert sich der Begriff der Öffentlichkeit rasant. Der angesehene Soziologe Manuel Castells hat mit seiner Studie «Communication Power» eine umfassende Analyse der Veränderung der Kommunikation und der medialen Öffentlichkeit durch das Web 2.0 vorgelegt. Der Medientheoretiker Felix Stalder, der selber zu den Netzpionieren gehört, kennt Castells Thesen - und diskutiert mit Barbara Basting darüber.
www.drs2.ch Reflexe vom Fr, 9.4.2010, 28. Min.

2

“Deep Search” Politik des Suchens jenseits von Google
Die digitale Explosion konfrontiert uns seit Jahren mit einem regelrechten Daten-Tsunami. Die Suchmaschinen sind es, die uns helfen, diesen Tsunami zu beherrschen. Das Verheerende: Was wir über die Welt wissen, erfahren wir fast immer durch Google. Anders gesagt: Was Google nicht findet, existiert für viele Menschen nicht. Mit dieser Situation und ihren Implikationen beschöftigen sich Medientheoretiker, Kulturwissenschaftler, Soziologen und Politologen im Sammelband “Deep Search – Politik des Suchens jenseits von Google”. Philipp Albers hat das Buch gelesen.
http://breitband.dradio.de 26. März 2010, 10 Min.

Wenn man diese Besprechung mit der Renzension der FAZ vergleicht, muss man sich fragen, wo heute wirklich die Qualitätsmedien liegen.

The FBI and other police agencies don't need to obtain a search warrant to learn the locations of Americans' cell phones, the U.S. Department of Justice told a federal appeals court in Philadelphia on Friday.

A Justice Department attorney told the Third Circuit Court of Appeals that there is no constitutional problem with obtaining records from cellular providers that can reveal the approximate locations of handheld and mobile devices. (See CNET's previous article.)

Source: CNET

Source: Wired.com

In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day.
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The intelligence community has been interested in social media for years. In-Q-Tel has sunk money into companies like Attensity, which recently announced its own web 2.0-monitoring service. The agencies have their own, password-protected blogs and wikis — even a MySpace for spooks. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence maintains an Open Source Center, which combs publicly available information, including web 2.0 sites. Doug Naquin, the Center’s Director, told an audience of intelligence professionals in October 2007 that “we’re looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence…. We have groups looking at what they call ‘citizens media’: people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the internet. Then there’s social media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs.”

OpenNet Initiative: Covering the state of Censorship and Filtering online

From an interview with Rafal Rohozinski, a founder and principal investigator of the Information Warfare Monitor and the OpenNet Initiative.

One of the more interesting things we've observed in recent years has been the emergence of "third-generation controls". This form of content control stops short of censorship, but rather sees the state (and pro-state groups) engage in active information warfare against their opponents. They use denial of service attacks, and other techniques in order to silence opposition. This approach is interesting, as it allows the state to claim that it is not censoring groups, but the effect is the same. Of course, there is no legal recourse to challenge these practices.

Ars Technica has an article on how the cultural industries are pushing their "copyright curriculum"  into US schools. An much expanded update of that old classic "don't copy that floppy" and similar to Canadian attempt of 2006, Captain Copyright (soon abandoned). Bottom line: it's a disgrace to the very idea of education.

Ars Technica reports on the new study The Internet and Civic Engagement which found that there is a strong correlation between income and political activity and that there is little difference between online and offline, except that online more people sign petitions. Looks like the Internet is not really broadening the social basis of political involvement.

Data source: Pew Internet & American Life Project

CNN 报道 caonima 草泥马

Another book for my reading list. Bill Bishop: The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. 2008. http://www.thebigsort.com

The Wall Street Journal: 'Like-Minded, Living Nearby' (April 22, 2008)

The more diverse America becomes, the more homogeneous it becomes.

No, that's not a misprint; it is the thesis of "The Big Sort," Bill Bishop's rich and challenging book about the ways in which the citizens of this country have, in the past generation, rearranged themselves into discrete enclaves that have little to say to one another and little incentive to bother trying. "As Americans have moved over the past three decades," Mr. Bishop proclaims, "they have clustered in communities of sameness, among people with similar ways of life, beliefs and in the end, politics."

It is an idea that has all but obsessed Mr. Bishop since he began thinking about it years ago in his hometown of Austin, Texas. In his Austin neighborhood, he observed, there were virtually no Republicans. In another community of similar size nearby there were very few Democrats. Thirty years earlier, he was willing to bet, nothing like that uniformity would have been possible. Values, ideology and partisanship would have mingled more variously in even the most compact neighborhood, ward or district.

NEW YORK (AP, 04.02.2009) — On buttons, posters and Web sites, the image was everywhere during last year's presidential campaign: a pensive Barack Obama looking upward, as if to the future, splashed in a Warholesque red, white and blue and underlined with the caption HOPE.

Designed by Shepard Fairey, a Los-Angeles based street artist, the image has led to sales of hundreds of thousands of posters and stickers, and has become so much in demand that copies signed by Fairey have been purchased for thousands of dollars on eBay.

The image, Fairey has acknowledged, is based on an Associated Press photograph, taken in April 2006 by Mannie Garcia on assignment for the AP at the National Press Club in Washington.

The AP says it owns the copyright, and wants credit and compensation. Fairey disagrees.

The article quotes competing opinions about whether this is fair use or not, with all the usual hair splitting.

There's an interview with Fairey where talks about all the different influences that guided his transformation of the image and how other people worked on his stuff. Which makes the fair use discussion even more absurd.

Last week, I spent a few days at a small but intense workshop where we were looking at a the political dimensions of various forms of commons. The discussions were open and far ranging. I tried to distill some of these into a definition of commons that tries to take its various dimensions into considerations and separates structural from political issues. Far from perfect....

COMMONS, A DEFINITION

A commons is a resource held as joint property by a community. Thus, it is distinct from private property (held by natural or legal persons) or public property (held by the state). Typical for commons is that the management of the resource is oriented towards use-value for its members, rather than towards exchange-value within society at large. The separation between producers and consumers is minimized. Thus, commons are also distinct from other forms of collective ownership (such as co-operatives) that produce for the market.

All commons are social institutions, they depend on a community to create and maintain it. A resource that is freely available to all but not managed in a meaningful way by a self-aware community (e.g., the fish in the open sea) are not a commons. Like in all communities, questions of membership (boundaries) and internal decision-making are subject to ongoing, more or less conflictual, negotiations.

It is these questions that define the political quality of the commons, which can serve as defensive mechanism against market encroachment (e.g., in the case of indigenous commons), as a project of exclusion (e.g., in far-right conceptions of the body national) or as the basis of open cooperation (e.g., in the case of Free and Open Source Software).