OpenNet Initiative
8 October, 2009 - 14:54 by felixOpenNet 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.
RIAA-funded copyright curriculum
18 September, 2009 - 14:38 by felixArs 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).
The Internet has not transformed civic engagement... yet
2 September, 2009 - 15:02 by felixArs 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.
semiotic subversion in china
19 April, 2009 - 15:44 by felixCNN 报道 caonima 草泥马
The Big Sort
20 March, 2009 - 14:33 by felixAnother 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.
AP alleges copyright infringement of Obama image
7 February, 2009 - 06:34 by felix
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.
Commons: A rough definition
21 January, 2009 - 22:00 by felixLast 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).
Google’s Gatekeepers
1 December, 2008 - 18:56 by felix
Jeffrey Rosen has an interesting article in the NYT Magazine asking "Are Google’s gatekeepers determining the limits of free speech?" He looks at various cases where Google decided how to respond to demands that it blocks access to material, most notably on YouTube.
