Ten Theses on Wikileaks :: net critique by Geert Lovink

Ten Theses on Wikileaks :: net critique by Geert Lovink:

"These 5.
The steady decline of investigative journalism due to diminishing support and funding is an undeniable fact. The ever-ongoing acceleration and over-crowding in the so-called attention economy makes that there is no longer enough room for complicated stories. The corporate owners of mass circulation media are also less and less inclined to see the working of the neo-liberal globalized economy and its politics detailled and discussed at length. The shift of information towards infotainment demanded by the public and media-owners has unfortunately also been embraced as a working style by journalists themselves making it difficult to publish complex stories. Wikileaks erupts in this state of affairs as an outsider within the steamy ambiance of ‘citizen journalism’ and DIY news reporting in the blogosphere. What Wikileaks anticipates, but so far has not been able to organize, is the ‘crowd sourcing’ of the actual interpretation of its leaked documents."

It is interesting that Wikileaks worked with high-profile news organizations that still do investigative journalism when it released this archive of material. In other words, it knows that this mountain of information needs analysis in order to mean something, in order for its full impact to be felt. And it is clear from the articles produced by major news organizations that it was the overwhelming impact of the large body of material that was most persuasive.
--

Google Up Close and Personal « Tennant: Digital Libraries

Google Up Close and Personal « Tennant: Digital Libraries:

"I did a vanity search, to see how many characters it would take before my page sifted to the top. For me, it only took “roy te” for my web site to be the top hit. But that was for me. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that a hair salon filled the page of results for everyone else.
So that sent me on a quest to purge all knowledge Google might have of me, or what I liked in the past, in order to recreate the experience that everyone else would have. Little did I know how difficult and unsatisfying that would be.

Roy Tennant"

It turns out that it is very difficult to escape from Google's Personalized search which began in December of 2009
--

Americans Spending More Time Following the News: OVERVIEW - Pew Research Center for the People & the Press

Americans Spending More Time Following the News: OVERVIEW - Pew Research Center for the People & the Press:

"Digital platforms are playing a larger role in news consumption, and they seem to be more than making up for modest declines in the audience for traditional platforms."

Massaging the bad news...
--

The future of the internet: A virtual counter-revolution | The Economist

The future of the internet: A virtual counter-revolution | The Economist: "A virtual counter-revolution
The internet has been a great unifier of people, companies and online networks. Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it"

First, governments are increasingly reasserting their sovereignty. Recently several countries have demanded that their law-enforcement agencies have access to e-mails sent from BlackBerry smart-phones. This week India, which had threatened to cut off BlackBerry service at the end of August, granted RIM, the device’s maker, an extra two months while authorities consider the firm’s proposal to comply. However, it has also said that it is going after other communication-service providers, notably Google and Skype.

Second, big IT companies are building their own digital territories, where they set the rules and control or limit connections to other parts of the internet. Third, network owners would like to treat different types of traffic differently, in effect creating faster and slower lanes on the internet.

--

E-communication and society: A cyber-house divided | The Economist

E-communication and society: A cyber-house divided | The Economist:

"Mr Zuckerman frets that the internet really serves to boost ties within countries, not between them. Using data from Google, he looked at the top 50 news sites in 30 countries. Almost every country reads all but 5% of its news from domestic sources. Mr Zuckerman believes that goods and services still travel much farther than ideas, and that the internet allows us to be “imaginary cosmopolitans”.

Geopolitical units are still powerful realities even in a borderless networked world. The Economist story points to some very interesting research in this area.
--

Op-Ed Contributor - Google’s Earth - NYTimes.com

Op-Ed Contributor - Google’s Earth - NYTimes.com:

"We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google."

William Gibson has some interesting thoughts on Google in his article from the NYT. Are we all now citizens of Google, watchers and the watched?

A history of folly, from the Trojan horse to Afghanistan | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free | The Guardian

A history of folly, from the Trojan horse to Afghanistan | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free | The Guardian:

"Far from defeating the enemy, technology is portrayed as shielding soldiers from the immediate result of their actions, hence distorting tactics and corrupting strategy. By recording failure in meticulous detail, the logs mock the moral basis for so-called wars among the peoples. Like Vietnam's TV images, they leave the Iraq and Afghan conflicts as bloodthirsty killing fields, devoid of rational justification.

The war logs are not so much sensational as relentless. Most of the material was known. It is the detail that bears devastating witness. Afghanistan 2001 now enters firmly into the pantheon of folly, from the wooden horse to Napoleon in Moscow to Vietnam. Indeed it bears the added crassness of coming two decades after the Russians committed the exact same folly in the same place.

What Wikileaks really revealed. What technology hides through technological warfare, the web helps to reveal.

MinnPost - The paper book is dead, long live the narrative

MinnPost - The paper book is dead, long live the narrative:

Wreading. All things digital blur. Any formerly crisp boundary in the physical world becomes porous and fuzzy in the digital world by the mere fact that content is no longer captive to the container. While the ideas behind any piece of fiction or non-fiction are intangible, rendered as ink on paper, they are immutable. Kept in the native form of bits, by contrast, the expression of an idea is not only fungible, but the reader can become a writer – what I am calling a wreader. A previously solitary experience becomes a social experience (unlike this one, so far).

Righting. Wikipedia is an example. It is about intellectual property seen as a collective process. The expansion and correcting of content is admittedly more germane to non-fiction than fiction, but the point is that text with digital readers can evolve both in terms of facts and point of view on those facts. To date with physical books, the closest approximation we have is reading somebody’s annotations in the margin. Another example is commentary at the end of a digitally published article. You might argue that the original narrative of such an article is often more considered, deliberate and refined than the comments that follow. True. But the volume (in the sense of loudness) and tone of the feedback is a form of self-correction of ideas, one that we have never had before.
- Sent using Google Toolbar

Why a Wreader and Righter? Why not a Weader and a Wrighter, or a Rweader and a Rwighter?

Slavoj Žižek: Wake up and smell the apocalypse

Slavoj Žižek: Wake up and smell the apocalypse
New Scientist
30 August 2010 by Liz Else

Do these issues arise from problems about what humans are becoming, and the relationships between the public and the private?

Yes. These are problems of the commons, the resources we collectively own or share. Nature is commons, biogenetics is genetic commons, intellectual property is commons. So how did Bill Gates become the richest man on earth? We are paying him rent. He privatised part of the "general intellect", the social network of communication - it's a new enclosure of the commons. This has given a new boost to capitalism, but in the long term it will not work. It's out of control.

Take a bottle of water: I produce it, you buy it. If I drink it, you cannot. Knowledge is exactly the opposite. If it freely circulates, it doesn't lose value; if anything, it gains value. The problem for companies is how to prevent the free circulation of knowledge. Sometimes they spend more money and time trying to prevent free copying than on developing products.

And now others are working even harder to enclose part of the social network commons.

The city is a hypertext

By Tim Carmody • Aug 12, 2010
on
The City is a Hypertext

And whenever I read anything about the web rewiring our brains, foretelling immanent disaster, I've always thought, geez, people -- we live in cities! Our species has evolved to survive in every climate and environment on dry land. Our brains can handle it!

Same ground that I continue to think about, Georg Simmel &c., but with some new additions.
I like relevance of this

Steve Jobs recently compared the shift from desktop to mobile computers to the shift from trucks to cars. You could maybe say something similar about the future of physical books compared to other kinds of media. The older forms don't go away, but they become more specialized, and the relationships between them become different, as our lifestyles change.

Is it that there is some basic difference in the character of our interactions with e-book readers, for example, something that connects them to a more urban, more alienated mode of existence. I can't at the moment imagine, but it is worth thinking about.

After Afghan War Leaks, Revisions in a Shield Bill - NYTimes.com

After Afghan War Leaks, Revisions in a Shield Bill - NYTimes.com:

"Senators Charles E. Schumer and Dianne Feinstein, Democrats of New York and California, are drafting an amendment to make clear that the bill’s protections extend only to traditional news-gathering activities and not to Web sites that serve as a conduit for the mass dissemination of secret documents. The so-called “media shield” bill is awaiting a vote on the Senate floor."

The war on WikiLeaks continues, or gathers steam. Would the "Pentagon Papers" fall under the shield of "traditional news-gathering"? And what is traditional news-gathering anymore?

Mel Gibson, Lindsay Lohan... and you too. Why your reputation needs an online detox | Technology | The Observer

Mel Gibson, Lindsay Lohan... and you too. Why your reputation needs an online detox | Technology | The Observer:

"We assume that Mr Harris would like his 'Google resume' to reflect positively on his unique career in international journalism. He can build that brand by ensuring that a Google search brings up positive and relevant content like his Observer profile, some of his best articles, his book, and his author page."

This is the first time, but probably not the last, that I have come across the term "Google resume."

The Ghosts of World War II's Past (20 photos) - My Modern Metropolis

The Ghosts of World War II's Past (20 photos) - My Modern Metropolis:

"Taking old World War II photos, Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov carefully photoshops them over more recent shots to make the past come alive. Not only do we get to experience places like Berlin, Prague, and Vienna in ways we could have never imagined, more importantly, we are able to appreciate our shared history in a whole new and unbelievably meaningful way."

Social networks and statehood: The future is another country | The Economist

Social networks and statehood: The future is another country | The Economist

The Web Means the End of Forgetting - NYTimes.com

The Web Means the End of Forgetting - NYTimes.com: "The Web Means the End of Forgetting" by Jeffrey Rosen

In a recent book, “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,” the cyberscholar Viktor Mayer-Schönberger cites Stacy Snyder’s case as a reminder of the importance of “societal forgetting.” By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.”

Study Finds No Link Between Social-Networking Sites and Academic Performance - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Study Finds No Link Between Social-Networking Sites and Academic Performance - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education: "July 15, 2010, 11:00 AM ET
Study Finds No Link Between Social-Networking Sites and Academic Performance
By Kelly Truong

Spend as much time on Facebook as you want—it won’t affect your GPA, a new study says.

Researchers at Northwestern University found no connection between time spent on social-networking sites and academic performance. The study, the results of which appear in the latest issue of Information, Communication & Society, included responses from approximately 1,000 first-year students at the University of Illinois at Chicago."

Martha Lane Fox introduces the data which shows the digital divide | News | guardian.co.uk

Martha Lane Fox introduces the data which shows the digital divide | News | guardian.co.uk

Try to picture it: it's the equivalent of the entire populations of our five biggest cities combined - London, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow and Sheffield - all being left without the tool that we now heavily rely on every day.

Four million of those who are offline are society's most disadvantaged: 39% are over 65.38% are unemployed - 19% are adults in families with children.

WikiLeaks and Julian Paul Assange : The New Yorker

WikiLeaks and Julian Paul Assange : The New Yorker: "NO SECRETS
Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency.
by Raffi Khatchadourian"

WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency.

...a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian#ixzz0s3YufzzN

Part of the article reads like something from a recent William Gibson novel, and the rest is an interesting portrait of Assange.

Mick Gzowski on online reputation management

The un-Googling of Mick Gzowski - The Globe and Mail

Denise Brunsdon, director of social media for the public-affairs firm GCI Group, says online reputation management is one of the fastest-growing areas of their business. It seems like whenever she tells people her title these days, she gets asked if she can do another contract.

As Gzowski shows in this article, online reputation is something many individuals and organizations want to control or manipulate. Being able to do it or help others do it has become an occupation in itself.
And by writing this blog post about this article, I may be helping Gzowski improve his own online reputation.

Social Media for Higher Education

Slideshare presentation:

Social Media for Higher Education

View more presentations from Trebor Scholz.

Saying information wants to be free does more harm than good | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Saying information wants to be free does more harm than good | Technology | guardian.co.uk: "'Information wants to be free' (IWTBF hereafter) is half of Stewart Brand's famous aphorism, first uttered at the Hackers Conference in Marin County, California (where else?), in 1984:

'On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.'

"
Doctorow makes a good case for not saying IWTBF anymore. It is good to remember that it was not intended to stand on its own as an absolute statement of fact but as part of a paradox.

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options - Graphic - NYTimes.com

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options - Graphic - NYTimes.com

Infographic illustrating the way Facebook's privacy settings have changed, as part of Nick Bilton's article "The Price of Facebook Privacy?". A good illustration of Facebook's attempt to find a way of enabling it to control personal identity online.

Making the internet safe for free speech | Gus Hosein | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Making the internet safe for free speech | Gus Hosein | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Through a simple subpoena or unwarranted access, vast amounts of personal information on individuals may be accessible to government authorities, much of which would have been previously inaccessible. Tactics such as these are regularly used to discover the identities of journalists' sources by gaining access to telephone and email logs so surveillance creates a hostile environment for free speech.

Generation Control

Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline
The NYTimes reports that students

are more diligent than older adults, however, in trying to protect themselves. In a new study to be released this month, the Pew Internet Project has found that people in their 20s exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves. “Social networking requires vigilance, not only in what you post, but what your friends post about you,” said Mary Madden, a senior research specialist who oversaw the study by Pew, which examines online behavior. “Now you are responsible for everything.”

My own study shows that a large portion of students at Dal is concerned about privacy when using Facebook, but it also shows that a solid minority believes that there are no real privacy concerns.

hypnotizing chickens

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint

WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

Read the full story at the NYTimes "We have met the enemy and he has PowerPoint"

Beyond The Beyond

Beyond The Beyond:

"Tim O’Reilly and the future of the Internet of Things. He rambles on for half an hour. It looks like he’s just telling disconnected alpha-geek anecdotes, in his customary, avuncular, visionary fashion. What Tim’s really doing is throwing lit matches into his network. And boy is he the guru when it comes to doing that. He can’t outguess the future and deliver a single coherent narrative, that’s not even possible."

BBC News - Today - A world without planes

BBC News - Today - A world without planes:

"Uncynical, unvigilant
Everything would, of course, go very slowly. It would take two days to reach Rome, a month before one finally sailed exultantly into Sydney harbour. And yet there would be benefits tied up in this languor.
Those who had known the age of planes would recall the confusion they had felt upon arriving in Mumbai or Rio, Auckland or Montego Bay, only hours after leaving home, their slight sickness and bewilderment lending credence to the old Arabic saying that the soul invariably travels at the speed of a camel."

Edge: THE REALITY CLUB: "DIGITAL POWER AND ITS DISCONTENTS"

Edge: THE REALITY CLUB: "DIGITAL POWER AND ITS DISCONTENTS":

"It seems apparent, alas, that Facebook, Twitter, etc. have not improved American democracy, and yet we expect these tools to promote democracy elsewhere.

The basic problem is that web 2.0 tools are not supportive of democracy by design. They are tools designed to gather spy-agency-like data in a seductive way, first and foremost, but as a side effect they tend to provide software support for mob-like phenomena. There are some nice mob effects, but the intensity of the failures is more profound than the delights of the successes."

Edge: DIGITAL POWER AND ITS DISCONTENTS — Morozov & Shirky: An Edge Conversation

Edge: DIGITAL POWER AND ITS DISCONTENTS — Morozov & Shirky: An Edge Conversation:

"The dreams of network utopians vs. the realists. Is the Internet is a medium of emancipation and of revolution — or a tool of control and repression? Did Twitter and Facebook have stoke the flames of rebellion in Iran, or did they help the authorities unmask the rebels? — Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung"

In E-Book Era, You Can’t Even Judge a Cover - NYTimes.com

In E-Book Era, You Can’t Even Judge a Cover - NYTimes.com:

"Bindu Wiles was on a Q train in Brooklyn this month when she spotted a woman reading a book whose cover had an arresting black silhouette of a girl’s head set against a bright orange background.
Ms. Wiles noticed that the woman looked about her age, 45, and was carrying a yoga mat, so she figured that they were like-minded and leaned in to catch the title: “Little Bee,” a novel by Chris Cleave. Ms. Wiles, a graduate student in nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, tapped a note into her iPhone and bought the book later that week."

The unanticipated encounter--the subway train, the affinity with the fellow passenger, the discovery of an unknown book--all more difficult in the age of ebooks, where the cover ceases to exist as a sign to the world.

Cognitive Surplus -- Clay Shirky

CITE Journal - Editorial

The Pew Internet and American Life project reports that the majority of all teens are now engaged in active creation of online content. The rise of social media reflects new opportunities and outlets for creativity.

Increased youth engagement through these activities represents a repurposing of what Clay Shirky terms a cognitive surplus. Shirky, a professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University, believes that a movement from passive activities such as watching television to more active and creative pursuits is emerging as a use of the cognitive surplus in the Web 2.0 era. Collaborative projects such as Wikipedia demonstrate that a previously unexploited collective intelligence can be tapped when the right conditions are established.

It is almost as if one of the goals of teaching with technology or using the technology that students use is a way of trying to squeeze educational goals into the creative activities of students.
Cognitive surplus is an interesting term--does it mean light or just heat? does it mean cognitive power put to the task of solving problems and creating new things, or is it just employing brain cycles to filter and recycle ideas and objects found on the web?

MoMA | @ at MoMA

MoMA | @ at MoMA
History of @

Danah Boyd: How Technology Makes A Mess Of Privacy and Publicity

Danah Boyd: How Technology Makes A Mess Of Privacy and Publicity:

a compelling talk that challenged the notion that personal information is on a binary spectrum of public or private

Boyd then discussed how different groups of people think about privacy. She says that teenagers are much more conscious about what they have to gain by being in public, whereas adults are more concerned about what they have to lose.

There is another summary of this presentation at ReadWriteWeb
Boyd's own notes for the presentation are also available at her website: http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/SXSW2010.html

Giz Explains: How You're Gonna Get Screwed By Ebook Formats - Ebooks - Gizmodo

Giz Explains: How You're Gonna Get Screwed By Ebook Formats - Ebooks - Gizmodo
Detailed explanation of ebook formats for major ebook readers, discussing how much freedom one will have to move ebooks from one device to another -- not much as it turns out. It also raises the question of whether the epub or the PDF is superior. An interesting point for debate.

Miller-McCune Research Essay — Handwriting Is History | Smart Journalism. Real Solutions. | Miller-McCune Online Magazine

Miller-McCune Research Essay — Handwriting Is History | Smart Journalism. Real Solutions. | Miller-McCune Online Magazine:

"Most of us know, but often forget, that handwriting is not natural. We are not born to do it. There is no genetic basis for writing. Writing is not like seeing or talking, which are innate. Writing must be taught."

And yet, it has become part of most people's minds so that if (or when) our ability to write ends or declines...

We may, however, forsake some neurological memory. I imagine some pathways in our brains will atrophy. Then again, I imagine my brain is developing new cognitive pathways each time I hit control C or double click Firefox.

Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine

Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget. - By Michael Agger - Slate Magazine:

"Perhaps our regimented Facebook selves have made things more vanilla. Perhaps you did stumble down more idiosyncratic paths of knowledge before Wikipedia dominated the top Google search results. But these are the kinds of nostalgic observations that are ridiculous to anyone young. The Web hasn't lost flavor; you've lost flavor."

Interesting review of Lanier's book, but this passage caught my eye. It may be worth looking at Lanier to see if he does make any argument related to the loss of the unanticipated. And while Lanier does have a solution for the economic problem he sees in the web's open structure, he does not have a solution to the culture of Google.
And an interview with Lanier by Aleks Krotoski

Atemporality for the Creative Artist | Beyond The Beyond

Atemporality for the Creative Artist | Beyond The Beyond:

"There are new asynchronous communication forms that are globalized and offshored, and there is the loss of a canon and a record. There is no single authoritative voice of history. Instead we get wildly empowered cranks, lunatics, and every kind of long-tail intellectual market appearing in network culture. Everything from brilliant insight to scurillous rumor."

Bruce Sterling, as usual, stimulating and weird at the same time. And, doubtless, yes, perhaps now, because of the internet / web there is a cacophony of voices... but...
Someone -- who, I forget who, but someone much smarter than me -- wrote about the fact that the present is always on the brink of a future that is unknown. There is always a basic "atemporality" in Sterling's sense, but I don't think it is the right word. He laments that the master narrative has been lost, but the fact is that the master narratives we create are always failing, not because some line of history is being lost, but because we never really understand the present in a complex enough way -- the way we will understand it when it is past. Atemporality may be messy or an intractable problem at the moment, but why lament the lack of a master narrative -- this is just for a dionysian moment a realization of the truth: there is no real master narrative, there never was.

FT.com / Comment / Editorial - Google’s size puts it in the searchlight

FT.com / Comment / Editorial - Google’s size puts it in the searchlight:

"The overarching issue is: does the gatekeeping role of web search give it a public utility-like role? That is the difficult question that Mr Almunia must help to answer."

Several things lately have made me come back to the idea of the web as a city, one that started out as a medieval city of small houses close together--smaller communities that grew and merged organically into a densely populated and crowded urban space, where getting anywhere was difficult and finding things tricky and uncertain.
Google is like Baron Haussmann, who cut boulevards through the structure of Paris bringing ease of movement as well as water and sewer service, to the city.
As the FT article points out, Google is like a utility (and like a gatekeeper (another medieval urban image)). Its roles actually reshape the information space. So, yes, it is a utility.

Google Massive infographic

Google facts and figures (massive infographic) | Royal Pingdom

>

The Future of the Internet IV | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

The Future of the Internet IV | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project:

"the Internet will enhance our intelligence – not make us stupid. It will also change the functions of reading and writing and be built around still-unanticipated gadgetry and applications. The battle over control of the internet will rage on."

Short history of the future of the Web

BBC News - MEPs condemn Nokia Siemens 'surveillance tech' in Iran

BBC News - MEPs condemn Nokia Siemens 'surveillance tech' in Iran:

"Euro MPs have 'strongly' criticised telecoms firm Nokia Siemens Networks for providing 'surveillance technology' to the Iranian authorities.
In a resolution adopted on Wednesday, the MEPs said the hardware was instrumental in the 'persecution and arrests of Iranian dissidents'."

And also a comment from Amnesty International:

Technology, particularly Internet and telecommunications technology, provides ‘the good guys’ with new tools to help them do their job: documenting human rights abuses, telling as many people as possible about it, mobilising people to try to stop them. But it also provides ‘the bad guys’ with new tools to do their job too – bugging people’s conversations, snooping on their emails, tracking their location.

Is technology really good for human rights?

E-books: Publishers poised for victory in latest battle - Times Online

E-books: Publishers poised for victory in latest battle - Times Online:

"It is believed that allowing buyers to print copies from Google Editions, or allowing the copying and pasting of extracts, is also now off the table."

Old media, doing what old media seems to do best in the information age.

A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749 - New York Times

A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749 - New York Times:

"But the detailed records of searches conducted by Ms. Arnold and 657,000 other Americans, copies of which continue to circulate online, underscore how much people unintentionally reveal about themselves when they use search engines — and how risky it can be for companies like AOL, Google and Yahoo to compile such data."

The more you search, the more the search engine knows what you are looking for. And on the other side of the coin, the more you search, the less anonymous you are to the search engine.

China Alarmed by Security Threat From Internet - NYTimes.com

China Alarmed by Security Threat From Internet - NYTimes.com:

"In the view of both political analysts and technology experts here and in the United States, China’s attempts to tighten its grip on Internet use are driven in part by the conviction that the West — and particularly the United States — is wielding communications innovations from malware to Twitter to weaken it militarily and to stir dissent internally."

The view from the other side: America and American technology as a tool for destabilization and disruptive change.

Google's Superbowl Ad

Edge: CLOUD CULTURE: THE PROMISE AND THE THREAT by Charles Leadbeater

Edge: CLOUD CULTURE: THE PROMISE AND THE THREAT by Charles Leadbeater:

"Digital clouds will be either commercial, social or public."

Charles Leadbeater gives a classification of digital clouds. And the growth of these clouds creates the possibility of what he calls "Cloud Culture" which could lead, he says, to "Exponential growth in mass cultural expression". And all of this culture could be / should be

a rare and delicate mix: more decentralised, plural and collaborative; less hierarchical, proprietary and money driven; the boundaries between amateur and professional, consumer and producer, grassroots and mainstream are breached, if not erased.

Yet, he is not blind to the other possibility, pointed out by Evgeny Morozov--the fact that authoritarian governments can also make use of the cloud.
Leadbeater is "hopeful but realistic," as much as it is possible to be about the unfolding future, but the truth remains to be seen.

Two futures of the internet: next cold war or up in the clouds | Technology | The Observer

Two futures of the internet: next cold war or up in the clouds | Technology | The Observer

Future 1: cyber war

"the world's dominant internet company is now in the crossfire of early skirmishes of the next cold war.

This thought was reinforced by Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman. He'd been to the International Institute for Strategic Studies for a briefing on its annual survey, Military Balance. 'The thing I found most interesting,' he said, 'was the confirmation that cyber-security is the hot issue … John Chipman, the head of the IISS, says the institute is about to launch a study of cyber-security which raises all sorts of issues. What if a country's infrastructure could be destroyed as effectively by a cyber-attack as by an invasion of tanks? How do you defend against that? How do you identify the culprits? What does international law have to say – might we have to revise our definitions of what constitutes an act of war?

'Chipman argues, plausibly, that we are now at an equivalent period to the early 1950s. Just as strategists had to devise whole new doctrines to cope with the nuclear age, so they will have to come up with new ideas to cope with the information age.'"

Visitors and Residents (from blip.tv)

from blip.tv

Visitors & Residents

This video explains the useful distinction between Visitors and Residents on the web.

From Tall blog: tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk

‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web

Most of us do this to some degree. We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too.

If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read — and doing it for free — I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look. Yet today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share.

Yes, maybe, but...

It isn't exactly controlled serendipity, it is more creating structures which allow one to control that which otherwise would be left to serendipity. So, in many ways, it is not in the least serendipitous. It is, however, the use of channels or paths that are unusual, but are adapted for an organizational, a resource-finding purpose that were not originally designed for this. It is path making.

Top 10 technologies for tyranny - Software - Technology - News - CRN Australia

Top 10 technologies for tyranny - Software - Technology - News - CRN Australia: "Top 10 technologies for tyranny"

Top 10 technologies for tyranny

By Iain Thomson
Jan 18, 2010 9:29 AM

Essential tools for up-and-coming despots."

The top five
5. Malware/keyloggers
4. CCTV

3. Databases

The beauty of the database is that it creates a streamlined, efficient method for reducing everyday human activity to a collection of statistics. A well-maintained database is particularly effective in times of strife, as modern tools have made it possible to cross-reference names and locations with previously flagged entries.

2. Web monitoring

...some countries have set up their own internal web monitoring systems, notably China although other countries also practice this. Such systems not only allow content to be blocked at source but also allow the authorities to keep track of what individuals are doing online. They are helped in this by companies operating in the country in question more often than not.

Basically web monitoring is just another form of undercover surveillance, but as the world becomes to rely more and more on the internet so web monitoring is becoming more useful as a method for crushing dissent.

1. Firewalls

Truly, for the ruler who demands the finest in information suppression, the large-scale public firewall is a must.

Is it really doomsday for books? Not while English casts its spell | Books | Books | The Observer

Is it really doomsday for books? Not while English casts its spell | Books | Books | The Observer:

"The books themselves, with some egregious exceptions, are better printed, bound and jacketed than ever before. Take any volume published in the 1970s and place it next to, say, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall or Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn. The contrast is shocking. Narrow margins, cheap paper, and hideous typography have all had a comprehensive aesthetic makeover."

Interesting that the rise of e-books and the rising threat to the existence of the book might reinvigorate the quality of books produced.