Limits on the Media
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My View: Are electronic media making us less (or more) literate? – Schools of Thought - CNN.com Blogs
by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Special to CNN Editor’s Note: Kathleen Fitzpatrick is director of scholarly communication at the Modern Language Association . She is the author of "Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy" and author of the blog Planned Obsolescence . "U kno wat i mean?"
In Piracy Bill Fight, New Economy Rises Against Old - NYTimes.com
Yet on Wednesday this formidable old guard was forced to make way for the new as Web powerhouses backed by Internet activists rallied opposition to the legislation through Internet blackouts and cascading criticism, sending an unmistakable message to lawmakers grappling with new media issues: Don’t mess with the Internet. As a result, the legislative battle over two once-obscure bills to combat the piracy of American movies, music, books and writing on the World Wide Web may prove to be a turning point for the way business is done in Washington. It represented a moment when the new economy rose up against the old.
Some sites blacked out — among them, the English-language , though it was possible to access the encyclopedia through several clever workarounds — while others, including and Craigslist, draped their pages with information about the bills, or restricted access. Many start-ups quickly cobbled together tech solutions to support their cause. HelloFax, for example, created a tool that let people send their representatives faxes voicing their opinions through the Web. The effort was an unusual orchestration that began gathering steam online late Tuesday night and escalated early Wednesday morning, eventually whipping the Web into a frenzy. Google said 4.5 million people signed its online petition to Congress, voicing displeasure at the legislation; said more than two million posts on the subject flowed through the site by early afternoon, nearly four times as many as usual.
With Blackouts and Twitter, Web Flexes Its Muscle - NYTimes.com
Wikipedia will black out the English language version of its website Wednesday to protest anti-piracy legislation under consideration in Congress, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries reports on digits. It will undermine free speech and due process, says one side. It will protect America's creative class from thieves, says the other. But what's really in the Stop Online Piracy Act? A guide:
Understanding SOPA: A Simple Q&A for Understanding the Online Piracy Debate - WSJ.com
Meanwhile, sites that host user-generated content will be under pressure to closely monitor users' behavior. That monitoring already happens on larger sites such as YouTube, but it could be a huge liability for startups, the EFF argues. Some progressive pundits have argued that media companies are trying to legislate their way out of what's really a business-model problem. "As we've seen over and over again, the most successful (by far) 'attack' against piracy is awesome new platforms that give customers what they want , such as Spotify and Netflix," TechDirt's Mike Masnick writes . SOPA and PIPA supporters argue that prophecies of a broken Internet are overblown. Cary Sherman, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, writes that SOPA clearly defines infringing sites based on Supreme Court holdings and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and requires rights holders to follow a strict set of rules when trying to get payment cut off to an infringing site.
SOPA and PIPA: Just the Facts | PCWorld
Why 2011 Will Be Defined by Social Media Democracy
Ekaterina Walter is a social media strategist at Intel. She is a part of Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence and is responsible for company-wide social media enablement and corporate social networking strategy. She was recently elected to serve on the board of directors of WOMMA. On Jan. 25, 2011 pictures and videos flooded out of Egypt as tens of thousands of anti-government protestors took to the streets in a “Day of Rage” protest over President Mubarak’s 30-year rule. Pro-democracy sympathizers across the world retweeted and shared the updates, even as the Egyptian government disabled cellphone towers and blocked Twitter in an attempt to censor the material. Reports indicated that households and businesses opened up their Wi-Fi networks to support the protesters and to allow the dissemination of information.
In base economic terms, the value of individual Twitter updates seems to be negligible; after all, what is a Twitter post but a few bits of data sent caroming through the Internet? But in a world where social media’s influence can mean the difference between a lucrative sale and another fruitless cold call, social media accounts at companies have taken on added significance. The question is: Can a company cash in on, and claim ownership of, an employee’s social media account, and if so, what does that mean for workers who are increasingly posting to Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus during work hours?
Lawsuit May Determine Who Owns a Twitter Account - NYTimes.com
The Saturday Profile - Blogger Aleksei Navalny Rouses Russia - NYTimes.com
Cut off from the Internet, ’s best-known blogger will have to wait until the next morning, when his lawyer will take him a stack of printouts telling him what happened — whether the protest fizzled, exploded into violence or made history. At a final coordinating meeting for the protest on Friday evening, where a roomful of veteran organizers were shouting to make themselves heard, a young environmental activist turned toward the crowd, suddenly grave. “I’d like to thank Aleksei Navalny,” she said. “Thanks to him, specifically because of the efforts of this concrete person, tomorrow thousands of people will come out to the square. It was he who united us with the idea: all against ‘the Party of Swindlers and Thieves,’ ” the name Mr.Media Consolidation
Would Facebook, he scoffed, have turned J. Edgar Hoover into John Hoover? “Where are you hiding, Mark?” he demanded of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, in one post . “Come out here and give me back my name!” The Twitterverse took up his cause.
Rushdie Wins Facebook Fight Over Identity - NYTimes.com
Privacy Concerns
Arab Uprisings
South Park 200/201
WikiLeaks
Censorship in China
Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project
Occupy Wall Street
War of the Worlds - Radiolab
This hour of Radiolab: an examination of the power of mass media to create panic. In our very first live hour, we take a deep dive into one of the most controversial moments in broadcasting history: Orson Welles' 1938 radio play about Martians invading New Jersey. "The War of the Worlds" is believed to have fooled over a million people when it originally aired, and it's continued to fool people since--from Santiago, Chile to Buffalo, New York to a particularly disastrous evening in Quito, Ecuador.That is what Bjork has accomplished with her latest conception, “Biophilia,” among the most creative, innovative and important new projects in popular culture. “Biophilia” essentially turns an album into a sort of audiovisual game, delivering a miniature production studio into the world’s willing hands. That doesn’t mean I like the music very much. Many of the songs on “Biophilia” strike me as hyper-serious, self-conscious twaddle; they don’t even make me want to get up and dance. Yet as a game critic who spends more personal time twitching my hips than twiddling my thumbs, I’m convinced that ambitious artists and executives in the struggling music industry will recognize “Biophilia” as a vital step forward in rethinking how their work can be conceived, packaged, delivered and made relevant to the public. The traditional, linear version of “Biophilia,” released this month, can be downloaded from services like iTunes .