Shirky Vs Morozov
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The future of the internet: A virtual counter-revolution | The Economist
THE first internet boom, a decade and a half ago, resembled a religious movement.
On Friday 27 May, Demos and the Open Society Institute hosted a panel discussion on the impact of the internet on democratic culture, institutes and engagement.
Demos | Events
With Twitter lauded for bringing down tyrannies and Facebook valued at more than $50 billion, we seem to be entering a new phase of digital utopianism. The interactivity of social networking and open data are seen by many as the drivers of a more participatory and democratic culture. Yet critics have long argued against the effects of the net in relation to privacy and corporate power, and argue the web’s culture of personalization undermines the exercise of democratic judgment.
Through a Web Darkly: Does the Internet Spread Democracy or Ignorance? | Information Program | Open Society Foundations - OSF
Early this April, when researchers at Washington University in St. Louis reported that a woman with a host of electrodes temporarily positioned over the speech center of her brain was able to move a computer cursor on a screen simply by thinking but not pronouncing certain sounds, it seemed like the Singularity—the long-standing science fiction dream of melding man and machine to create a better species—might have arrived. At Brown University around the same time, scientists successfully tested a different kind of brain–computer interface (BCI) called BrainGate, which allowed a paralyzed woman to move a cursor, again just by thinking.
Mind Control & the Internet by Sue Halpern | The New York Review of Books
Was What Happened in Tunisia a Twitter Revolution?: Tech News and Analysis «
As it did during the recent shootings in Arizona, the Twitter network provided a ringside seat for another major news event on Friday — the overthrow of a corrupt government in the African nation of Tunisia , after weeks of protests over repression and economic upheaval.
L'État-Nation peut-il survivre à la Société de l'Information ?
Ce texte est un mémoire de fin d'études de l'Institut d'Études Politiques de Grenoble établissement rattaché à l'Université Pierre Mendès-France de Grenoble (Grenoble 2). Il a été réalisé dans le cadre du séminaire de Daniel Bougnoux, professeur à l'Université Stendhal de Grenoble (Grenoble 3) " L'information, les médias et la démocratie ", et fut soutenu en septembre 1998.
The internet is a child with many fathers. It is an extremely complex multi-module technology and each module—from communication protocols to browsers—has a convoluted history. The internet’s earliest roots lie in the rise of cybernetics during the 1950s.
Two decades of the web: a utopia no longer | Prospect Magazine
Think Sharing and Free Are Good? Jaron Lanier Says (Group) Think Again, Idiots | Motherboard
You know the free music downloads you share over your fun social networking sites?“ Je trouve qu’on rentre dans une société étrange dans laquelle on ne peut plus rien dire, plus rien faire … Vous savez, la transparence absolue, c’est le début du totalitarisme . La transparence, ça veut dire qu’il n’y a plus d’intimité, plus de discrétion, plus rien n’a d’épaisseur dans la transparence, à commencer par les êtres, d’ailleurs … ”
De La Transparence, De L'Internet Et Du Totalitarisme - AgoraVox le média citoyen
Political Repression 2.0 - NYTimes.com
AGENTS of the East German Stasi could only have dreamed of the sophisticated electronic equipment that powered Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s extensive spying apparatus, which the Libyan transitional government uncovered earlier this week. The monitoring of text messages, e-mails and online chats — no communications seemed beyond the reach of the eccentric colonel.Evgeny Morozov: How democracy slipped through the net | Technology | The Guardian
On 15 June 2009, while thousands of Iranians were streaming on to the streets of Tehran to protest against the disputed results of the presidential election, Jared Cohen, an official in the US state department, quietly sent an email to Twitter. Despite coming from the youngest member of America's foreign policy arm – Cohen was just 27 at the time – it was surprisingly serious.The current chapter in the WikiLeaks saga has finally forced me to come out of my blogging semi-retirement! While I'm still trying to make sense of everything that has happened in the last ten days, here are some analytical notes on Anonymous and the challenges facing the Obama administration as it mulls an appropriate response to WikiLeaks. The impact of the recent wave of cyber-attacks launched by Anonymous on a handful of companies that dropped WikiLeaks as their client -- Amazon, EveryDNS, MasterCard, Visa and others -- is hard to gauge. I'm certain these attacks won't make any of these firms to reconsider, strike peace with WikiLeaks, and offer them some vouchers in compensation. But could the attacks serve as a deterrent to other firms that have been considering dropping WikiLeaks? Perhaps -- but I don't know how many such companies there are.