Group items tagged

A smart political article about the relation between communication and capitalism. Useful especially on the way technical networks both present themselves as political and foreclose the political.

Self explanatory title tracing the history of online spaces through its inception in a mass scale political context.

Nye, who argues that "the diffusion of power away from governments is one of this century's great political shifts", looks at the implications of cyber wars on the security budget as well as international relations within the political context.

Interesting process of Wikipedia's response to really poorly done political commentary on its site.

I apologize for all of the posts about WikiLeaks, but I'm fascinated by Assange's views of his work. One minute I feel like he's a hero and that these leaks really can open the masses' eyes to political corruption and scandal, but the next minutes I feel like he's playing with fire and am fearful of the consequences of uncovering these documents.

This RSA adaptation of Evgeny Morozov's 2009 talk illustrates (and examines) the concept of "cyber-utopianism": the theory that the internet "plays a largely emancipatory role in global politics." Morozov discusses whether or not the internet predominately empowers or censors citizens by facilitating activism and allowing individuals to disseminate information more effectively.

Fascinating article from frequent Chronicle tech blogger on why some academic scholars continue to use the typewriter. The primary answer - nostalgia - is both a mood (in the sense of a feeling one has in relation to history and technology), a political statement (opposed to forward modernization), and - perhaps - deeply related to the "literary" or writing (notalgia as why one writes).

McLuhan and Bogart would probably enjoy this article because it involves procedural rhetoric. It examines how "gamification strategies"--using games to change behavior in real life--can promote energy efficiency. Companies like SimpleEnergy are creating apps that let users track their energy usage, find ways to improve, and compete with friends and neighbors for spots on a leaderboard. Gamification succeeds because apparently social pressure can motivate people even more than monetary incentives, and these initiatives combine both types of incentives: An energy usage competition at the University of Hawaii led to some dorms cutting energy usage by up to 20 percent. This specific method also allows users to save money and conserve energy without "radical infrastructure changes" or the corruption and waste that often results from government subsidies to politically-connected "green" companies like Solyndra and possibly Sapphire Energy. In addition, the apps provide large-scale energy usage data that researchers can use to measure both change over time and the impact of energy usage on other variables.

This is a module that traces the evolution of the Republican candidates' Wikipedia pages during the course of the primaries. Some of the yahoo user comments at the bottom of the page are quite entertaining too

I wanted to add this link to the famous court case of Miller v California that helped define pornography and its protection (or lack thereof) under the first amendment. There is a lot to discuss here regarding offensiveness and "social value" especially in regard to the fact that the case dates back to the 70's. Perhaps the same case would be tried differently today.

This group is briefly mentioned in the chapter on Pranks in this week's reading. The fired game designer for the SIms helicopter game left and joined this group-- pretty much pranksters of an online nature. While it has little to do with video games, it has everything to do with ethos in an Internet age.

Netflix CEO gives a brief rant about the Comcast data limit and how it applies (or not) depending on which app you use for your content.

Black boxes: not just for airplanes anymore... And these should actually be black.

Another step forward in the "open source ecology" type world. Parts are still relatively expensive, but it's heading in the right direction

Google spent $5.03 million on lobbying in the first quarter of the year, almost matching its entire 2010 lobbying budget of $5.2 million. In comparison, Apple spent $500,000 and Microsoft spent $1.79 million during the same quarter. If Google maintains this pace, it will outspend the entire tobacco industry ($17 million) and the combined spending of JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup ($18 million).

A school district in Delaware recently proposed a rule that would require teachers to unfriend students, a district in Maine is banning all social networking, chat sites, forums, and other sites from state-provided laptops, and now the New York City Department of Education will now monitor teachers' interactions with students on professional social networking services. Teachers were warned not to expect any privacy and that administrators and officials should have access to the professional accounts. This makes me wonder if now workplaces and universities will require employees to loosen their privacy settings on their accounts.

The Obama administration is banning hundreds of thousands of federal employees from calling up the WikiLeaks site on government computers because the leaked material is still formally regarded as classified. The Library of Congress tonight joined the education department, the commerce department and other government agencies in confirming that the ban is in place.

Wikileaks leads to art.

Another common topic has seemed to be blogs and blogging, especially following the readings for last week. This seemed like a blog post that might add to the discussion.

There have been a lot of posts about web tracking in light of the recent changes in Google. This is an interesting article, but one of the things I like the best is the Collusion display of who's tracking your data.