Fantastic use of Google Maps by protesting students in the U.K. to outwit police/authorities...certainly connects to Little Brother scenario.

Digital media and network technologies are now part of everyday life. The Internet has become the backbone of communication, commerce, and media; the ubiquitous mobile phone connects us with others as it removes us from any stable sense of location. Along with this, the public is transforming. The mass media and mass audience analyzed by the Frankfurt School are long past. Today we inhabit multiple, overlapping and global networks such as user forums, Facebook, Flickr, blogs, and wikis. The media industry which just a decade ago seemed well-established, is in flux, facing its greatest challenge ever. Our book, Networked Publics examines the ways that the social and cultural shifts created by these technologies have transformed our relationships to (and definitions of) place, culture, politics, and infrastructure.

On-line newspapers, information agency, blogs and personal websites, thematic media are monitored to highlight the pattern of perceptions on the urban space. This monitoring activity leads to the creation of an atlas that will produce - in real-time - different maps based on news sources, themes, and time. The atlas allows users to understand the urban space as a function of media attention and biases and social and cultural diversity of the city itself. 

Following our discussion on Thursday (10/28) about maps and such...

Cory Doctorow interviewed on NPR re: e-books and creating connections with an audience via emergent publishing tech

Telovation provides no-nonsense reporting on everything new, cool, and interesting in the world of technology, gadgets, and innovation. Telovation.com is a web news magazine that provides daily reports on the latest achievements in the world of technology, art, design, innovation, and interesting people and things from around the world.

a behind-the-scenes look at "truth" and "reality" in popular media production courtesy of Stargate Studios (http://www.stargatestudios.net/)

The Internet can be a hostile place, with powerful companies paying handsome sums to hide negative content in Google search results or any quest for information that might hurt their bottom line. Unseen battles are waged every day to protect and destroy brands and reputations.

Publicity was once the exclusive property of men of rank. They alone, by virtue of their stations, could make things public. During the eighteenth century it became meaningful to talk about public opinion as something formed outside the state. Today anyone with a Twitter account can make a public. In this series Ideas producer David Cayley examines how publics were formed in Europe between 1500 and 1700, and how these first publics grew into the concept of the public that we hold today.

Often, these groups seem simply to be a site to "park" political views in a place with access to thousands of sympathetic eyeballs. I argue that many individuals use Facebook to perform political identity in a venue that allows them to try on different political selves in a nomynous (not anonymous) venue. This means that individuals are performing a "public" political identity. For many of them this might be the only place they feel comfortable expressing this voice. Those who aren't good communicators, disabled, low income or otherwise inhibited from participating in political activism can use Facebook as a semi-autonomous space to proclaim their political self.

Not much on this site yet, but I found it by googling "public media". This is most of the text on the site: "The new Public Media Service will be based in Los Angeles and will involve the testing and development of a new radio and multimedia service directed to an ethnically diverse and underserved 25-40 year-old demographic and, initially, will target the fastest-growing population group in the region, Latinos."

A public relations/advertising outfit called "Public Media" (found by googling "public media" oddly enough...); from their welcome screen: "PUBLIC MEDIA is all about the client. Our production division, PUBLIC MEDIA and our advertising division, MAKE WAVES, create success for our clients by using new and traditional advertising, marketing, design and production techniques in creative and cost effective ways."