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Ed Webb

YouTube - Clay Shirky - 0 views

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    One of the smartest analysts of emerging digital media practices. Worth 40 minutes of your time.
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    Shirky rocks out in this excellent lecture/presentation on digital media and how we organize and disseminate data. Pull rather than push.
Ed Webb

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky - 0 views

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    Mentioned by David Faris on 3/19
Ed Webb

Why Small Payments Won't Save Publishers « Clay Shirky - 0 views

  • he media business is being turned upside down by our new freedoms and our new roles. We’re not just readers anymore, or listeners or viewers. We’re not customers and we’re certainly not consumers. We’re users. We don’t consume content, we use it, and mostly what we use it for is to support our conversations with one another, because we’re media outlets now too.
  • superdistribution — content moving from friend to friend through the social network, far from the original source of the story. Superdistribution, despite its unweildy name, matters to users. It matters a lot. It matters so much, in fact, that we will routinely prefer a shareable amateur source to a professional source that requires us to keep the content a secret on pain of lawsuit. (Wikipedia’s historical advantage over Britannica in one sentence.)
  • The internet really is a revolution for the media ecology, and the changes it is forcing on existing models are large. What matters at newspapers and magazines isn’t publishing, it’s reporting. We should be talking about new models for employing reporters rather than resuscitating old models for employing publishers; the more time we waste fantasizing about magic solutions for the latter problem, the less time we have to figure out real solutions to the former one.
Ed Webb

The Failure of #amazonfail « Clay Shirky - 0 views

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    Essential reading
Ed Webb

Journalism.co.uk :: 'Democratic legitimation via the web is not enough', says Clay Shirky - 0 views

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    Here comes everybody again, only this time they need some rules...
Ed Webb

MinnPost - As newspapers go away, our shared community is dispersing - 0 views

  • the news business as we've known it for generations is changing and will continue to change in ways we can't possibly imagine now.I accept that and even embrace it. Yet at the same time, I can't help but wonder how we can recover what is almost certain to be lost in this revolution: a sense of shared knowledge of our communities.
  • I think we're reaching the point when we need some technology that helps us filter, sort and make sense of the river of data that we swim in every day.There used to be something like that. It was called a newspaper.
  • I believe people still want what newspapers have provided: a sense of being presented with important, useful and enjoyable information, culled from many sources and thoughtfully organized.Like Clay Shirky, I don't know what online form that might take. And given the economics of the Web, it may be that nobody can make a living producing it.
Ed Webb

Middle East Revolutions: The View from China by Perry Link | NYRBlog | The New York Rev... - 5 views

  • hus, while Chinese censors have declared the word Mubarak (along with “Egypt” and others) to be “sensitive” and have set up filters to delete any message that contains it, Chinese Web users, in their usual cat-and-mouse game, have invented witty substitutes. These include “Mu Xiaoping” and “Mu Jintao”—which, by playing on the names of China’s own autocrats, get around the censors and up the ante at the same time.
    • gweyman
       
      The contest is at the level of the word - imitates the growth of search and of Twitter hashtags. 
  • The Egyptian uprising is an awkward fact for China’s rulers because it undermines one of their favorite arguments.
    • gweyman
       
      Is control at the level of the argument? What impact do arguments have in authoritarian countries? 
    • Ed Webb
       
      Even authoritarian regimes require consent at some level, even the consent of silence. This is why the role of dissenter is so important in such societies. Repression alone is too expensive - ideological hegemony is more efficient. So argument/dissent matters.
    • gweyman
       
      Agreed repression is expensive and often only causes more dissent. But the issue is whether ideological hegemony is actually about substantive arguments or a kind of rhetoric which citizens cannot break down, but know is false.
    • Ed Webb
       
      If you haven't read Lisa Wedeen's Ambiguities of Domination, you should! Great stuff on the power of absurd arguments.
    • gweyman
       
      Absolutely what I was thinking of. This book was quite influential for me. Thanks Ed. (ps back in the day I tried to take forward some of those arguments for Syria here http://users.ox.ac.uk/~metheses/WeymanThesis.htm)
    • Ed Webb
       
      That's going on my summer reading list!
  • The example of Tunisia raises a related question, equally awkward. For China’s rulers, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the ousted dictator, would have been seen as following their own approach—the so-called “Chinese model” of economic growth combined with political repression—and having much success with it, or so it was assumed for many years. But the Tunisian people took to the streets to overthrow him. Did the people want something more than the Chinese model? How could that be?
    • gweyman
       
      Points also to Saudi Arabia. 
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt could not have happened without Facebook and Twitter.
    • gweyman
       
      Over stated. How would the author explain Yemen where Facebook has a 1.6% penetration?
  • For five days at the height of the protests, Mubarak’s people were able to shut down the Internet and, for a time, cell phone networks as well.
    • gweyman
       
      Shutting the internet down was in effect the Egyptian government admitting to its own weakness in the face of growing internet  use that it could not control. 
  • Chinese sources have revealed that the government spends over 500 billion yuan ($76 billion) a year on domestic “stability maintenance.”
    • gweyman
       
      What is the relationship between what an authoritarian regime spends on maintaining its power and the fact of its continued power? Are these resources well spent? 
  • On February 15, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton delivered a speech on Internet freedom in which she said the US is committed to helping people in China and elsewhere “get around filters, stay one step ahead of the censors,” and in other ways join a free and open Internet. She said the US plans to award $25 million this year in competitive grants to “technologists and activists working at the cutting edge of the fight against Internet repression.”
    • gweyman
       
      US credibility in internet censorship is somewhat undermined by its response to Wikileaks. 
  • And which method—fighting Internet repression or fighting wars—seems more likely actually to bring democracy?
    • gweyman
       
      cf clay shirky on US policies on tackling internet repression. He argues it is not a particularly useful strategy.
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