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Audrey B

Electronic Civil Disobedience and the World Wide Web of Hacktivism: - 1 views

  • In the spring of 1998, a young British hacker known as "JF" accessed about 300 web sites and placed anti-nuclear text and imagery. He entered, changed and added HTML code. At that point it was the biggest political hack of its kind. Since then, and increasingly over the course of the year, there were numerous reports of web sites being accessed and altered with political content.
  • By no means was 1998 the first year of the browser wars, but it was the year when electronic civil disobedience and hacktivism came to the fore, evidenced by a front page New York Times article on the subject by the end of October. Since then the subject has continued to move through the media sphere.
  • computerized activism, grassroots infowar, electronic civil disobedience, politicized hacking, and resistance to future war
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  • these five portals seem to provide a useful starting point for a more in-depth, yet to come, examination of the convergence of activism, art, and computer-based communication and media.
  • PeaceNet enabled - really for the first time - political activists to communicate with one another across international borders with relative ease and speed.
  • The international role of email communication, coupled to varying degrees with the use of the Fax machine, was highlighted in both the struggles of pro-democracy Chinese students and in broader trans-national movements that lead to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
  • the role of international email communication in linking together the world.
  • an overarching dominant paradigm that privileges discourse, dialogue, discussion and open and free access.
  • So the first portal of Computerized Activism is important for understanding the roots of today’s extraparliamentarian,
  • Computerized activism, defined more purely as the use of the Internet infrastructure as a means for activists to communicate with one another, across international borders or not, is less threatening to power than the other types of uses we see emerging in which the Internet infrastructure is not only a means toward or a site for communication, but the Internet infrastructure itself becomes an object or site for action.
    • Audrey B
       
      Twitter, YouTube, other forms of social networking that provide communication within the Internet infrastructure to become an "object or site for action"...
  • Infowar here refers to a war of words, a propaganda war. Grassroots infowar is the first step, the first move away from the Internet as just a site for communication and the beginning of the transformation from word to deed.
  • emerge fully cognizant they are on a global stage, telepresent across borders, in many locations simultaneously.
  • a desire to push words towards action. Internet media forms become vehicles for inciting action as opposed to simply describing or reporting.
  • war of words
  • war of words
  • war of words
  • lists, newsgroups, discussion lists, and web sites
  • A primary distinction, then, between earlier forms of computerized activism and forms of grassroots infowar is in the degree of intensity. Coupled with that is the degree to which the participants are noticed and seen as a force.
  • in grassroots infowar comes the desire to incite action and the ability to do so at a global scale.
  • Within a matter of days there were protests and actions at Mexican consulates and embassies all over the world
  • At the end of 1997, news of the Acteal massacre in Chiapas, in which 45 indigenous people were killed, quickly spread through global pro-Zapatista Internet networks.
  • following there has been a shift, the beginning of the move toward accepting the Internet infrastructure as both a channel for communication and a site for action.
    • Audrey B
       
      channel for communication=computerized activism. a Site for action= grassroots infowar...Combining the two leads to Electronic Civil Disobedience
  • tactics of trespass and blockade from these earlier social movements and are experimentally applying them to the Internet.
  • A typical civil disobedience tactic has been for a group of people to physically blockade, with their bodies, the entranceways of an opponent's office or building or to physically occupy an opponent's office -- to have a sit-in.
  • utilizes virtual blockades and virtual sit-ins
  • an ECD actor can participate in virtual blockades and sit-ins from home, from work, from the university, or from other points of access to the Net.
  • a theoretical exploration of how to move protests from the streets onto the Internet.
  • street protest, on-the-ground disruptions and disturbance of urban infrastructure and they hypothesize how such practices can be applied to the Internet infrastructure
  • after the 1997 Acteal Massacre in Chiapas, there was a shift toward a more hybrid position that views the Internet infrastructure as both a means for communication and a site for direct action.
  • Electronic Civil Disobedience is the first transgression, making Politicized Hacking the second transgression and Resistance to Future War the third.
  • The realization and legitimization of the Internet infrastructure as a site for word and deed opens up new possibilities for Net politics, especially for those already predisposed to extraparliamentarian and direct action social movement tactics.
  • In early 1998 a small group calling themselves the Electronic Disturbance Theater had been watching other people experimenting with early forms of virtual sit-ins. The group then created software called FloodNet and on a number of occasions has invited mass participation in its virtual sit-ins against the Mexican government.
  • FloodNet to direct a "symbolic gesture" against an opponent's web site.
  • it launched a three-pronged FloodNet disturbance against web sites of the Mexican presidency, the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and the Pentagon, to demonstrate international support for the Zapatistas, against the Mexican government, against the U.S. military, and against a symbol of international capital.
  • hacks into Mexican government web sites where political messages have been added to those sites.
  • the young British hacker named "JF" who hacked into around 300 web sites world wide and placed anti-nuclear imagery and text. This method has been tried by a number of groups.
  • while ECD actors don’t hide their names, operating freely and above board, most political hacks are done by people who wish to remain anonymous. It is also likely political hacks are done by individuals rather than by specific groups.
  • As already stated there are critiques aimed at the effectiveness and the appropriateness of cyber-protests. In terms of effectiveness, three closely related types of questions have appeared regarding political, tactical, and technical effectiveness. Concerning appropriateness there are ethical questions, that may be also considered as political questions, and of course there are legal questions. Some of the legal concerns raise issues of enforceability and prosecuteability.
  • Are these methods of computerized activism effective?
  • If the desired goal of hacktivism is to draw attention to particular issues by engaging in actions that are unusual and will attract some degree of media coverage, then effectiveness can be seen as being high.
  • Rather hacktivism appears to be a means to augment or supplement existing organizing efforts, a way to make some noise and focus attention.
  • a period of expansion, rather than contraction.
  • To judge blocking a web site, or clogging the pipelines leading up to a web site, is to take an ethical position. If the judgement goes against such activity, such an ethical position is likely to be derived from an ethical code that values free and open access to information.
  • While it is true that some forms of hacktivity are fairly easy to see as being outside the bounds of law - such as entering into systems to destroy data - there are other forms that are more ambiguous and hover much closer to the boundary between the legal and the illegal. Coupled with this ambiguity are other factors that tend to cloud the enforceability or prosecuteability of particular hacktivist offenses. Jurisdictional factors are key here. The nature of cyberspace is extraterritorial. People can easily act across geographic political borders, as those borders do not show themselves in the terrain. Law enforcement is still bound to particular geographic zones. So there is a conflict between the new capabilities of political actors and the old system to which the law is still attached. This is already beginning to change and legal frameworks, at the international level, will be mapped on to cyberspace.
  • It seems that hacktivity has met and will meet resistance from many quarters. It doesn't seem as if opposition to hacktivist ideas and practices falls along particular ideological lines either.
  • hacktivism represents a spectrum of possibilities that exists in some combination of word and deed.
  • What remains unclear about hacktivism emerges when we start to ask questions like: what does this mean and where is this going?
    • Audrey B
       
      Twitter. At 3:30 people log/hack on to Twitter and form blockades so that Iranians can voice their beliefs and feelings towards the government in 140 characters. People are also hacking and creating proxy sites that allow Iranians to get online.
  • Theorizing about grassroots or bottom-up Information Warfare doesn't nearly get as much attention as the dominant models and as a consequence there is not much written on the subject. 11 The case of the global pro-Zapatista networks of solidarity and resistance offers a point of departure for further examination of grassroots infowar. One feature of Zapatista experience over the course of the last 5 years is that it has been a war of words, as opposed to a prolonged military conflict. This is not to say there isn't a strong Mexican military presence in the state of Chiapas. Quite the contrary is true. But fighting technically ended on January 12, 1994 and since then there has been a ceasefire and numerous attempts at negotiation.12 What scholars, activists, and journalists, on both the left and the right, have said is that the Zapatistas owe their survival at this point largely to a war of words. This war of words, in part, is the propaganda war that has been successfully unleashed by Zapatista leaders like Subcommandante Marcos as well as non-Zapatista supporters throughout Mexico and the world. Such propaganda and rhetoric has, of course, been transmitted through more traditional mass communication means, like through the newspaper La Jornada. 13 But quite a substantial component of this war of words has taken place on the Internet. Since January 1, 1994 there has been an explosion of the Zapatista Internet presence in the forms of email Cc:
  • Because of the more secret, private, low key, and anonymous nature of the politicized hacks, this type of activity expresses a different kind of politics. It is not the politics of mobilization, nor the politics that requires mass participation. This is said not to pass judgement, but to illuminate that there are several important forms of direct action Net politics already being shaped.
  • hackers' desires to make information free.
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    Concrete article for paper
Ben M

BBC NEWS | Technology | Berners-Lee on the read/write web - 1 views

  • Well in some ways. The idea was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about.
  • For years I had been trying to address the fact that the web for most people wasn't a creative space; there were other editors, but editing web pages became difficult and complicated for people. What happened with blogs and with wikis, these editable web spaces, was that they became much more simple. When you write a blog, you don't write complicated hypertext, you just write text, so I'm very, very happy to see that now it's gone in the direction of becoming more of a creative medium.
  • I feel that we need to individually work on putting good things on it, finding ways to protect ourselves from accidentally finding the bad stuff, and that at the end of the day, a lot of the problems of bad information out there, things that you don't like, are problems with humanity.
    • Heather D
       
      This reminds me of how I think the Church uses these tools. Yes, the internet can be used for not-so-good things...but ultimately, it can be used and is meant to be used to expand the Church's work.
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  • My hope is that it'll be very positive in bringing people together around the planet, because it'll make communication between different countries more possible.
    • Ben M
       
      Reminds me of Robert and his ham radio friends all over the world
  • building of something very new and special,
    • Ben M
       
      a cathedral!
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    The man who launched the very first website talks about the way blogs and wikis have realized his initial vision of the web as a space for participatory creativity (and writing in particular)
Audrey B

In Iran, Cyber-activism Without the Middle-man - PCWorld - 1 views

  • Twitter, which are giving Iranian citizens and supporters of the government protests there new ways of involving themselves in the political struggle.
  • They've let Iranians and supporters of the protesters share information, even within the centrally controlled Internet service in Iran and connected people like Papillon to a country on the other side of the world.
  • Proxy servers are Web sites that let people visit parts of the Internet that would normally be blocked to them.
    • Audrey B
       
      Allowing people in Iran to speak up!
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  • Web 2.0 is paving new routes around Internet censorship.
  • Nowhere is Internet activism more visible than on Twitter
  • t's amazing how naturally people who are not necessarily technical have found ways to organize information on-line and decide who to trust using things as simple as Twitter -- a 140 character micro-blogging service with a basic search feature. "It's a pretty incredible counter-intelligence network," he said.
  • proxy servers have become a critical conduit for information.
  • In recent days these social media networks are getting more important as mainstream reporters have been confined to their hotel rooms on government orders or forced to head home when their visas expire.On YouTube users can find street scenes in Iran, including videos of protesters being beaten and shot by police. "The traditional media is in some ways not able to provide it because there are restrictions placed on them by the Iranian government," said YouTube spokesman Scott Rubin ."It's the citizens stealing the story."
    • Audrey B
       
      News reporters assist in allowing civil disobedience. It mentions that on YouTube, there are certain videos that would not be shown on public television. However, by using the web, we are not limited in what we can see in the world. Things are not hidden from us. The web tells it how it is and doesn't beat around the bush. This is important. Citizens are telling the story. Afterall, shouldn't government be run by the people? This is what Thoreau believed and what he practiced resulting in the writing of his revolutionary essay "Civil Disobedience". Hearing, Tweeting, and Viewing the stories of the citizens, of those being attacked or denied certain rights creates an appeal to unite and defy government (in this case). But to do so civily.
  • "Twitter is such a cut-out-the middleman type of situation,"
  • This has made information available to a wider group of people, but it in addition to spreading information about proxy servers, it has made home-grown attack tools available to a wider audience.
  • But soon the anti-government activists realized that DOS attacks were maybe not such a good idea. Not only is it illegal in many countries to launch a DOS attack, but this type of activity also slows down the network throughout Iran, making it hard to get messages out.
  • Twitter, in particular, has proven particularly adept at organizing people and information, said Zittrain. Although Proxies are the most popular way of reaching Twitter, updates can also be sent via other Web applications, SMS (Short Message Service) or even e-mail. "It's a byproduct of the way Twitter was built," he said. "The fact that the APIs are so open has meant that there are already lots of ways to get data in and out of Twitter, that do not rely on direct access to Twitter.com."
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    Twitter and YouTube both revolutionizing the way to civily defy government.
Allison Frost

China's Orwellian Internet | The Heritage Foundation - 0 views

  • However, for China's 79 million Web surfers-the most educated and prosperous segment of the country's popula­tion-the Internet is now a tool of police surveil­lance and official disinformation.
  • Democratic reform in China is highly unlikely to come from the top down, that is, from the Chi­nese Communist Party. It will have to emerge from the grass roots. If the Internet is to be a medium of that reform, ways will need to be found to counter China's official censorship and manipulation of digital communications. The cultivation of demo­cratic ideals in China therefore requires that the U.S. adopt policies that promote freedom of infor­mation and communication by funding the devel­opment of anti-censorship technologies and restricting the export of Internet censoring and monitoring technologies to police states.[
  • As the central propaganda organs and police agencies maintain and tighten their grips on information flow and private digital communications, the average Chinese citizen now realizes that political speech on the Internet is no longer shrouded in anonymity: Private contacts with like-minded citizens in chat rooms, or even via e-mail text messaging, are not likely to escape police notice.
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  • On July 31, 2004, hundreds of villagers of Shiji­ahecun hamlet in rural Henan province demon­strated against local corruption. Provincial police from the capital at Zhengzhou dispatched a large anti-riot unit to the village, which attacked the crowd with rubber bullets, tear gas, and electric prods.[12] Propaganda officials immediately banned media coverage of the incident, and the outside world might not have learned of the clash if an intrepid local "netizen" had not posted news of it on the Internet. The Web correspondent was quickly identified by Chinese cybercops and arrested during a telephone interview with the Voice of America on August 2. While the infor­mant was on the phone with VOA interviewers in Washington, D.C., he was suddenly cut short, and the voice of a relative could be heard in the back­ground shouting that authorities from the Internet office of the Zhengzhou public security bureau (Shi Gonganju Wangluchu) had come to arrest the interviewee. After several seconds of noisy strug­gle, the telephone connection went dead
  • In January 2004, Amnesty International documented 54 cases of individuals arrested for "cyberdissent," but concluded that the 54 cases were probably just "a fraction" of the actual number detained.[
  • In April 2004, The Washington Post described a typical cyberdissidence case involving a group of students who were arrested for participating in an informal discussion forum at Beijing University. It was a chilling report that covered the surveillance, arrest, trial, and conviction of the dissidents and police intimidation of witnesses. Yang Zili, the group's coordinator, and other young idealists in his Beijing University circle were influenced by the writings of Vaclav Havel, Friedrich Hayek, and Samuel P. Huntington. Yang questioned the abuses of human rights permitted in the "New China." His popular Web site was monitored by police, and after letting him attract a substantial number of like-minded others, China's cyberpolice swept up the entire group. Relentlessly interrogated, beaten, and pressured to sign confessions implicat­ing each other, the core members nevertheless with­stood the pressure. The case demonstrated that stamping out cyberdissent had become a priority state function. According to the Post, Chinese leader Jiang Zemin considered "the investigation as one of the most important in the nation." In March 2003, the arrestees were each sentenced to prison terms of between eight and ten years-all for exchanging opinions on the Internet.[9] Then there is the case of Liu Di, a psychology student at Beijing Normal University who posted Internet essays under the screen name of Stainless Steel Mouse. She is an exception among cyberdis­sidents-after a year behind bars, she is now out of jail. The then 23-year-old Liu was influenced by George Orwell's 1984 and became well known for her satirical writing and musings on dissidents in the former Soviet Union. She defended other cyberdissidents, supported intellectuals arrested for organizing reading groups, attacked Chinese chauvinists, and, in a spoof, called for a new polit­ical party in which anyone could join and every­one could be "chairman." Arrested in November 2002 and held for nearly one year without a trial, she became a cause célèbre for human rights and press freedom groups overseas and apparently gained some notoriety within China as well. Although she had been held without trial and was never formally charged, she was imprisoned in a Beijing jail cell with three criminals. In December 2003, she was released in anticipation of Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to the U.S. Yet nine months after returning to the Beijing apartment that she shares with her grandmother, Liu still finds police secu­rity officers posted at her home. She has found it impossible to find a regular job, and police moni­tors block her screen name Stainless Steel Mouse from Web sites
  • Although President Hu's anti-porn crusade has superficially lofty goals, the nationwide crackdown conveniently tightens state control over the spread of digital information. In fact, more than 90 per­cent of the articles in China's legal regime govern­ing Internet sites is "news and information," and less than 5 percent is "other inappropriate con­tent."[
  • In February 2003, a mysterious virus swept through the southern Chinese province of Guang­dong, decimating the staffs of hospitals and clinics. According to The Washington Post, "there were 900 people sick with SARS [sudden acute respiratory syndrome] in Guangzhou and 45 percent of them were health care professionals." The Chinese media suppressed news of the disease, apparently in the belief that the public would panic, but: [News] reached the Chinese public in Guangdong through a short-text message, sent to mobile phones in Guangzhou around noon on Feb. 8. "There is a fatal flu in Guangzhou," it read. This same message was resent 40 million times that day, 41 million times the next day and 45 million times on Feb. 10.[36] The SARS epidemic taught the Chinese security services that mobile phone text messages are a powerful weapon against censorship and state control of the media. The Chinese government announced in 2003 new plans to censor text mes­sages distributed by mobile telephone.
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    written in 2004, a bit outdated, but gives great background into China's stance on internet censorship and individual accounts of citizens arrested and held (sometimes years without trail) for crimes committed online
Weiye Loh

Why I Am Teaching a Course Called "Wasting Time on the Internet" - The New Yorker - 0 views

  • The vast amount of the Web’s language is perfect raw material for literature. Disjunctive, compressed, decontextualized, and, most important, cut-and-pastable, it’s easily reassembled into works of art.
  • What they’ve been surreptitiously doing throughout their academic career—patchwriting, cutting-and-pasting, lifting—must now be done in the open, where they are accountable for their decisions. Suddenly, new questions arise: What is it that I’m lifting? And why? What do my choices about what to appropriate tell me about myself? My emotions? My history? My biases and passions? The critiques turn toward formal improvement: Could I have swiped better material? Could my methods in constructing these texts have been better? Not surprisingly, they thrive. What I’ve learned from these years in the classroom is that no matter what we do, we can’t help but express ourselves.
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    "Web surfing as a form of self-expression. Every click is indicative of who we are: indicative of our likes, our dislikes, our emotions, our politics, our world view. Of course, marketers have long recognized this, but literature hasn't yet learned to treasure-and exploit-this situation. The idea for this class arose from my frustration with reading endless indictments of the Web for making us dumber. I've been feeling just the opposite. We're reading and writing more than we have in a generation, but we are reading and writing differently-skimming, parsing, grazing, bookmarking, forwarding, retweeting, reblogging, and spamming language-in ways that aren't yet recognized as literary."
Sam McGrath

10 Writing Tips for a Winning Web Site - 3 views

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    This might have been good at the beginning of the semester. I guess for those of us who will keep blogging it can still help us out.
Krista S

Internet Use and Child Development - 0 views

shared by Krista S on 16 Jun 10 - No Cached
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    In the context of middle class families, elements in the techno-subsystem (e.g., Internet access) may not necessarily facilitate child cognitive development; effective use of those elements, highly dependent upon parent behavior, may promote development. For example, Cho and Cheon (2005) surveyed families and found that parents' perceived control, obtained through shared web activities and family cohesion, reduced children's exposure to negative Internet content. Using the Internet at home to learn was reported in 65 cases, to play was reported in 57 cases, to browse in 35 cases, and to communicate in 27 cases. Fuchs and Wößmann (2005) inferred, having controlled for socioeconomic status, "a negative relationship between home computer availability and academic achievement, but a positive relationship between home computer use for Internet communication" (p. 581). DeBell and Chapman (2006) concluded that Internet use promotes cognitive development in children, "specifically in the area of visual intelligence, where certain computer activities -- particularly games -- may enhance the ability to monitor several visual stimuli at once, to read diagrams, recognize icons, and visualize spatial relationships" (p. 3). Van Deventer and White (2002) observed proficient 10- and 11-year-old video gamers and noted extremely high levels of self-monitoring, pattern recognition, and visual memory. In a comprehensive review of the literature of the time (when interactive digital games were relatively unsophisticated), Subrahmanyam, Kraut, Greenfield, and Gross (2000) concluded that "children who play computer games can improve their visual intelligence" (p. 128). It should be noted, however, that playing video games has also been linked to childhood distractibility, over-arousal, hostility, and aggression (Anderson, Gentile, & Buckley, 2007; Funk, Chan, Brouwer, & Curtiss, 2006).
Audrey B

What Would Martin Luther King Make of Twitter? | VF Daily | Vanity Fair ... - 0 views

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    Baratunde Thurston imagines how the civil rights leader would have expressed himself in 140 characters. It is interesting to see that MLK was a reader and follower of Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience". There is civil disobedience going on all across the web. Was Thoreau also a precursor for an influx of electronic civil opposition?
Bri Zabriskie

Search - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

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    research on the web that I found THRU my library research. 
Bri Zabriskie

Literary Criticism: Map - 1 views

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    Something I'm learning to do is look for things that have already been done in what I'm trying to do. Check out this map of literary theory. I think it could be "updated" to web 2.0 so it doesn't need as much explanation, but it's functional.
Amanda Giles

Keeping True Identity Online Becomes Battle - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • But in this more narcissistic Internet era, people who were once happily anonymous view themselves as online minicelebrities with their own brands to promote.
  • vanity addresses
  • accounts on sites like Twitter and Facebook tend to show up at the top of the list when people search the Web
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  • his is a new world that we are having to step into in order to protect our brand, and they did not give us a huge window of time to prepare for it
Neal C

EBSCOhost: Result List: landscape and film - 1 views

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    # 87... The Rehetoric of space...especially p. 5-6 and the "travel gaze"
becca_hay

193031_759372088_789375107.pdf (application/pdf Object) - 0 views

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    Great article concerning adolescent identity online.
Neal C

EBSCOhost: The Terrain of the Long Take - 0 views

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    talks about landscapes and Barthes
Neal C

EBSCOhost: Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape - 0 views

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    Changing American landscape....analogy to hollywood films?
Rachael Schiel

Online Book Clubs and web-based Book Discussion - 0 views

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    General ideas and links for people interested in online book discussion. Isn't the idea of a book club, though, to get people to meet each other, not just discuss literature? If you've only met someone digitally, is it really possible to consider their literature biases and personal interpretation of the books you are reading?
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