03 Jan 2012
Recommended
8 March 2012: Roderick Parkes takes a different view on the audit society (European Voice): “According to students of trust, those who champion an uncompromising diet of transparency and scrutiny are usually those who have developed the strongest sense of their own rightness and of others’ inherent dishonesty. That is the only reason they put up with a system that exposes them to invasive scrutiny. ”
3 January 2012: Eli Pariser reviews the history of quality journalism (The Filter Bubble): “In the mid-1800s, printing a newspaper was hardly a reputable business. Papers were fiercely partisan and recklessly ideological. (…) But as newspapers became highly profitable and highly important, they began to change. It became possible, in a few big cities, to run papers that weren’t just chasing scandal and sensation – in part, because their owners could afford not to.” (p. 236)
2 January 2012: Cory Doctorow prepares for much greater disputes than the current online piracy/copyright battle (28c3): “[There are] lobbies and interest groups that are far more influential than Hollywood and big content are on their best days, and every one of them will arrive at the same place — ‘can’t you just make us a general purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?’”
2 December 2011: Jonathan Zittrain on the subtle power shift actuated by the manufacturers of operating systems (Technology Review): ” If we allow ourselves to be lulled into satisfaction with walled gardens, we’ll miss out on innovations to which the gardeners object, and we’ll set ourselves up for censorship of code and content that was previously impossible. We need some angry nerds.”
14 November 2011: Dean Starkman picks “news gurus” such as Jarvis and Shirky to pieces (Columbia Journalism Review): “The news-as-cheap-commodity argument was all along an ideological one couched in economic terms… The cruel truth of the emerging networked news environment is that reporters are as disempowered as they have ever been, writing more often, under more pressure, with less autonomy, about more trivial things than under the previous monopolistic regime.”
28 October 2011: Simon Anholt explains the USP of the European Union: “The European Union is the only successful – partly, largely – experiment in multilateral governance in the history of mankind. It is the lap, it is the place where so many advances have been achieved – a bit of strategy, a great deal of substance, not nearly enough symbolic actions –, but at heart the place where the global governance, the planetary order, the global society is being forged. We are so much further along that road in the European Union than any collection of humans have ever managed to be before.”
13 September 2011: Revisiting Newton Minow’s classic speech about Television and the Public Interest (1961): “I hope that you broadcasters will not permit yourselves to become so absorbed in the daily chase for ratings, sales, and profits that you lose [the] wider view. Now more than ever before in broadcasting’s history the times demand the best of all of us. We need imagination in programming, not sterility; creativity, not imitation; experimentation, not conformity; excellence, not mediocrity. Television is filled with creative, imaginative people. You must strive to set them free.”
12 September 2011: Horace Dediu correctly predicted in May 2010 how the computer industry would react to the iPad (Asymco): “Apple keeps a tight lid on new products so that competitors don’t get a head-start on copying, but in the case of the iPad, advance knowledge would not have had any impact. Competitors look at the iPad and see nothing. They’ll only react once the market explodes and they start to feel belated pain.”
16 August 2011: Jonathan Zittrain suggests to imagine your house were curated by Apple (The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It): “…each house is ‘curated’ by its seller. Once you move in, that seller will get to say what furnishings can go in, and collects 30% of the purchase price of whatever you buy for the house… it still doesn’t feel very free when, two years after you’re living in the house, a particular coffee table or paint color is denied.”
11 August 2011: Bernie Hogan explains why forcing people to use real names on the Internet is counterproductive for free speech (Bernie Hogan): “Offline people don’t have to worry about their real name, because their behavior is tied to the context and the impressions they foster in that context. In fact, …if your speech is not confined to the context you are in – but available to a potentially unknowable audience – you are online.”
22 July 2011: Damien Horowitz explains why you should quit your technology job and get a Ph.D. in the humanities (The Chronicle of Higher Education): “It is a convenient truth: You go into the humanities to pursue your intellectual passion; and it just so happens, as a by-product, that you emerge as a desired commodity for industry. Such is the halo of human flourishing.”
10 July 2010: Clay Shirky defines the public value of news (shirky.com): “Real news — reporting done for citizens instead of consumers — is a public good. This is true both in the colloquial sense of ‘good for the public’ and in the economic sense of ‘best provisioned for a whole group at once.’”
16 June 2011: Olaf Cramme analyses the current state of the European Union (Policy Network): “Whereas the Commission used to be the central mechanism for reducing the transaction cost of any contested bargain between member states, it has become almost powerless in the face of a shifting political agenda which is now dominated by greatly sensitive policy issues outside of classical community business.”
16 June 2011: Timothy Garton Ash diagnoses the inherent jinx of European achievements (The Guardian): “Those powerful driving forces [of the European project] included searing personal experiences of war, occupation, Holocaust, fascist and communist dictatorships; the Soviet threat, catalysing west European solidarity; generous, energetic American support for European unification; and a West Germany that was the mighty engine of European integration, with France on top as the driver… All these are now gone, or very much diminished.”
28 March 2011: Ethan Zuckerman finds Google a bit “unheimlich” (My heart’s in Accra): “…there’s something unheimlich about the idea that something as important an influencer as Google being as mercurial as it is. Personalization is disturbing to the extent to which it separates us from the real, true, stable search results, the ur-results Google is withholding from us in the hopes of selling us ads [more] effectively… but even more disturbing is the idea that there’s no solid ground, no single set of best results Google could deliver, even if it wanted to.”
14 March 2011: Jay Rosen diagnoses why journalists may get disenchanted with their own profession (PressThink): “…people who always wanted to be journalists and make the world a better place find that the professional codes in place often prevent this. It’s hard to fight for justice when you have to master ‘he said, she said’ stories. Voice is something you learn to take out of your work if you want to succeed in the modern newsroom. You are supposed to sacrifice and learn to report the story without attitude or bias creeping in.”
7 March 2011: Corinne Grinapol makes a case for increased self-confidence of bloggers (PressThink): “If the collective psychological profile of bloggers continues to be of that of a group that exits outside the mainstream, the culture of reacting to what [mainstream media] creates is maintained. Bloggers’ sense of empowerment is thus derived from being as outspoken as they wish about news streams that have already been created. Continuing to inhabit this space prevents bloggers from generating alternate streams of news, to bestow themselves with the authority to decide what is newsworthy, as that could put them in the place of institutional power they are trying to avoid.”
7 March 2011: Scott Rosenberg observes that the news cycle may just be a power thing (sayeverything.com): “…one prerogative of an editor has always been the ability to declare, ‘This argument is at an end.’ The job of a news editor is to say, ‘And now this.’ The news cycle has turned! Time to move on. The trouble was, bloggers were under no obligation to pay attention to such marching orders… This characteristic of blogging became a profound irritant to editors who were accustomed to being able to set the agenda of public dialogue.”
2 March 2011: Mirko Lorenz, Nicolas Kayser, and Geoff McGhee answer the question What is the trust market? (owni.eu): “Trust, not information, is the scarce resource in today’s world. Trust is something that is hard to earn and easy to lose. And it is a core element of journalism, few other professions are so dependent on trust. But it is not just a requirement, it is also an enormous underserved market. Media companies will learn that it is trust, not SEO, branding, or content farming that’s the road to success.”
7 February 2011: Jon Evans sings the praise of piracy, albeit with reluctance (TechCrunch): “Although it pains me to say this, it’s the pirates who are on the right side of history. Empires built on barbed wire inevitably collapse, and the sooner the better; while this one reigns, it perpetuates yesterday’s regimes, and squelches innovation and progress. Is piracy wrong? Yes, but that’s the wrong question. The right question is, which is worse: widespread piracy, or the endless and futile attempt to preserve DRM everywhere? So long live the pirates. Those jerks.”
30 January 2011: Doc Searls explains why free online services paid for by advertising might no longer be the best way to go (Doc Searls Weblog): “So I think we need to do two things here. First is to pay more for what’s now free stuff. This is the public radio model… Second is to develop self-hosted versions of Flickr, or the equivalent. Self-hosting is the future we’ll have after commercial hosting services like Flickr start to fail.”
24 January 2011: Mercedes Bunz sieht der Herrschaft der Maschinen optimistisch entgegen (faz.net): “Die Digitalisierung [verschiebt] die Rolle von Experten, indem sie von den sogenannten gehobenen Berufen – von Journalisten, Ärzten, Lehrern oder Ingenieuren – eine Neuausrichtung ihrer Legitimation einfordert: Weil jeder Wissen googeln kann, basiert die Autorität von Experten heute weniger auf dem Umstand, faktisch mehr zu wissen, als vielmehr darauf, den strukturellen Überblick zu besitzen, neues Wissen einordnen zu können und die Struktur entsprechend anzugleichen.”
21 January 2011: Bert Hoffmann makes a level-headed analysis of whether and how the Internet changed and empowered Cuba’s civil society (GIGA): “Some 15 years after Cuba joined the Internet, the web-based media not only represent a leak of voice to a globalized public, but they have led to a limited, yet important transformation of state-society relations. They empower a new reassertion of citizenship rights that challenge established rules and they empower the emergence of new social actors and forms of action. However, the case also shows that there is no automatism from such trends to a process of gradual reform or even regime change.”
26 December 2010: Zeynep Tufekci reasons about the merits of a free Internet (The Atlantic): “Remember, the Internet did not create freedom of speech; in theory, we always had freedom of speech–it’s just that it often went along with the freedom to be ignored. People had no access to the infrastructure to be heard. Until the Internet, the right to be heard was in most cases reserved to the governments, deep pockets, and corporate media. Before the Internet, trees fell in lonely forests.”
24 December 2010: Zeynep Tufekci calls for a different Internet infrastructure (The Atlantic): “It has become obvious that, increasingly, contentious content is going to require infrastructure far above and beyond what is necessary to support content that is mainstream, power-friendly, or irrelevant. And further, contentious content will likely be cut off from being funded through people-power.”
5 December 2010: Nikki Usher is surprised by how much the Wikileaks case shows the interdependence of legacy and online media (Nieman Journalism Lab): “Regardless of what you might say about the dependency of news organizations on official sources, this access to power is something that the average citizen combing through cables simply doesn’t have. And that access adds to our understanding of the impact of these cables… Look at what happens when mainstream news and whatever we want to call WikiLeaks work together. The forces are not in opposition but are united with a common goal.”
5 December 2010: Hal Roberts shows why a few Internet giants increasingly assume control over speech on the Net (Hal Roberts): “There are only a couple dozen organizations … at the core of the Internet who have sufficient amounts of bandwidth, technical ability, and community connections to fight off the biggest of these [DDoS] attacks. Paying for services from those organizations is very expensive, though… As a society, we have reached a place where the only way to protect some sorts of speech on the Internet is through one of [them].”
2 December 2010: Jeremy Bernstein explains what the financial terms everybody’s talking about actually mean (Edge): “These financial instruments are rather new. The commodity they trade in is money. They are very clever devices that were thought up by very smart people to make money from money and they are in the process of doing us all in.”
29 November 2010: Federal Reserve Bank, inflation, credit, and the creation of money – finally explained to non-economists (The Aporetic): “American history broadly shows a long tension between men on the make, who want low interest rates, paper money, and inflation, and people who’ve made it, who want a specie standard and fixed prices and values.”
28 November 2010: Kathrin Passig kann auf Bücher verzichten (Merkur): “Sobald das Lesen nicht mehr zwingend ein physisches Medium erfordert …, lässt seine Attraktivität als Einrichtungsgegenstand nach. Unter anderem aus diesem Grund war das private Horten und Zurschaustellen bei Filmen noch nie eine weit verbreitete Praxis. Filmbesitz in größerem Umfang war und ist eine Sache für Spezialisten. Der Besitz von Büchern wird es in absehbarer Zeit wieder werden.”
19 November 2010: Ethan Zuckerman describes the concept of serendipity by way of comparing book libraries and the web in search of knowledge (My heart’s in Accra): “Serendipity is the product of hard work, through the careful structuring of a system to encourage chance encounter (the work done to arrange library books by subject on shelves) or the efforts of a sage curator, who uses her knowledge … to offer recommendations. An understanding of serendipity that favors sage interpretations of random encounters rather than just the happy accident. (…) Libraries are as much about magical stumbling as about knowledge and information.”
10 November 2010: Clay Shirky performs a diligent analysis of newspapers’ paywall issues (Clay Shirky): “Paywalls do indeed help newspapers escape commodification, but only by ejecting the readers who think of the product as a commodity.”
5 November 2010: Kathlyn Clore asks why journalists don’t realise the redundancy of much of their work (Kathlyn Clore): “Mind-boggling is that [all journalists covering the event were] sitting next to each other, each writing slightly different versions of the same stories without realizing that portals like Google, Yahoo and MSNBC are aggregating all their work in the same place anyway. When are journalists going to realize that the only ‘on ramp’ to their work isn’t their brand’s website or printed product?”
20 October 2010: Thomas E. Weber found indications about how Facebook decides what to show in a member’s news feed (Business Insider): “Not only does Facebook decide who will and won’t see the news, it also keeps the details of its interventions relatively discreet. All the while, Facebook, like Google, continues to redefine ‘what’s important to you’ as ‘what’s important to other people.’”
18 October 2010: Farhad Manjoo corroborates the diagnosis that the difference between “articles” and “blog posts” ceases to exist (Slate): “Nearly all journalistic blogs … are thoroughly professional. They engage in reporting, they’ve got layers of editors, and they’re aimed at satisfying a target audience in order to gain traffic… When I asked Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds how he defines blogging, he said the most important thing was ‘the lack of an institutional voice.’”
4 October 2010: Craig Labovitz analyses structural changes to the Internet by example of Google (Security to the Core): “The competition for Internet dominance is … about infrastructure… In 2007, Google used transit providers for the majority of their Internet traffic … But over the last three years, Google both built out their global data center and content distribution capability as well as aggressively pursued direct interconnection with most consumer networks.”
4 October 2010: The OpenNet initiative asks what it means for the public sphere that most social networks are owned by private companies (opennet.org): “But as private companies increasingly take on roles in the public sphere, the rules users must follow become increasingly complex. In some cases this can be positive… At the same time, companies set their own standards, which often means navigating tricky terrain; companies want to keep users happy but must also operate within a viable business model.”
28 September 2010: Eben Moglen compares the Internet to electromagnetic induction, i.e., power generation: “If you wrap the Internet around every person on the planet and spin the planet, software flows in the network. It’s an emergent property of connected human minds that they create things for one another’s pleasure and to conquer their uneasy sense of being too alone. The only question to ask is, what’s the resistance of the network? [It] is directly proportional to the field strength of the ‘intellectual property’ system.”
18 September 2010: Jonathan Zittrain is “intrigued with the idea of guaranteed capacity for regular Internet service” (The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it): “New specialized services should not be used to shrink the pie for regular Internet offerings. Experimentation could continue apace on the open Internet, with some of its best results then bottled up and offered sleekly through a more appliancized offering.”
17 September 2010: Roderick Parkes’ view of why the EU exists (European Voice): “The unique selling-point of the EU is its capacity to accommodate and overcome differences between its members. Its strength, unrivalled by other organisations, is an institutional robustness formidable enough to give otherwise competing states the confidence to do far-sighted things together.”
15 September 2010: Jonathan Zittrain makes a plea for the self-empowerment of the netizens (Fordham Law Review): “It is time for a metaphorical NATO for the Internet, not among states but among Internet participants, something built into its fabric through Web servers and clients… in order to gather otherwise powerless individual entities together into a stronger force.”
13 September 2010: Jay Rosen about the new breed of journalists formerly known as the media (Jay Rosen: Public Notebook): “Seeing people as masses is the art in which the mass media … specialized during their profitable 150-year run (1850 to 2000). But now we can see that this was actually an interval… Professional journalism … has lived its entire life during this phase, but let me say it again: this is what your generation has a chance to break free from.”
9 September 2010: Carolin Emcke fordert einen anderen Journalismus angesichts von Globalisierung und Internet (Carolin Emcke): “In analytischer Hinsicht ist die Ambivalenz der große Gewinner der Globalisierung… [Das] bedeutet zunächst, dass der Konzept-Journalismus, der Geschichten gern in Gewinner und Verlierer aufteilt, … dass diese Art von Geschichten zu … grobkörnig sind für die Figuren und Strukturen einer so verwobenen Welt.”
8 September 2010: Chatham House expert Fadi Hakura about the state of Turkey’s modernization process (Common Ground News Service): “Turkey’s society and business community are uncharacteristically steaming ahead of its politicians in terms of adopting modern political and social values. (…) A reduced dependency on the European Union will finally debunk the myth that only Europe can spur the liberalisation of Turkey.”
4 September 2010: Über den Innovationsbedarf der Medienaufsicht (epd Medien): “Vielfaltsicherung ist heute nicht mehr darauf angewiesen, einer erlesenen Handvoll Veranstalter binnenpluralistische Auflagen zu machen, um dem Missbrauch knapper Ressourcen vorzubeugen. Als Anwälte der Mediennutzer müssen die Landesmedienanstalten heute schon eher die Infrastruktur selbst sichern und aktiv fördern.”
28 August 2010: Frank Rieger zieht Parallelen zwischen militärischer Rationalität und modernem Management (FAZ.net): “Die Methoden, nach denen Management-Consultants … vorgehen, sind teilweise direkt aus den jeweils aktuellen militärischen Vorgehensweisen übernommen. Der geradezu fetischhafte Glaube an Quantifizier- und Messbarkeit … und Optimierbarkeit ist historisch in enger Wechselwirkung zwischen Militär und Geschäftswelt entstanden.”
21 August 2010: Larry Downes explains that the Net was never neutral in the first place, and why (Future Tense): “Voice and video packets have to arrive pretty much at the same time in order to maintain good quality, so Voice over IP telephone calls … get priority treatment. (…) Google … has deals with some ISPs to locate Google-only servers in their hubs to ensure local copies of their web pages are always close by.”
21 August 2010: Christian Sandvig instructively likens the Internet to Railroad services (Future Tense): “Back when railroads ran the economy, or much of it, they did so to further their own interests. In general terms, we got out of this mess by establishing novel new independent commissions to apply a set of legal rules called common carriage.”
21 August 2010: Danah Boyd explains why considering Facebook as a utility changes everything (apophenia): “When people feel as though they are wedded to something because of its utilitarian value, the company providing it can change but the infrastructure is there for good… [Therefore we need] to think about what it means that regulation is coming.”
16 August 2010: Jonathan Zittrain on the essential facts and questions of Net Neutrality (The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it): “When each ISP can, in effect, speak on behalf of its unwitting subscribers, … offering up different conditions for access to them, the economics of the Net will start to favor the consolidated, the well-connected, the well-heeled.”
9 August 2010: Revisiting Langdon Winner’s now-classic essay “Do Artifacts have Politics?” (1986): “In our times people are often willing to make drastic changes in the way they live to accommodate technological innovation while at the same time resisting similar kinds of changes justified on political grounds.”
6 August 2010: The Digital Media Test Kitchen at the University of Colorado School of Journalism looks into current and future uses of smartphones: “…the smartphone represents not merely a smaller digital screen on which to present … existing news from other media platforms, but a larger range of opportunities, even for in-depth news packages: presentation, personalization, real-time geographic news and ad targeting, interaction, user engagement and action, and mobile-original content and features.”
15 July 2010: Ethan Zuckerman examines the added value provided by conventional newspapers (My Heart’s in Accra): “While there’s something appealingly populist about the idea of building a media property around what people are searching for, … you’d give up the critical ability to push topics and parts of the world that readers might not be interested in, but need to know about.”
10 June 2010: Christian Sandvig explains how phone numbers were originally allocated by the time it took to dial them on rotary phones (multicast): “You see, youngsters, the weighted dial on a rotary telephone requires a fixed amount of time to dial each number.”
7 June 2010: Jürgen Kuri ruft nach der Digitalen Aufklärung (faz.net): “Wer das technische Wissen den Technikern überlässt, wird blind für die möglichen Problemlösungen und die Gefahren des algorithmischen Versprechens.”
6 June 2010: Jonathan Zittrain about the security implications of an increasingly oligopolistic Internet (The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it): “The lures of security, interoperability and economies of scale have propelled much of the Web from a vibrant ecosystem of different, and differently managed, PCs and sites to one where a handful of private Fort Knoxes take responsibility for security.”
22 May 2010: Christian Sandvig discusses the politics of wireless(multicast): “Technical jargon is a way to keep us out of vital conversations by making them seem arcane, boring, and specialist. (…) New wireless technologies … suggest a re-imagining of the spectrum itself and how we use it.”
5 May 2010: Danah Boyd sheds an ethnographic light on data privacy issues (apophenia): “Even in public situations, people regularly go out of their way to ignore others, to give them privacy in a public setting. (…) You may be able to stare at everyone who walks by but you don’t.”
13 April 2010: Christian Sandvig on the future of video on the Internet (multicast): “I fear that television is evolving backwards. (…) trends are now pointing toward a retrenched mass media that may restrict future innovation and participation in online video.”
2 April 2010: Cory Doctorow about why not to buy an iPad (BoingBoing), rehashing Langdon Winner: “The real issue isn’t the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.”
26 March 2010: Michael Lewis explores the mechanics of the Credit Crunch (Vanity Fair): “The market made no sense, but that didn’t stop (…) Wall Street firms from jumping into it.”
10 March 2010: Mark Thompson on context in journalism (newsless.org): “Journalists spend a ton of time trying to acquire the systemic knowledge we need to report an issue, yet we dribble it out in stingy bits between lots and lots of worthless, episodic updates.”
7 March 2010: Jay Rosen on context in journalism (PRESSthink): “…if journalists could put themselves in the shoes of ordinary users more effectively they would realize all the places where It was in the news all the time but I didn’t know what they were talking about applies.”
10 February 2010: Eben Moglen on liberty in cloud computing (Software Freedom Law Center): “There is a technical challenge for a social reason… It’s a frontier for technical people to explore. There is enormous social payoff for exploring it.”
