21 Aug 2010
Links
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.”