Yule Heibel's Library tagged internet →  View Popular, Search in Google

Another examination of whether/ how the internet is scattering our focus. And then there's Eytan Kobre's response to this question, "It's also that you're dressing the same way your 18th century ancestors did, which implies that you're rejecting the modern world":
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There may be elements of truth to that. But the irony is that hipsters all dress a certain way, and the whole point is to dress entirely different from everyone else. Orthodox Jews actually have the courage to dress the same way as 500,000 of their brethren. They're the ones who challenge people by asking, "Are you deep enough to look beyond my garb and relate to me as a thinking individual?" In contrast, the hipster buys into the most external of indicators: that which is immediately apparent to the eye.
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eytan_kobre atlantic_monthly internet socialcritique

Brilliant explanation of just how bad SOPA and PIPA are.

video khan_academy sopa pipa government internet

Great insights from Adam Gopnik. Loved these passages, near the end of the article, especially regarding a technology's descent from omnipresence to ...just something:
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Now television [once the object of jeremiads about the disintegration of modern life] is the harmless little fireplace over in the corner, where the family gathers to watch “Entourage.” TV isn’t just docile; it’s positively benevolent. This makes you think that what made television so evil back when it was evil was not its essence but its omnipresence. Once it is not everything, it can be merely something. The real demon in the machine is the tirelessness of the user. A meatless Monday has advantages over enforced vegetarianism, because it helps release the pressure on the food system without making undue demands on the eaters. In the same way, an unplugged Sunday is a better idea than turning off the Internet completely, since it demonstrates that we can get along just fine without the screens, if only for a day.
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And: "Thoughts are bigger than the things that deliver them." Truer words (etc etc)...

adam_gopnik newyorker internet socialcritique

Fantastic analysis and riff on the internet and our present prospects, by Jaron Lanier.
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To expect liberty from democracy without a middle class is hopeless because without a middle class you can't have democracy. The whole thing falls a part.
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Interesting: a crit of the web akin to Jane Jacobs's 1961 book?
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What the internet badly needed in its first two decades of existence, and what it needs still, is a book akin to Jane Jacob’s [sic] 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities which attacked the practices and attitudes of 1950s US urban planners and proved hugely influential. The structure of online space requires a similar critique.

The founding fathers of the internet had laudable instincts: the utopian vision of the internet as a shared space to maximise communal welfare is a good template to work from. But they got co-opted by big money, and became trapped in the self-empowerment discourse that was just an ideological ruse to conceal the interests of big companies and minimise government intervention.

The current state of affairs is not irreversible. We still have some privacy left and internet companies can still be swayed by smart regulation. But we need to stop thinking of the internet as a marketplace first and a public forum second. What is long overdue is a fundamental reconsideration of the primacy of the internet’s civic and aesthetic dimensions. It’s time to decide whether we want the internet to look like a private mall or a public square.
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prospect_magazine evgeny_morozov jjacobs internet socialcritique

Hear, hear:
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Carr’s chief problem, though, is a tendency to view every social problem he encounters as either caused by the internet or heavily influenced by it. He worries about the emergence of the post-literary mind; the fact that few people have time for novels like War and Peace; the lack of time and space for contemplative thought; and even a “slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity,” not to mention his constant fretting about the future of western civilisation held hostage by the ephemeral tweets of movie star Ashton Kutcher. There is cause for concern here, but most of these problems pre-date the internet. Similarly, Carr’s sections on the novel provide a conservative defence of linear narrative, stable truths, and highly-structured, rational discourse. Yet all of this came under severe assault from postmodernism long before Google’s founders entered high school.
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prospect_magazine evgeny_morozov nicholas_carr internet socialcritique

This reminds me of Bill Bishop's The Big Sort, which analyzed how America has "sorted" itself geographically into suburban enclaves, except now the sorting is done in our heads via algorithms. Interesting to think about...
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Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, once told colleagues that “a squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” At Facebook, “relevance” is virtually the sole criterion that determines what users see. Focusing on the most personally relevant news — the squirrel — is a great business strategy. But it leaves us staring at our front yard instead of reading about suffering, genocide and revolution.
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internet nyt eli_pariser gatekeepers big_sort algorithm

Fantastic article. Eben Moglen's ideas tie in well with Lewis Hyde's on common wealth and copyright. More power to them.
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"We have to aim our engineering more directly at politics now,” [Moglen] said. “What has happened in Egypt is enormously inspiring, but the Egyptian state was late to the attempt to control the Net and not ready to be as remorseless as it could have been.”
(...)
In the first days of the personal computer era, many scoffed at the idea that free software could have an important place in the modern world. Today, it is the digital genome for millions of phones, printers, cameras, MP3 players, televisions, the Pentagon, the New York Stock Exchange and the computers that underpin Google’s empire.
(...)
Social networking has changed the balance of political power, he said, “but everything we know about technology tells us that the current forms of social network communication, despite their enormous current value for politics, are also intensely dangerous to use. They are too centralized; they are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control.”

In January, investors were said to have put a value of about $50 billion on Facebook, the social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg. If revolutions for freedom rest on the shoulders of Facebook, Mr. Moglen said, the revolutionaries will have to count on individuals who have huge stakes in keeping the powerful happy.

“It is not hard, when everybody is just in one big database controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg, to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse,” Mr. Moglen said.

By contrast, with tens of thousands of individual encrypted servers, there would be no one place where a repressive government could find out who was publishing or reading “subversive” material.

In response to Mr. Moglen’s call for help, a group of developers working in a free operating system called Debian have started to organize Freedom Box software. Four students from New York University who heard a talk by Mr. Moglen last year hav

eben_moglen internet freedom security democracy software

Article about Sean Parker (who is portrayed in Aaron Sorkin's film, The Social Network, as a jerk):
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...Parker, a svelte, wavy-maned clotheshorse, is a uniquely quirky figure in the annals of 21st-century business. At age 30, he is already worth close to a billion dollars, thanks mostly to the cache of Facebook stock he still owns. An autodidact who barely finished high school, he is nonetheless almost painfully cerebral. A sickly child whose asthma sometimes landed him in the hospital, he devoured books from a very young age; his father, a U.S.-government oceanographer, began teaching him programming at age seven. There is hardly a topic—literary, political, medical, or technological—about which he cannot offer an informed and nuanced opinion in his rapid-fire patter. (Don’t get him started on Ben Franklin’s role as a media pioneer.)

Most of all, he turns his knowledge and instincts toward Internet business strategy as a way, he says, of “re-architecting society. It’s technology, not business or government, that’s the real driving force behind large-scale societal shifts.” Indeed, Parker has such a superb track record for predicting where technology is headed (and which type of product and service will appeal to consumers) that companies often invite him to invest simply to tap his brain. “Few people are as smart as he is,” says Facebook’s Zuckerberg, aged 26, who still consults quite frequently with his former partner.
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facebook innovation web2.0 mark_zuckerberg internet aaron_sorkin sean_parker vanity_fair hollywood

Larry Lessig nails it in this brilliant review of Aaron Sorkin's film, The Social Network. Read the whole article, especially the 2nd part where Lessig (a lawyer/ professor of law) spells out how the legal establishment is completely missing the point.
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Zuckerberg faced no such barrier [of entry into a market, as the makers of Nantucket Nectars did]. For less than $1,000, he could get his idea onto the Internet. He needed no permission from the network provider. He needed no clearance from Harvard to offer it to Harvard students. Neither with Yale, or Princeton, or Stanford. Nor with every other community he invited in. Because the platform of the Internet is open and free, or in the language of the day, because it is a “neutral network,” a billion Mark Zuckerbergs have the opportunity to invent for the platform. And though there are crucial partners who are essential to bring the product to market, the cost of proving viability on this platform has dropped dramatically. You don’t even have to possess Zuckerberg’s technical genius to develop your own idea for the Internet today. Websites across the developing world deliver high quality coding to complement the very best ideas from anywhere. This is a platform that has made democratic innovation possible—and it was on the Facebook platform resting on that Internet platform that another Facebook co-founder, Chris Hughes, organized the most important digital movement for Obama, and that the film’s petty villain, Sean Parker, organized Causes, one of the most important tools to support nonprofit social missions.

The tragedy—small in the scale of things, no doubt—of this film is that practically everyone watching it will miss this point. Practically everyone walking out will think they understand genius on the Internet. But almost none will have seen the real genius here. And that is tragedy because just at the moment when we celebrate the product of these two wonders—Zuckerberg and the Internet—working together, policymakers are conspiring ferociously with old

facebook innovation larry_lessig law copyright internet web2.0 tnr mark_zuckerberg aaron_sorkin sean_parker

Excellent summary of some of the issues around online privacy, transparency, and - lately - re-anonymization. Interesting roadblocks ahead, too:

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However, there are powerful opponents to this kind of anonymity software, and they aren't online advertisers; they're security agencies. Simply put, the same technology that allows people to maintain their privacy online also makes criminals tougher to catch. As such, there is a push to limit anonymity on the Web.

A perfect example is Research In Motion's BlackBerry. For years, big businesses have purchased the devices in droves because of their strong encryption, which makes messages sent from BlackBerrys much more difficult for outside parties to monitor. But now, a host of countries are threatening to ban BlackBerry services precisely because RIM keeps the data too private.
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globeandmail privacy online_privacy canada internet

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If you have access to fast broadband, your friends all work online and it is easy to find venture capital, then you are in a digital hub. And you're not in Canada. Our country trails the world when it comes to building these centres of digital innovation. In this episode of "Our Digital Future - Digital Hubs", leading voices from Canada's digital community discuss the characteristics of a good digital hub and the investment needed to create intelligent communities for tomorrow's digital economy. The episode features: Mark Kuznicki, a leader in the field of citizen and community engagement; Sarah Prevette, founder of Sprouter.com, an online community for entrepreneurs; Jesse Brown, journalist and an influential voice in the world of social media; and, Bill Hutchison, the Executive Director of Intelligent Communities for Waterfront Toronto and a renowned business and social entrepreneur.
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Slow down please, this is Canada! Canada's digital networks are some of the slowest in the world, running between one hundred to a thousand times slower than other countries in the developed world. In this episode of "Our Digital Future - The Need for High-Speed", Bill Hutchison, Executive Director of Intelligent Communities for Waterfront Toronto describes the sorry state of our digital infrastructure, stressing the need for major investments in advanced broadband networks. Bill Hutchison is a renowned business and social entrepreneur. He has been a founder of four successful business start-ups and CEO of three corporate turnarounds. As a social entrepreneur he has been the founding chair or director of ten industry and social consortia and charitable foundations.
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canada innovation broadband internet video tvo

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Today's Reality

But now the alarm bells are ringing as Canada has been falling down the international leadership staircase in terms of the innovation and application of technology in ways that could continue to improve the quality of life for all citizens. A recent study indicates that Canada:
* Has some of the poorest high-speed internet service in the developed world;
* Ranked 22nd out of 30 countries against measures such as broadband adoption, network capacity and pricing; and
* Ranked 16th on broadband adoption.

Please take a few minutes to view the TVO video on the impact of Canada being way behind the rest of the world in terms of our digital economy and broadband infrastructure. Canada's speed is 1/100 to 1/1000 slower than 20 major competitors.
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canada innovation broadband internet

Interesting observations. Heavy users are ~1% of online participants (90% lurk, 9% comment occasionally, 1% comment heavily and shape the community). Re. anonymity, see also the Shirky article in The Guardian, and consider this observation in Boston.com:
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Almost all the heavy users I spoke with said they would continue to comment even if they had to provide their real name.
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And how easy is it to uncover anonymity? Very.
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While news organizations debate scrapping anonymity, the ground may be shifting beneath them. With all of our identifying information getting sliced, diced, and sold, by everyone from credit card companies to Facebook, is there really such a thing as the anonymous Web anymore? Consider this demonstration from the late ’90s by Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor Latanya Sweeney. She took three commonly available data points: sex (male), ZIP code (02138), and date of birth (July 31, 1945). Those seemingly anonymous attributes could have described lots of people, right? Actually, no. She proved they could belong to just one person: former governor William Weld. She tells me that 87 percent of Americans can now be identified with just these three data points.
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boston_globe online_commenting anonymity internet socialtheory socialcritique

Clay Shirky defends the web, has a couple of insights into the nature of nasty anonymous commenting, too, which really make a lot of sense. I like his "islands of civility" notion. And here's my favorite bit:
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"The final thing I'd say about optimism is this. If we took the loopiest, most moonbeam-addled Californian utopian internet bullshit, and held it up against the most cynical, realpolitik-inflected scepticism, the Californian bullshit would still be a better predictor of the future. Which is to say that, if in 1994 you'd wanted to understand what our lives would be like right now, you'd still be better off reading a single copy of Wired magazine published in that year than all of the sceptical literature published ever since."
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clay_shirky internet socialcritique socialtheory

Thought-provoking post by Doc Searls: social media is "a crock." What's ignored in all the social media hype is the infrastructure that underwrites the private real estate of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. The other problem with social media is that "as a concept (if not as a practice) it subordinates the personal."

"Personal and social go hand-in-hand, but the latter builds on the former."

"Markets are built on the individuals we call customers. They’re where the ideas, the conversations, the intentions (to buy, to converse, to relate) and the money all start. Each of us, as individuals, are the natural points of integration of our own data — and of origination about what gets done with it. "

doc_searls socialmedia infrastructure internet

The "Did You Know?" video, which has been making its viral rounds through various social networks. Breathless, admittedly amazing facts, prepare to meet a firehose of information. ("What does it in-form?" is another question...)

youtube education technology google internet video

The Internet Research Conference in Copenhagen (October 2008) lays out its call for papers. The theme is " Rethinking Community, Rethinking Place."
Synopsis:
In the past few years, new forms of net-based communities are emerging, distributed on various websites and services, and making use of several media platforms and genres to stay connected. Now, as mobile and location-based technologies are reintroducing "place" as an important aspect in the formation of communal and social activities, it is time to consider and rethink the concept of online or virtual communities. Not forgetting the lessons we have learned from studying the early virtual communities, how do we describe, analyse, theorise and design the communities and social formations of the early 21st century? How do we address the blurring of boundaries between places and communities on- and offline.

We call for papers, panel proposals, and presentations from any discipline, methodology, and community, and from conjunctions of multiple disciplines, methodologies and academic communities that address the conference themes.

Sessions at the conference will be established that specifically address the conference themes, and we welcome innovative, exciting, and unexpected takes on those themes. We also welcome submissions on topics that address social, cultural, political, economic, and/or aesthetic aspects of the Internet beyond the conference themes. In all cases, we welcome disciplinary and interdisciplinary submissions as well as international collaborations from both AoIR and non-AoIR members.

call_for_papers conference copenhagen internet media reference research socialtheory

access business canada digitization internet media michael_geist ottawa