So the so-called founder of the web (certainly more credentials than Al Gore in that department), Tim Berners Lee, is playing the Pandora card. Oh no. Horrors. The web might be a source for misinformation.
Net Neutrality is starting to look more and more like a collectivist block committee environment in which non-conformists can be banned without violating the principle.
In response to a complaint by a single viewer, British media regulator Ofcom said Turner Broadcasting has offered to delete scenes that "glamorize smoking" in cartoons from earlier decades, when such scenes were commonplace. According to Reuters, the change was instigated when a single viewer complained to Ofcom about two scenes in two Tom and Jerry cartoons (one scene in each) shown on Turner's Boomerang channel in England, 56 percent of whose viewers are aged four to fourteen.
Continue reading "Turner to Remove Smoking Scenes from Cartoons—in UK" »
Jay Rosen at PressThink has some very intelligent points on the recent controversy over a New York Times report that our government is sifting bank records in Belgium. More importantly he has an outstanding roundup of the ongoing debate. Though, he seems to imply that it's all actually Bush's fault for "rolling back the national press" and "[expanding] executive branch power."
Isn't this exactly the problem, the press generally feels that Bush's faults (and there are many) justify anything. But presumably there is a real need to strengthen our defenses against terrorism, even if we shouldn't label it a "war," and exposing programs that do so with no clear and present damage to our civil rights seems counterproductive.
I'm sympathetic, but with the Belgium controversy I've yet to hear a coherent defense that ties the program to my civil rights. The real question, I think, is should the press be burdened with such a defense? Or should they be able to simply justify their action in a sweeping political context that lays the blame on the administration. Thoughts?
As if we needed more examples of bad media, check out this article by Seth Borenstein:
Propaganda alert!
With the obvious intention of currying favor with carriers for free transmission of fromtheheartland.org faster than the speed of life; and - less toungue and cheek- at the risk of subjecting this blog to its first DOS (denial of sanity) attack from commentors and trackbacks: I feel compelled to point to the self-interested chatter that is supposed to qualify as argumentation on behalf of net neutrality.
I'm a big fan of alliteration, but somehow this one had escaped me until I fell across a rather cryptic reference by Glenn Reynolds over at Instapundit.com. He seems to be buying into casting this as a battle between titanic telephone and bantamweight bloggers. When you're a lumberjack, everything looks like a tree, so it is unsurprising to see that the author of An Army of Davids : How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths would cast this as yet one more battle cry for the little literati to take up the sling.
It is not that internet architecture and the commercial interests of the relatively narrow band of broadband providers aren't worthy of discussion, but this appears to be an intellectual fait accompli, not a serious discourse. The vast silence in the grassroots blogosphere in the face of such a sweeping regulatory effort made me wonder: where has skepticism of government solutions gone? Apparently if forced to choose between Big Media and Big Government, Glenn Reynolds has thrown in his lot with the latter, or actually with both. The blogoshere ain't leading this charge, they're following the likes of Google's Guru Vint Cerf. The coalition for net neutrality operates under that typically 'understated' rubric of "Save The Internet".
Continue reading "Net neut[e]rality or the wild, wild web? I'm with the cowboys!" »
April 2006 saw the 2nd-highest tax revenue collection in history, up 13.4% since April of 2005. Let's keep tabs on how many media outlets cover the story, specifically The New York Times.
A recent story makes one of my favorite resources out to be dirtopedia. Part of blogging is pointing to other blogs, not out of homage, but with the idea that a multiverse of intellectual output is more than zero sum. I don't mean that in a collectivist sense, as in we are working together under some altruistic bent to further the common good, but rather than one's own work can be buttressed or enlarged by independent self-interested contributions of others to intellectual life. Further one's own ideas can be subject to revision and criticism even as they revise and criticize the ideas of others.
Wikipedia is the logical conclusion of this cerebral megaverse (pardon the rhetoric of emerging string theory - I just finished Susskind's popular distillation of string theory The Cosmic Landscape in which he lays out metastable laws of physics that result from compactified dimensions resembling a cross between a bagel and a block of swiss cheese -- not a bad read despite my offhanded review).
Over the past two weeks there have been numerous articles, columns, editorials, talk shows - even late night jokes - devoted to the issue of whether a company owned by the United Arab Emirates (UAB) should be allowed to purchase the management contracts of 6 seaports in the USA.
At issue in all of this is whether our national security could be more severely threatened if we allow an Arab-owned company to manage six of our major ports. Sounds like an important issue doesn’t it?
In fact, it does not sound like just one issue but a bundle of issues. And they are all important.