"Should governments be allowed to cut off social networks or cell service in the interest of public order?"

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"Should governments be allowed to cut off social networks or cell service in the interest of public order?"
Fascinating breakdown.
"the content of the medium is never the message. any medium at all creates a new pattern, a new atmosphere, a new environment of human perception which works upon the whole man. It works upon the whole society. That is the message." Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan in "The medium is the message"
Vince Cable, UK business secretary:
We are determined to explore how exceptions to copyright can benefit the UK economy and support growth. Private copying is carried out by millions of people and many are astonished that it is illegal in this country.
The big man Rupert Murdoch, and his son James, defend their media empire in front of the British government. Verdict: Murdoch Sr. appears too old and daft to be at the helm of News Corp. And James doesn't come across as up to the task.
the new media ecosystem often feels like one big collective story where the "news" is a best-fit line between different outlying points of absurdity, first-person narrative, and "expert" speculation
The Twitter Effect: How Social Media Changes the News Narrative
Subscription Fees & Coffee Houses
Declaring “The coffee house is back. Enjoy it,” The Economist in its most recent issue published a special report on the impact of the internet and social media on the journalism industry. The (august) Economist argues that “there is much to celebrate in the noisy, diverse, vociferous, argumentative and stridently alive environment of the news business in the age of the internet.”
Yet there are acute risks, as The Economist notes. First, we as a society risk losing high quality investigative journalism to hold the rich and powerful to account. Second, our collective coffee house is a worryingly partisan place.
The Economist’s recommendations for how to maximize the good and minimize the bad of our new world coffee house are feeble. “As producers of new journalism. . . be scrupulous with facts and transparent with their sources. As consumers. . . be catholic in their tastes and demanding in their standards.”
Better yet, consumers who rely on high quality news sources should, budgets allowing, pay for them. If you’re reading this blog you’re no doubt savvy enough to be able to tiptoe around the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist or Financial Times paywalls (although that FT paywall is a bit tricky). Either now or in a few years you will be able to afford subscriptions to some or all of these sources.
If you consistently read those sources, pay for them! Assuming government support is out of the question, the only way these high quality institutions will survive is if members of our generation buy the product. Free loading in this case threatens to bankrupt the producers of relatively moderate, high quality journalism (including investigative journalism) that do so much to inform our democracy.
The internet is indeed a noisy, diverse, vociferous place filled with fascinating arguments. Yet arguments are only truly helpful when one or both sides have meaningful facts at their disposal. We as a society need to be careful before we decide the benefits of free loading (i.e. saving three or four hundred dollars a year in subscription fees) outweigh for us the benefits of learning about Abu Ghraib, NSA wiretapping, CIA rendition sites, and so on.
After 168 years of playing fast and dirty with the truth, Rupert Murdoch pulls the plug on News of the World.
ICT: necessary but not sufficient
At Intel's “Egypt Tomorrow: IT Vision for a Brighter Future” panel discussion last week, speakers highlighted the role of the IT sector at this stage in Egypt’s history and political transformation.
“The 25th of January revolution is a testament to the power of technology,” affirmed moderator Hicham Arafa
“Overall, Egypt’s transition to democracy simply can’t be done without ICT,” said Sherif Hashem, executive vice president of the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA)
But internet penetration in Egypt is estimated at just over 20 million users, less than a quarter of the country's population (as of March 2011).Sure, "ICT gives people power that they've never had before" ... but which people?
Thanks, Nabiha. But: "Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?"
BREAKING (PUNCTUATION) NEWS
Oxford does not recommend use of the Oxford comma:
As a general rule, do not use the serial/Oxford comma: so write ‘a, b and c’ not ‘a, b, and c’. But when a comma would assist in the meaning of the sentence or helps to resolve ambiguity, it can be used – especially where one of the items in the list is already joined by ‘and’
It gets better. Jason Kottke -- who first noted this punctuational oddity -- writes that Oxford Style Manual does recommend the use of the Oxford comma: "So basically, Oxford is telling us to use the Oxford comma but isn't going to use it internally. Oxford gone schizo, y'all!"
Indeed.
But kudos to Google for actually telling us this -- hurrah for transparency reports!
Crowdsourcing Haiti
Today, the New York Times looks at big changes taking placing at the World Bank. The big 'ol banking behemoth is throwing open its doors-making its raw data sets available to the public for the first time.
For more than a year, the bank has been releasing its prized data sets, currently giving public access to more than 7,000 that were previously available only to some 140,000 subscribers — mostly governments and researchers, who pay to gain access to it.
Those data sets contain all sorts of information about the developing world, whether workaday economic statistics — gross domestic product, consumer price inflation and the like — or arcana like how many women are breast-feeding their children in rural Peru.
It is a trove unlike anything else in the world, and, it turns out, highly valuable.
The article is mostly about culture clash within the decades-old financial body: stirred up by a new generation of World Bankers who are pushing for more institutional transparency (live-streams of closed-door meetings, public data dumps, etc...).
But what's most interesting is the part of the article that talks about Haiti. In January 2010 (shortly after the earthquake in Port-au-Prince) the World Bank sent a plane to take aerial photographs of the country. The Bank then released those photographs to the public-inviting engineers from all over the world to study them, and then offer advise on how/where to funnel aid money.
“As opposed to some imperious bureaucracy in Washington, we’re making things open and accessible to people,” [Robert Zoellick] says. “That makes for better performance, it makes for a more open system, it makes for people having a different attitude about the World Bank.”
Haiti was crowdsourced. International development, says Zoellick, can be improved with a crowdsourcing model.
I wonder if the I.M.F could start using crowdsourcing too? Give us some of that Greek financial data, and let's see what we can do...
WikiConstitution
Egypt's Hisham Mubarak Law Center has just launched a "Lets Write our Constitution" initiative that makes use of the web platform and social networks to mobilize a citizen-driven Social Contract.
from the department of new-and-awesome-words
“bloggeague” is born, thanks to Katie (here). I just added it to Urban Dictionary, and the term is now awaiting editor moderation.
Any bets on how long it’ll take us to get into Oxford English Dictionary?
Old media lives! In my nostrils...