From September 2005 to June 2006 a team of thirteen scholars at the The University of Southern California's Annenberg Center for Communication explored how new and maturing networking technologies are transforming the way in which we interact with content, media sources, other individuals and groups, and the world that surrounds us.
This site documents the process and the results.
Dave Zatz's blog on high tech entertainment carries a cautionary note amidst all the attention that the video iPod has garnered. Netflix is indefinitely postponing its launch of a downloadable movie system because of opposition from the studios.
Last month I was ready to upgrade to a new iPod from my third generation model, but the rumor sites began to make noises that an upgrade to 80gb was in the works so I held off.
After the announcement of the video iPod last week I decided that even though I was a little disappointed by the size of the drive, a bigger one would be unlikely before January so I ordered a 60 gb unit from Apple.
I was supposed to get my iPod tomorrow, but FedEx delivered the unit a day early.
Read on for my review of the video iPod after half a day of playing with it.
The New York Times carries an an article on how repressive regimes such as the military-run state of Myanmar use off-the-shelf technology from Sunnyvale, California based Fortinet to filter out dissenting Internet content.
I've posted my essay "The City Beyond Maps," originally published in Pasajes de Arquitectura y Critica, September, 2003,
to varnelis.net. This article is the final of four articles commissioned by Pasajes to re-examine the relationship of architecture and capital at the start of the millennium. The other three are: Hallucination in Seattle, on Gehry's Experience Music Project, Cathedrals of the Culture Industry, on OMA's competition entry for LACMA, Disney Hall, and Eli Broad, and A Brief History of Horizontality: 1968/1969 to 2001/2002, on 9/11, Archizoom, and FOA's Yokohama Terminal. This essay considers downtown Los Angeles from the perspective of a critical theory of network technology and suggests that, as we search for new theories to understand architecture and culture after postmodernism, it is not the Disney Concert Hall that succeeds Fredric Jameson's Bonaventure Hotel, it is carrier hotel One Wilshire. Read it [here] You may also want to look at Marc Tuters's essay Locative Space: Situated and Interconnected" on this very site. Marc and I are working together this semester and I think it's worth juxtaposing these pieces.
If yesterday's entry about Congress's desire to protect the freedom speech of journalists, but not to extend those benefits to bloggers wasn't enough, the telecom cities mailing list carries a story from the New York Daily News about how select business and arts executives received e-mails warning of a terrorist threat to the city three days before the public was informed and ninety minutes before Mayor Bloomberg was given a full briefing.
Is membership in the exclusive online community of asmallworld.net required to survive terrorist attacks these days?
Read the NY Daily News entry here
Ars Technica picked up this item from Editor and Publisher yesterday. The 2005 Free Flow of Information Act is designed to protect journalists from having to reveal the names of their anonymous sources except under specific conditions. On Monday, however, the bill's co-sponsor, US Senator Richard Lugar—who said he was inspired to write the legislation by columnist Judith Miller's recent imprisonment for not revealing her source to a court—suggested that bloggers would not be considered journalists under this law. So somehow we have freedom of speech, but some of us have more freedom of speech than others? So much for the dream of media from the ground up.
At oreillynet, Dan Zambonini asks the seemingly heretical question: Is Web 2.0 killing the Semantic Web? Zambonini suggests that the rush to give power to the people with Web 2.0 impedes important progress toward developing the semantic web, which he argues is much more critical in the long run.
Today's Slashdot carries a frightening article that suggests that what we previously thought of as [[w: cyberterrorism]] may be a new competitive business strategy. See Blackout Shows Net's Fragility. Slashdot is blogging an a ZDNet article discussing a dispute between Level 3 Communications and Cogent Communication that has left subscribers to both networks unable to talk to another.
What are the consequences of Web 2.0 for Networked Publics—not this academic group but rather our object of study? Web 2.0 is based around the model of consumers becoming active producers, not only creating their own content but actively remixing content themselves. In that, Web 2.0 splendidly embodies Roland Barthes's concept of the writerly text replacing the readerly text. Depending on your epistemological paradigm, the web has moved from the classical era to the modern era, or from the modern to the postmodern. But the jury is still out on Web 2.0's consequence to social structures. In a response to an essay by danah boyd, I suggest that if Web 2.0 will lead to greater bonds between dispersed localities based on interest and lifestyle communities, it may well also lead to a greater disconnect between individuals in close physical proximity.
Ether, a project about the impact of telecommunications on everyday life by new media architectural collective AUDC, of which I am a co-founder, was featured in the LA Weekly recently. The exhibit remains open by appointment.
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