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.
This is a pretty important netpublics theory object, I think. Discussed more fully here:
Royal Grand Prix Derby Racing (On Air) theory object.
In "bloggers to have less rights than journalists?", Kazys Varnelis writes:
bq. "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."
The comment by Luger was actually a question, according to Seth Finkelstein responding to Dan Gillmor. The full quote reads:
bq. "As to who is a reporter, this will be a subject of debate as this bill goes farther along (...) Are bloggers journalists? Or some of the commercial businesses that you here would probably not consider real journalists? Probably not, but how do you determine who will be included in this bill?"
kausfiles also weighs in on the journalist vs. blogger protection.
Is anyone surprised, though, that journalists would be granted privileges and protections that bloggers are not?
Mobile video and TV has been tried before and failed. This week Apple announced their video iPod, and more importantly, a deal with Disney/ABC. So will the vPod prevail? The iPod certainly changed the way that people consume music, and by extension, is changing the way music is produced and distributed. Will the vPod do the same? The jury is out. One argument for the sucess is that Apple is very good at creating a seamless and simple user experience. The iTunes Music Store is close to perfect, and the integration of software and hardware is dead simple.
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.
This is not exactly new news, but I recently returned from Japan, and failed, for the 2nd time, to acquire some tamagotchi for my kids. Okay, so I was able to get them a special edition hanerucchi over the summer, purely by chance, because there were a few left at the toy store in Narita airport. But just as in the summer, when I hit the toy stores and department stores for the cuter tamagotchi, everywhere has been sold out. I finally realized that they were already out in the US, and I just ordered a friendship pair from toysrus.com.
Two big announcements from MS today...mostly likely to try and derail the Apple juggernaut (ie today's vPod announcement). First, MS to pay Real a chunk of money and partner to distribute their online music wares. This is an attempt to displace ITMS as the dominant player in the space. Second, MS and Yahoo have teamed up to take on AOL for instant messaging dominance.
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