The Web Difference » control & power

A Human Rights Web Difference

tsullivan — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 14:38:59 +0000

This is an interesting story on CNN right now. A UC Berkeley grad student was arrested while attending an anti-government rally in Cairo and used a Twitter message to to tell his friends. They then posted the message (and others that followed) on their blogs, and eventually UC Berkeley sent a lawyer to get him out of jail.

Can PR Save the Beijing 2008 Olympics?

ckennedy — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 04:53:10 +0000

“Can PR Save the Beijing 2008 Olympics?”

This blog usually covers a number of the topics that came up during our class discussion with DW on Astroturfing and Marketing “Conversations” and this whole entry, including the comments, relates to the conversation with Ethan Zuckerman about Western Media Bias and the Chinese Olympics.

-CK

More blocking than we thought?

dweinberger — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 20:58:16 +0000

This report says it’s not just Comcast blocking Bittorrent. Of course, it comes from Vuze, a company that makes a Bittorrent client…

National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force

skass — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:27:22 +0000

The FBI has established a cyber-security division focused on protecting the United States against cyber-security threats to fundamental networks. The details are incredibly fuzzy – all we know is that it involves inter-agency cooperation and “dozens” of people. The FBI has requested funding to cover 70 additional agents and 100 support personnel for the task force. It’s good to know the government is concerned, but annoying that all we can say is that it is doing something to protect us from something.

More on Internet Campaigning

nikae — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 23:45:46 +0000

Some of our discussion in class last week reminded me of this article in Rolling Stone. The article discusses some of the techniques that Obama’s campaign is using, including novel uses of the web. It discusses the social networking site “MyBo,” includes an approving quote from Joe Trippi, and explains how Obama has generally built and improved upon the basic internet framework that Howard Dean developed in 03-04.

However, I think one of the most interesting parts of the article is a brief discussion (on page 2) of how the Obama campaign has intentionally played down its internet involvement in order to avoid being labeled “the next Howard Dean” and treated merely as a flash in the pan. Unfortunately, the article does not really elaborate on this point. Would playing up his internet credentials really cause Barack Obama to be taken less seriously? Would some voters be turned off by social networking sites dedicated to him? Would Howard Dean comparisons be fatal? I believe that the answer to all these questions is probably “no,” but clearly at least one media director in the Obama camp felt otherwise…

Is the Web different? And should teaching be objective?

dweinberger — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 15:11:30 +0000

I’m in the slightly awkward position of having blogged some thoughts about the overall question of whether the Web is different, and about how we might talk about this during the last class. It’s awkward because I haven’t talked about this with JP and he may have a very different (and, inevitably, better) idea. As might you. Plus, I’ve tipped my hand about where I stand on the issue, in case you hadn’t guessed already.

At the meta level, this is reminiscent of the debate about journalistic neutrality, balance, and objectivity (which are, of course, three different things). Would it be best for a teacher to keep her personal views on such topics hidden from the class? Or is transparency the right approach?

For journalism, I personally tend to think transparency is usually best, although that may take the form of maximally neutral reporting along with a blog (or something else) that makes the reporter’s background, values, and biases apparent. That way, we can check out the biases we may suspect are at play.

But it’s different with teaching. For one thing, teachers and students are in a power relationship. This is formalized in the grading system (stupid, stupid grading system … a rant for another time) but is likely to exist even outside of that system because the teacher is the one who sits at the front of the classroom. Obviously, the student-teacher relationship isn’t only about power, but it seems to me to be an almost inevitable component of that relationship. (Exceptions exist, modalities and degrees exist.) So, there’s less at risk if you disagree with a reporter’s stances and values than if you disagree with your teacher’s.

I’m not saying that that power imbalance can’t be overcome. Every (?) teacher hopes that her students feel genuinely free to disagree, even and especially fundamentally. But when students enter a classroom, they take the measure of the teacher and quickly gauge the extent to which they are free to argue back, to reason differently, to engage outside the day’s topic. Don’t you? That’s different with our relationship to reporters.

I apparently have taken a stand on this meta issue as well, by posting about the Web difference (the topic and the class) on my personal blog. I did so on the grounds of transparency, because you could always google me and get a pretty good idea of where I stand anyway, and to get pushback from my readers. I’m just not 100% comfortable with having done so.

Politics and open source

jpines — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:34:33 +0000

One of the readings for today talked of the great potential of applying the Linux open source model to political campaigning. Is the open source model really different? Here’s an article describing the rapid increase in open source acquisitions by wealthy investors. Is open source going “corporate”? What type of effect will the outside money have? Is this symbolic of other trends of web differences?

Live Blogging Lessig on Change Congress

kparker — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:26:36 +0000

6:31 More Questions.

Why not a pledge for lobbyist? Pledge to give information but not money. This is a good idea and Larry seems to like it as well.

How do you protect this organization from abuse and give it trust? Ummm… Larry doesn’t know. I think the key is to try and keep it bipartisan and out of the ugly political trenches. Is that doable, I don’t know, but it should be a goal.

What is the future? What about gerrymandering? Who knows.

What is the real problem with PACs? They aggregate small donors into real donations. But the problem is the lack of transparency that ends with one entity have amplified power.

6:12 Questions.

Why don’t incumbents support public financing? I think that equal dollars being spent would make incumbents even harder to out.

What do we need? Some victories. That is true. But which issues should be first?

6:10 Congressman Cooper:

The system is hopelessly broken. We have to make change happen. (and he is done, wow that was quick).

6:07 – Is this destined to fail? Can we Change Congress? Perhaps, but nonetheless we need to try.

5:59 – We need lots of people to make this work. People like YOU!

Reagan and Jefferson both feared capture of gov’t. But who is capturing gov’t? It is us. And this is profoundly destructive. (oh and there is the Mickey shout out I alluded to earlier).

5:48 – Earmarks. Not mostly a cost problem, but a corruption and corrosion problem.

Earmark example in OR. I find it interesting that he has used mostly democrat examples. I wonder if this was intentional so that it can’t be easily dismissed by people on the right?

Level 1 of CC (Change Congress, not Creative Commons although that is interesting isn’t it?). A way for candidates and citizens to pledge commitment.

Level 2 of CC. The wiki like tracking function. See Congressman Cooper here.
Level 3 of CC. Emily’s list model, become an organization driving for reform.

5:41 – 88% of people (in the Bay Area at least) believe that money changes outcomes. Even if it doesn’t actually change things everyone believes it. So what do we need to do? Change the role of money.

Public Financing of Elections. Why is gov’t so big? -> B/c congressmen must get elected. Now that is clever. I like it. Could public financing be shown to pay for itself by reducing the size of unnecessary gov’t?

Might this work with “safe” districts?

5:28 – Is the gov’t stupid? Larry says no. The system is just busted. Well doesn’t that mean the gov’t is stupid right now? It just doesn’t require that is has to be stupid forever…

Congressmen are good people just working in a system that drives them to do bad things.

Story about vaccines. The vaccine process might be good,the process just looks very bad. As a result some people don’t vaccinate their kids. That ain’t good.

Shout out to Maxed Out! You go Prof Warren. (ps. Unintentional puns are the best ones.)

5:22 – (c). Gov’t always extend (c) retrospectively. Why does the gov’t get this wrong? I think I saw an ominous Mickey Mouse shadow in the background of the last slide.

Sugar. Ok, that is just scary. But what is gov’t doing telling us what to eat anyway?

Global Warming.

5:18 – . Larry was invited to MSFT? Wow. The 90s were crazy (and oh yeah baysian filters, those were the days). But geeks solve problems without thinking about law. I see east coast code vs. west coast code showdown coming (it sort of came…). Geeks think gov’t is hopeless (or just stupid?). My money is on the latter.

5:16 – . Drug companies spend lots of money getting doctors to like their products. They also spend lots of money on “false science”. This is a corruption of science.

5:12 – . So raise your hand if you thought that Lessig would start with Ronald Reagan? I totally dig it but I feel like I might be in the minority on that one.

5:11 – Welcome Larry! (and the lights go down). Ok, the CA weather joke is getting old everybody. We don’t need to be reminded that the weather here sucks. We know every time we look outside.

5:07 – JP giving the introduction. 10th Anniversary of Berkman, happy to welcome back Larry (he has lots of history here). So, if Larry really wants to get this Change Congress thing moving he should probably head back to the East Coast. The shuttle makes it real quick to get down to DC Larry! I’m sure Dean Kagan would go for it. We’ve hired away all of UofC and a good chunk of Yale, we need to get started on Stanford.

5:05 – Tick tock? Congressman Cooper is in the house (or at least his doppleganger)

4:57 – More people watching: room looks ‘full’ though there are a good number of empty seats scattered around. Also, Larry and Terry Fisher have an uncanny resemblance. They were just standing together at the front of the room and but for Larry having his hair slicked back you might have thought they were brothers.

4:49 – A lot more people here now, I totally suck at guessing crowd sizes but I’d say at least twice as many as earlier (maybe even more). No one really exciting in the audience yet (aside from all the Berkman folks of course). However, I probably wouldn’t recognize many internet famous people anyway aside from the Tron Guy and only then if he was in costume.

4:39 – Got a quick preview of the deck, first slide is . Good looking group so far, I’d say more than 50 people all ready and we are still 20 minutes out.

Oh and Larry just walked in.

_______________________________________________

In a little bit (hopefully around 5?) I am going to be live blogging Larry Lessig’s presentation at HLS on “Building the Change Congress Movement”. However, in the mean time I’d thought I’d throw up some links for folks to check out if they are interested:

Live Webcast! (starting at 5ish obviously)

Berkman Center Announcement

http://change-congress.org/

Since this is being webcast, and I feel safe assuming archived, there will be less transcription and more commentary (yay or boo? let’s go with yay for now and reevaluate later).

Has the Web Increased Corporate Responsiveness?

skass — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 02:25:09 +0000

Adobe has vowed to modify its new Photoshop terms of service in response to user complaints regarding a particular term that gave Adobe a non-exclusive license to each user photograph uploaded to the system. The story sounds somewhat similar to Facebook’s responses to users’ privacy complaints regarding news feed and beacon. Hopefully this increased responsiveness on the part of corporate entities signals a web difference.

Comcast cutting deal with BitTorrent

bepa — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:23:03 +0000

Comcast announced today that it will work with BitTorrent to treat the P2P traffic equally. (See here for the announcement)

However, though Comcast said it will no longer (by the end of the year) discriminate based on traffic using the BitTorrent protocol, it’s unclear what this means for other types of traffic.