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By Karen Elliott House
$28.95
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By Cormac McCarthy
$22
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Twitter.com / WhiteHouse
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It’s not entirely clear how the White House joining the cyber-ranks of MySpace, Facebook and Twitter will serve to make the American government more “transparent” and “efficient,” but perhaps micro-blogging will save our democracy ... or maybe we’ll get to hear about what Joe Biden had for lunch.
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vicepresidents.com
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You know a social networking trend has gone too far when: (1) Karl Rove has caught on, and (2) Karl Rove attempts to “friend” you—or, in Meghan McCain’s unenviable case, follow you on Twitter. Ew.
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thepiratebay.org
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While not to be confused with piracy on the high seas, a Swedish court has ordered that the four founders of The Pirate Bay, the most renowned file-sharing Web site on the Internet, should be jailed for one year after being found guilty of breaking copyright law. All this for a site that provides user-submitted links to media, not storage of the media itself.
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youtube.com
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Thanks to the magic of the Internet, we can do all sorts of things we couldn’t before, like post countless reaction videos to others’ reaction videos on YouTube! However, some enterprising and musically inclined types found a more productive use of the medium and took their act all the way to Carnegie Hall.
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thelotusposition.files.wordpress.com
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Can plugging into online social networks via Twitter or Facebook lead to some kind of computer-aided moral decline en masse? A study out of the University of Southern California’s Brain and Creativity Institute seems to suggest that this may be an imminent side effect of living in information-overloaded societies.
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AP photo / Sang Tan
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Sacre bleu! Some conservative members of France’s parliament are probably regretting their decision to begin their Easter break a little early, as their absence allowed rival socialists to ambush an Internet piracy bill on Thursday.
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Flickr / freezelight
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The BBC reports on some alarming numbers coming out of Redmond: “More than 97% of all e-mails sent over the net are unwanted, according to a Microsoft security report. The e-mails are dominated by spam adverts for drugs, and general product pitches and often have malicious attachments.”
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By David Sirota — Most newspaper postmortems insist that decreased ad revenues brought on by the Internet and the recession caused journalism’s problems, but a look at the vapid celebrity-obsessed pages of the nation’s ever-thinner rags tells a different story.
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highvolumemedia.com
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The Vatican is about to become a more Web-savvy institution, according to Benedict XVI. The pope issued a public statement Friday acknowledging that the Holy See failed to investigate the background of Holocaust-denying British Bishop Richard Williamson before formally welcoming him back into the Church’s good graces in January.
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By Marie Cocco — A favorite of the MTV crowd, the stunning and successful singer now is a symbol of the ubiquity of domestic violence—and the dangerously confused message that celebrity culture sends about it.
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denverpost.com
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The death knell has been sounded for the Rocky Mountain News, E.W. Scripps’ Denver-area newspaper, which is scheduled to close after Friday’s edition is churned out, no doubt signaling more mayhem to come in the old media world.
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By David Sirota — One thing is obvious after Michael Phelps’ marijuana “scandal”: Our society is addicted to fake outrage—and to break our dependence, we’re going to need far more potent medicine than the herb Phelps was smoking.
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windowssecrets.com
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Visitors to CNN’s Web site looking to watch streaming video of the inauguration on Jan. 20 got this message: “For faster, better video, click ‘yes’ here.” Doing so installed a peer-to-peer plug-in that transferred the bandwidth responsibility of streaming the video from CNN to the users, taking over visitors’ computers in the process.
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A new book by Lawrence Lessig asks what constitutes copyright infringement in the era of “sampling” and point-and-click downloading.
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Flickr / me and the sysop
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A recent spate of mass e-mails nearly crippled the State Department’s communications and generated a terse cable—sent out to all employees, of course—threatening disciplinary action if diplomats and others don’t cut it out. The note blamed abuse of the “reply all” button for the “e-mail storm.”
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By Eugene Robinson — In a sense, we’re all Bernie Madoff. We’ve been running our economy in accordance with his accounting principles for a generation—and now we face a most unpleasant reckoning.
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Or so he says in a series of videos on his megachurch’s Web site. Among other highlights, Warren blames bloggers and talk radio for stirring up the controversy around his forthcoming inauguration prayer.
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The outgoing chairman of the Democratic National Committee fought to expand his party’s reach to the red states that Barack Obama won. His pioneering Internet fundraisers became Obama’s pioneering Internet fundraisers. He refused to budge on Florida and Michigan. So why is Howard Dean out in the cold?
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There’s a revolution underway in Chinese culture as young women flock from villages to factory employment in the cities, leaving traditional values behind.
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By Regina Marler — A new volume of the late poet’s correspondence sheds fresh light on the anguish and art of Sylvia Plath.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — While the nation’s capital obsesses over who will be the next pick for Barack Obama’s Cabinet, the president-elect’s lieutenants are engaged with what may be a more important long-term issue: What will become of Obama’s vast grass-roots network?
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By Ellen Goodman — Have you noticed that the spookiest colors of the season are not orange and black but red and blue? As Halloween slips into Election Day, the race for the White House has scared more grown-ups than any trip to the haunted house.
Posted on Oct 30, 2008
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Composite: Flickr: oneras/free tibet
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By Aram Sinnreich and Masha Zager —
As tools like the Web, e-mail, voice over IP, Internet video, mobile phones and peer-to-peer file sharing become increasingly vital to our lives, limitations on speech and threats to our privacy are becoming increasingly important civil rights issues.
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By Ellen Goodman — A cohort of entrepreneurs and scientists is the cutting edge of the Personal Genome Project. In an act of altruism and/or exhibitionism, the PGP-10 have put their medical records, traits and genetic codes on the Web where all the scientists, paparazzo and peeping Toms can see them.
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engadget.com
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Alaska’s Sen. Ted Stevens (the Internet as a “series of tubes” guy) testified in his own defense at his corruption trial Friday, blaming the fact that he received $250,000 in free house renovations and gifts first on his wife, then family friends, and ultimately on the many responsibilities of a U.S. senator.
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Composite by Truthdig
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While sister company Viacom is still suing YouTube for $1 billion, CBS is hoping to get some cash out of the Web video mecca a more polite way. The Tiffany Network has had some success online, and currently has one of the more popular YouTube channels, but the eyeball business isn’t as straightforward as it used to be.
Posted on Oct 13, 2008
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By Eugene Robinson — John McCain was telling the truth when he said that economics wasn’t his strong suit. In response to what many economists have called the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Republican nominee has sounded—and let’s be honest here—totally, embarrassingly and dangerously clueless.
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gawker.com
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Anonymous, an Internet-based group best known for pranking and protesting the Church of Scientology, apparently hacked Sarah Palin’s Yahoo Mail account and posted images of her inbox and correspondence on the Web. The McCain campaign condemned the “shocking invasion,” which turned up nothing of substantial juiciness.
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McCain campaign image altered for comment
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It’s time to start using the L-word when referring to John McCain and his campaign for the presidency. Misleading doesn’t quite capture the hypocritical use of distortions to make your opponent appear dishonest, as McCain’s latest ad attempts.
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Flickr / Mykl Roventine
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The Justice Department could be gearing up for an antitrust case against the world’s leading search and online advertising provider because of a deal with Yahoo that puts Google in control of the vast majority of online ads. Despite a pledge to not do evil, Google’s image has been tarnished in recent years, mainly over privacy concerns.
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dipdive.com
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Will.i.am’s viral hit will be performed live before Barack Obama’s historic acceptance speech in Denver on Thursday. Other musical acts expected to perform include Stevie Wonder, John Legend, Sheryl Crow and Jennifer Hudson, who will sing the national anthem. Bruce Springsteen has been rumored and un-rumored to appear, so we’ll have to wait and see. Updated.
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Satire by Andy Borowitz —
In a daring bid to wrench attention from his Democratic rival in the 2008 presidential race, Sen. John McCain today embarked on a historic first-ever visit to the Internet.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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The British government is planning to “significantly reduce” the country’s online file-sharing of copyrighted content, by at least 50 percent, in the next three years through a sequence of warning letters, Internet account suspensions and ultimate expulsion from Internet access.
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AP photo / Andrew Brownbill
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Pope Benedict XVI hit a green note Thursday, pontificating (har har) about the environment to a crowd of pilgrims at the Roman Catholic Church’s youth festival in Sydney, Australia, and making good on his eco-friendly nickname, “the green pope.”
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By Ellen Goodman — We are expected to interact with “labor-saving technology” without realizing that it’s labor-transferring technology. The job has not been “saved”; it’s been taken out of the paid sector, where employees have a nasty habit of expecting salaries, and put into the unpaid sector, where suckers ‘r’ us.
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businessweek.com
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A recent advertising partnership between search giant Google and competitor Yahoo has antitrust authorities worried. Not only does a Google-Yahoo deal look ridiculous in name, but critics (such as Microsoft) say the partnership would consolidate Google’s control of Internet search ad revenue to a whopping 90 percent of U.S. market share.
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By William Pfaff — A basic argument in Washington’s war on terror, an argument that one might think settled by now, concerns whether al-Qaida is the powerful global organization the Bush administration says it is or whether it has been, since its retreat into the Pakistan tribal areas, mostly an Internet phenomenon.
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By David Sirota — Books have survived radio and television for the same reason they will survive the Internet. Human life is simply too complex to be represented by a news spot or a blog post.
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We’ve gotten used to the idea of independent groups funneling soft money into political campaign ads, but in this election some progressives are trying to do something entirely new. According to a report by NPR and the Center for Investigative Reporting, a band of crafty activists is trying to create a grand network for progressive issues and groups.
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Flickr / soggydan
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It turns out that the candidate who says he’s vetting his vice president with “a Google” may not actually know how to do so. Asked whether John McCain ever used a computer, his “deputy eCampaign director” replied, “You don’t need to use a computer to know how it shapes the country.”
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“Daily Show” host and media critic Jon Stewart lampoons cable’s talking heads for bragging about their journalistic superiority to the Internet while reporting rumors directly from YouTube.
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The Associated Press over the weekend challenged the very format of blogging, prompting an immediate boycott and, almost as quickly, a reversal. The blogosphere began organizing a bipartisan boycott after AP informed the Drudge Retort that its excerpts of AP stories—some as short as 39 words—were a violation of copyright. The news cooperative has since retreated, saying it will work toward “better and more positive” guidelines.
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AP photo / LM Otero
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By Elliot D. Cohen — John McCain has long been a major player in a radical militaristic group driven by an ideology of global expansionism and dominance attained through perpetual, pre-emptive, unilateral, multiple wars. Over its two terms, the George W. Bush administration has planted the seeds for this geopolitical master plan, and now appears to be counting on the McCain administration, if one comes to power, to nurture it.
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By Amy Goodman — Thousands of people gathered in Minneapolis for the fourth National Conference for Media Reform. They came from all walks of life and all ages to address a central crisis in our society: our broken media system.
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publishing2.com
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A Los Angeles judge on Tuesday ordered two Internet spammers to pay a record-breaking $230 million in fines after they sent more than 700,000 unsolicited advertisements to MySpace users. The amount is almost half what Rupert Murdoch spent to buy the social networking site in 2005.
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By Marie Cocco — What is more frustrating? The sexism Hillary Clinton had to endure, or that so many were oblivious to it?
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Flickr/ Captian Giona
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Imagine going to the Internet and being able to see how much everyone in the United States, including you, earned and paid in taxes. The outgoing Italian government just made everyone’s private business public. Needless to say, Italians were outraged as they rushed to the Web to see the income of their neighbors and the rich and famous.
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Flickr / NCBrian
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Elizabeth Edwards has some insight into the media’s coverage of presidential campaigns, which she brings to a thoughtful Op-Ed in this Sunday’s New York Times. Beyond the current campaign, Edwards warns, “the future of news is not bright.”
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By Eugene Robinson — Who picked this movie? A few months ago, the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination looked as if it would be the feel-good political campaign of the decade, if not the century. Instead, we’re having to endure an endless loop of “Alien vs. Predator.”
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news.bbc.co.uk
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Representatives of the International Olympic Committee have warned China that the estimated 30,000 journalists who will cover the Games in Beijing must have unimpeded Internet access. Concerns were raised after the Chinese government blocked access to certain sites during the recent unrest in Tibet.
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