The Republic of Dissent

The damaging internet

From Martha Stewart:

The internet is responsible for our short-term mindset.I am convinced of it. We think with our thumbs instead of our minds. It’s very damaging. When the internet started, I thought it was this extraordinary thing to save time, which is always what I want, because that then makes time: to create, to plant trees. But it has been just the opposite! It has become an all-consuming passion.

It's always easy, reassuring and popular to blame the internet for our own shortcomings.

Internet dating

Interesting stuff from Emily Witt:

Internet dating alerted me to the fact that our notions of human behaviour and achievement, expressed in the agglomerative text of hundreds of internet dating profiles, are all much the same and therefore boring and not a good way to attract other people. The body, I also learned, is not a secondary entity. The mind contains very few truths that the body withholds. There is little of import in an encounter between two bodies that would fail to be revealed rather quickly. Until the bodies are introduced, seduction is only provisional.

In the depths of loneliness, however, internet dating provided me with a lot of opportunities to go to a bar and have a drink with a stranger on nights that would otherwise have been spent unhappy and alone.

Isn't technology so human!

Twitter as performance

This bit from Jessa Crispin explains, in part, why I haven't been tweeting as much as I used to, performing quickly and often is hard and almost always vacuous though it can be as fun as fluff can be:

Twitter is a performance, and occasionally that performance becomes this magical, swirly world of champagne cocktails, Paris hotel rooms, strings of pearls, and world famous friends that all love you intensely, and it's important to retweet their messages of love so that everyone knows this. It's different in tone from a person celebrating good fortune, and it's different from enthusiasm and a life well lived. A life well lived doesn't need to do it in front of an audience to prove its value. Envy bait carries a gaping shadow underneath it, a toothy "Don't you wish your life were so fabulous? Well, it's not" edge.

We are all Baudelaire

Sentences to munch on this weekend from Stefany Anne Golberg :

In a way, new technologies have made us all like Baudelaire. We are intoxicated by the multitude but cannot ignore its troubling aspects. Like Baudelaire, we are trying to find our private life in the crowd while protecting our “real” selves in a public persona. Blogs and social networking sites are like diaries with broken locks. They are confessions written for an audience. They let us feel as if we can fabricate a personal world for ourselves, a world we can control. We listen to music no one else can hear and read emails while standing on a crowded bus because we are looking for privacy. Baudelaire used poetry and fashion; we use PDAs and e-readers and the Internet. With boundless access to information, we can easily observe the crowd. But we cannot escape being observed. And we wonder if we can find the private life we’re looking for, either in the public space of the real world or in the virtual one.

Baudelaire wrote about the romance of throwing oneself alone, directionless, into the crush of public life. And it is exhilarating — spending your days wandering from shop to shop, fact to fact, video to video, stranger to stranger.

The strangeness of Google

Pertinent words from Ali Smith on Google:

Google is so strange. It promises everything, but everything isn’t there. You type in the words for what you need, and what you need becomes superfluous in an instant, shadowed instantaneously by the things you really need, and none of them answerable by Google.

I can't remember how I started  a relationship with Google, but what is more troubling is that I know that I'm staying not out of love, but because there is nothing out there better and that although I'm not unhappy without being neither at peace nor at ease, I fed something that fills me up some of the time.

Not Ok for Bush, Ok for Obama

Quote of the midday is from Bella Gerens:

Not that I ever expected him to be, but Obama is surely not the saviour he tried to make us all believe he was. And I absolutely do not understand why it is an outrage for Bush to read our emails but it’s fine for Obama to authorise the assassination of an American citizen. I do not understand why it is an outrage for Bush to deny foreign terrorism suspects their rights but it’s fine for Obama to do the same to American citizens on American soil. I do not understand why it was good that Obama was going to try Kalid Sheikh Mohammed in a civil court in Manhattan (where he would never get a fair trial), and now it’s also good that Obama’s not going to try American terrorism suspects in civil courts (where they might just have had a chance at a fair trial). I do not understand how American Congressmen can even propose this sort of thing during the administration of a constitutional lawyer, when the merest idiot can see that it’s plainly unconstitutional. There are no exceptions for terrorism in the Bill of Rights.

Invading New York City

As a resident of New York, I find this video cool and very creative.

Margaret Atwood and Twitter

Margaret Atwood explains why she loves Twitter:

The Twittersphere is an odd and uncanny place. It's something like having fairies at the bottom of your garden. How do you know anyone is who he/she says he is, especially when they put up pictures of themselves that might be their feet, or a cat, or a Mardi Gras mask, or a tin of Spam?
But despite their sometimes strange appearances, I'm well pleased with my followers – I have a number of techno-geeks and bio-geeks, as well as many book fans. They're a playful but also a helpful group. If you ask them for advice, it's immediately forthcoming: thanks to them, I learned how to make a Twitpic photo appear as if by magic, and how to shorten a URL using bit.ly or tinyurl. They've sent me many interesting items pertaining to artificially-grown pig flesh, unusual slugs, and the like. (They deduce my interests.) Some of them have appeared at tour events bearing small packages of organic shade-grown fair-trade coffee. I've even had a special badge made by a follower, just for me: "The 'call me a visionary, because I do a pretty convincing science dystopia' badge." It looks like this: They're sharp: make a typo and they're on it like a shot, and they tease without mercy. However, if you set them a verbal challenge, a frisson sweeps through them. They did very well with definitions for "dold socks" – one of my typos – and "Thnax", another one. And they really shone when, during the Olympics, I said that "Own the podium" was too brash to be Canadian, and suggested "A podium might be nice." Their own variations poured on to a feed tagged #cpodium: "A podium! For me?" "Rent the podium, see if we like it." "Mind if I squeeze by you to get onto that podium?" I was so proud of them! It was like having 33,000 precocious grandchildren!

I haven't yet to love twitter. I like it. Sometimes, I like it a lot, but I'm trying to get control of it and not let it control me.

The Ipad is for kids

I agree with Marc Bousquet on this:

I wouldn’t buy the iPad for me, but I’d certainly consider buying something like it for my son. Infants acquire the ability to point around ten months of age. With touch-screen interfaces, shortly thereafter most can interact with literacy programs designed for much older children.(...) the iPad is more of a toy than a tool.

Technology and the immigrant

Aleksandar Hemon's pertinent words on the effects that technology has on immigration and more specifically on the immigrants:

I think technology has a neutral value at best; it could be used for good things or bad things. I think it fundamentally changes the situation of assimilation or participation in society. Because you can stay in touch daily with wherever you came from and you can listen to live broadcasts of radio stations or the prayers from the mosques or read daily newspapers, complete with obituaries online. I met a guy in St. Louis, a city that has the largest Bosnian population [in America], who, when he got nostalgic would get on the Web and watch snow fall in Sarajevo.
Ellis Island immigrants, on the other hand, would come in, work hard, be exploited, make it or not make it but even those who made it would go back thirty to forty years later to the village of their origin and they would find that one or two people remembered them. So it was easy to sever connections, and in some ways it was natural: your life was here, your old life was there. But I know a large number of Bosnians in Chicago who send their kids to Bosnia over the summer—school’s over, they send them to Grandma. These kids are bilingual, bicultural. Displacement is not necessarily political. You can go back and forth. Transportation has become relatively cheap. Masses of people are moving around the world: immigrants, refugees, labor migrants. It’s an entirely different world.

I'm wondering whether technology isn't just a tool that is reflecting that the fact that immigration has changed because the world has gotten smaller and also that at the same time, it has become more fragmented. Immigrants when they move to a new country no longer leave everything behind; to the contrary, they are able more often than not to live within  a community of their compatriots that has recreated its home environment a best as it could. Globalization may have compressed both time and space, it has made people less willing to change their identities or adapt their culture for those have become too sacred to touch.

Internet, atrocity footage and the need to watch the sufferings of others

I agree wholeheartedly with Nicholas Sautin on this:

In short, the proliferation of atrocity footage on the Internet has complicated the ethical and aesthetic landscape of how and why we watch the suffering of others. If technology grants every war a dominant representational medium (consider the role of television during the Vietnam War), the digital aesthetic associated with Internet video perhaps most closely inhabits our contemporary anxiety about the wars fought in our name—our ability to see and not see, and our desire both to know and not know. The Internet passively collects the visual dregs of a world where anything and everything can be captured on film. (...) The problem with voyeurism and the Internet, though, is that the idea of “the right to look” may have become obsolete. Atrocity footage has been taken out of the hands of those who would previously have held such moral responsibility—governments, journalists, censors, teachers, etc. The images are simply there for anyone who wishes to look. We imagine their existence, haunted by glimpses of what we have actually seen, and often choose not to look further.
At their core, such images remain visible traces of what has happened, even if they seem incomprehensible. In their democratic lack of artifice and ornamentation, they suggest the closest approximation we have to reality; this makes them intolerable.

I have the feeling that atrocity footage of wars, violence or any other barbarity is the way of the future not just because modern society has accepted a legitimized a certain form of voyeurism, but also because we like in an age where as Agassi would have said 20 years ago, image is everything. Furthermore, "modern wars" (that's an oxymoron) are becoming so gadgetized and sterilized that people will want/need to experiment sensations, which brings them as close as possible to the experience of war because we live in the video-game era where anything real, brutal, and more importantly illicit is irresistible especially when it can be found on the internet and more also because we have become so desensitized to violence that only shocking images of the suffering of others can make us believe in its realness. It is the same feeling that explain for example why the media coverage of the earthquake of Haiti needed to be so gruesome and spectacular to provoke an outpouring of charitable feelings.

Grand Frère France

This worries:

The lower house of the French parliament has approved a draft bill that will allow the state unprecedented control over the Internet. Although the government says it will improve security for ordinary citizens, civil rights activists are warning of a "new level" of censorship and surveillance.
For members of the French administration, it is a law against digital crime. For civil rights activists and politicians from opposition parties, it is a plan for censorship that excites fear and loathing -- and even conjures up the specter of Big Brother and the surveillance state.
The lower house of the French parliament, the National Assembly, passed the first draft of the bill, known as "Loppsi 2," on Tuesday. It will now go on for a second reading in the Senate, where it seems likely to pass, thanks to the government's majority. If the Senate approves the bill, the new law could come into force as early as this summer. The legislation could have far-reaching consequences: Loppsi 2 contains rules that would make France the European country where the Internet is subject to the most censorship, regulation, control and surveillance.

What gets to me is how easy Loppsi 2 was to pass. This frightening fact underscores two critical reality about France. First, Internet has become the fundamental political,cultural and economical tool, which political, cultural, and economical elites want to control before it undermines totally their influence and their ability to remain "the ones". Second, there is no organized and vital opposition to Sarkozy despite his increasing unpopularity. Whatever one can say about Sarkozy, he has total control of his side while the opposition whether it is in civil society or elsewhere is too busy focusing about what they don't like about each other as if it matters since they don't have any power without offering a credible alternative that would at least tear down the new myth that there is no alternative to Sarkozysm.

Amish country and the Internet

Interesting...:

In a world where news still travels at a mail carrier's pace, the farmers, preachers and mechanics responsible for filling The Budget threatened to go on strike if the 119-year-old Amish weekly went ahead with its plan to go online.
The writers, known as scribes, feared their plain-spoken dispatches would become fodder for entertainment in the “English,” or non-Amish, world. The editors hastily rescinded the plan shortly after proposing it in 2006, and today, only local news briefs appear on The Budget's bare-bones website.

Le net

David Post has an excellent post on France, the EU and Internet Speech, which is a must-read. My only criticism is that it asks more questions than it answers. The reason for that is that we are at a time where nobody quite knows where the law will go if the two options concerning Internet Speech remains between total freedom and censorship.

Anything but a smooth transition

This week is another tough one for me so I won't post as much as I want to. I have so many things to do and an apartment to order. My anemia makes me feel like I weigh 500 pounds and like my brain is a thousand years old. I have just ordered a new computer and new "smartphone" so I'm in what I like to call a transitional period that hopefully will make my world and my work more technologically savvy. After I heard the news yesterday on the new Iphone, I was so happy I resisted the urge to get one last week. The trouble that I have one is that I don't see the point of getting one if I constantly need to worry about the fact that it is costing me way to more that it ought and that Apple will in the next month come up with something better. I think a phone company should do an Ad comparing the its product to the Iphone just like Apple does with pc with those persuasive commercials on TV, which make you want to get a  Apple computer just to avoid having to deal with Vista and other silly Windows updates. That said, I'm going to get a Macbook Pro fairly soon, but I will wait another year to get an Iphone.

Twitter and race

Interesting stuff from  Caitlin Moran:

(...) my biggest discovery has been on the subject of race. An internet facility that allows connection with the whole world gives you a deeper and a richer understanding of different people and their problems. It makes you rethink things you had blithely taken for granted.
The big revelation I have had is that the phrase “mixed-race African-American” takes up 26 letters, from the available Twit-posting-limit of 140. The descriptor for a white American, meanwhile, would be simply “American”, a mere eight letters.This glaring disparity gives a Twittering advantage to white Americans — they have an extra 18 letters to communicate with. Mixed-race Americans, however, have to spend so many letters simply defining themselves that their actual announcements, jokes and links to duff YouTube clips are brutally curtailed. We can’t shillyshally around this — that is a racial disadvantage. In the interests of an equal and happy world, we have to find a snappier way to describe people’s ethnic heritage or Twitter will turn into a ghastly WASPy golf club and die of whiteness.
This is given added impetus because we now live in a post-Obama world. Obama is the most famous mixed-race African-American in history. Given how many times a day Obama is written about, discussed or name-checked, if we don’t tackle this “mixed-race African-American” problem soon, millions of people are going to be crippled by RSI. As the world is an increasingly mixed-race, mixed-nationality place — because of the unstoppable forces of a) increasingly cheap international travel and b) hot lust — it behoves us all, in our global brotherhood, to chip in with suggestions on this pressing linguistic problem.

I have to say that the fact that  Moran's observations about the linguistic and racial problems of twittering are interesting, they don't make me want to care because she is addressing mundane, pc, and fluffy issues, which come to the center just because they are modern even though they should force the technically aware crowd to the realization that some worldviews and categorizations are just too old and too odd for the new world.

A distinction without a difference

I'm wondering or rather I doubt that  Stephen Pollard's point about the difference between blogs and newspapers is still relevant or even true because I have to say that I believe that most journalists have become bloggers in an attempt to escape their conviction that blogs and the Internet will doom their profession and newspapers:

In the end, the difference between quality newspapers and even serious blogs is that your default reaction to a newspaper piece should be that it is true, whereas your default reaction to a blog post should be that it might be true, but it might equally well be a pack of lies. Rather like government smear campaigns.

Technology makes the ridiculous and the trivial revolutionary and fabulous

Katherine Mangu-Ward has an article on internet application such as twitter in Reason magazine. She makes the interesting point that they help make the ridiculous sublime and the ordinary and the trivial revolutionary. Sugary excerpt:

Twitter is another example of the ridiculous quickly turning to the sublime. Morons who can't choose one bar and stay there on Friday nights want their friends to be able find them. Voila, a service that sends out badly spelled messages about your whereabouts to everyone you know. A few short months later, Egyptian democracy activists are using the same tool to organize and communicate below the radar and/or while in jail.

From frivolous to political is well-documented, but where does the market fit in? [Clay] Shirky mentions another collaborative project, a tool to coordinate teams of people to subtitle Japanese animation called Aegisub. "It ended up signaling the high demand for stuff that American distributors thought was too arcane," says Shirky. As official releases of anime other than Sailor Moon became more common, the Aegisub community decided to delete their bootleg versions.

Why did they start a group only to run themselves out of business? "It's not because of a commercial motivation. It's also not because of an anti-commercial motivation. These aren't people who are motivated by sticking it to The Man....They changed the world to be more like what they wanted and once it changed, they could stop."

It's that impulse—do what you want in order to get what you want and then go back to whatever you were doing—that Shirky ably captures in Here Comes Everybody. Things that seem trivial become tools for building crucially important, often ad hoc, collaborations. Social media erodes the divide between freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly, and intertwining them makes all of them easier to defend.(Emphasis added)

Technology, ethnic conflicts, and Africa

Via the Globe and Mail, Tim Querengesser has an interesting article on the role that technology, particularly cellphones, plays inciting ethnic tensions in Africa, particularly in Kenya. Sugary excerpt:

The numbers are striking. Mobile phones are everywhere in Africa, despite its relative poverty. In fact, Kibera, Kenya's largest slum, is one of the country's biggest customers for mobile airtime.

And demand keeps growing. In 1999, one in 2,300 had a mobile phone. By 2004, it was one in 10. Now, it is one in four; of the nearly one billion people in Africa, nearly 100 million have a mobile.

The technology has pole-vaulted many African countries beyond their crumbling infrastructure and into the information age. But it has also exposed them to risks. No other continent struggles with ethnic conflict like Africa. With SMS the preferred method to communicate (they're cheaper than calls) and with cellphone-happy Kenya now picking up the pieces after ethnic war, the potential for SMS to incite hate is coming into focus.

[...] During Kenya's constitutional referendum in 2005, politicians preyed on tribal hatreds to sway votes. At the time, vernacular radio was the medium most infected with hate speech.

This time around, tribe was all important and SMS took the lead. "It's easier to use SMS than radio," said Mr. Mucheke. "There's more censorship on radio. There are no controls at the moment over SMS. That made it the most efficient and easiest medium to proliferate hate speech."

The moral block people have to spreading hate is easily overcome when a simple push of a button is all that's needed, adds Mr. Mucheke.

The trouble is that in most African countries, the State isn’t strong enough to stop the use of technology to encourage ethnic hatred and incite racial violence. Moreover, the most disturbing element of the story in that in Kenya and in too many other African countries, different ethnic groups are still viewing themselves not as part of one country and illegitimate holders of political or economical power when the two don’t come hand and hand.

The net and publishing

Nicholas Clee argues that publishers are lost online for two reasons:

The first reason is that publishers and authors have been understandably tentative. Stephen King experimented [ putting his works online and trusting readers to be honest and to pay for downloading them] with comparatively unimportant novels; if he posted The Duma Key online, everyone would really sit up, as they would if HarperCollins posted a new Michael Crichton, or Random House a new Ian McEwan.

The more important reason is that there is no way of reading electronic texts that competes with the printed book. Amazon reports that sales of its e-book reader, the Kindle, have exceeded expectations; but the company has conspicuously failed to provide figures. You can be sure that the number of trees spared is modest.

The good side of anonymity

Linda Grant had an excellent and thought-provoking article on Comment is Free at the beginning of the week on anonymity in cyberspace. She took the contrarian position that anonymity isn't just causing people to be mean and to cross dangerous boundaries, but to have a sense of community that they wouldn’t have otherwise when they take the time to get past first impressions and instant reactions. Sugary excerpt:

Often I would try to imagine the person behind the opinions. Who did we have here? An embittered old Trot with a couple of bad marriages behind him and a tendency to take a drink or two? Or spotty Tory boy, commenting in his bedroom while he was supposed to be studying for his A levels? The problem with Cif was that not only did you not know who someone was, but usually you didn't even know their gender, age, occupation. Was this person commenting on Africa a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle or a call-centre worker who has read an article on Wikipedia?

But why should it matter? It mattered, I thought, because by turning someone into nothing more than a set of opinions on a screen, you could first depersonalise, then dehumanise and then demonise your opponent. You were battling with vast realms of virtual enemies, whom you could invest with all kinds of evil intent (which is why the accusation "Nazi!" is so popular on the internet). The extrapolation from a few slightly badly chosen words, hurriedly typed, into a whole system of belief became a common sport - "Zionist neocon!", "Loony lefty".

I recounted last week the discovery that the son of my old boss, Tony Hall, turned out to be the frequent commenter known as "ishouldapologise" (in real life Phil Hall). Through him, I was able to regain contact with his parents, two of the most remarkable people I have ever met, who have spent all their lives devoted to Africa and its people, "gypsy journalists" they described themselves. It was a few months before Eve Hall's death from breast cancer, and I wrote her obituary for the Guardian when, two weeks ago, sadly, at the age of 70, she died.

I wrote about this experience last week on Cif and something remarkable happened. After a few comments on the issue of anonymity, suddenly people began to treat each other as people, not sets of ideas. Many offered their condolences to Phil Hall (ishouldapologise); he told them the names of the songs that would be sung at his mother's funeral on Saturday, and people posted Youtube versions. Some said they would light candles. Others began to reveal, painfully, their own experiences of close family deaths, of mothers, of fathers and of children, of their own battles with cancer. The most remarkable were the words of "sapient", in Australia, who wrote:

"This is hard to write even though anonymously ... today 9th Nov is the 20th anniversary of my son's funeral. My son was injured in an accident and lived for ten days. My only question was: 'Has he enough painkiller?' The doctor's answer was: 'We do not know.' He died on the 5th."

This harrowing image has stayed with me. I don't know who "sapient" is, and his or her name is immaterial. Whatever their opinions, I know that this is a person who was suffered a dreadful loss. Would it make any difference if their real name were printed next to it? If this is Jane Smith or Marcel Leland (whoever they are) it makes no difference. And as "sapient" pointed out, it was the anonymity that allowed the memory to be expressed. If anything has convinced me that the anonymity issue is a red herring, this is it.

I spent the last few days wondering rereading Grant’s article and wondering if she could be right. I have concluded that she is because I think that anonymity becomes less about meanness when one is able to get past the tempestuous and vile articles and comments written probably by someone choosing to vent, to react, and not to think. However, the more thought and feelings get into the process, the more personalizing anonymity becomes in the sense that you may not know the person name, but you know things about them, what they think and about what they feel. I think I am of course an example of Grant’s point or at least, if I hope that I am not. If I'm not, I will just try harder to elevate the debate and to make a distinction between being opiniated and passionate and being mean and intolerant.

Blogs and elitism

Sunny at Pickled Politics makes the following interesting point about blogging and elitism, which I think is instructive even though I wonder whether it is on point:

Firstly, I think the level of debate on the blogosphere makes it very difficult for academics, anlysts, think-tanks and other NGOs to get involved. There’s too much “drive-by commenting” and people just want to spout abuse because that’s the culture we’ve developed. I believe this needs to change if the British blogosphere is to attract heavy-weights who can feed into constructive dialogue, as is the case a lot in the United States. I’m not saying the Americans do it better but I definitely think the level of debate there is way better (apart from the likes of LGF, Michelle Malkin and sometimes even Daily Kos) because more academics, analysts, policy people get involved.

Secondly, there’s also a fair bit of elitism amongst such organisations, who feel that testing their ideas amongst the masses serves no purpose and they should concentrate solely on lobbying. To an extent I can see their point since resources are usually quite stretched.

But sometimes I get the feeling they don’t want to have that debate because they’re worried it might challenge their own methodology / ideas. It may partly be because they don’t see a constructive debate happening (so it becomes a chicken and egg situation). But unless we get more people working at grass-roots, doing research or developing policy actually engaging with others on their ideas, it means intellectual stagnation. And I see this happening a lot on the left on areas like race, religion, feminism, environment, migration etc - where the same ideas from 20 years ago are being recycled.

The urge to fight the power and the Viacom vs. Youtube case

Paul Kedrosky argues that the issue in the Viacom’s case against Google because of YouTube’s alleged infractions of intellectual property rights is consumer rebellion. Sugary excerpt:

Consumers have spoken, and they don't like the way that electronic media--whether music, television or movies--is being packaged and sold to them. A decade ago they rebelled against being forced to buy entire CDs when they only wanted the few good tracks, and thus spawned Napster. Today, using YouTube, they are rebelling against being forced to watch entire programs when they only really want the 20-second part of American Idol last night where the contestant forgot the song lyrics and broke down in tears. Or a hockey fight. Or whatever.

Seeing that digital media can be sold to them in the equivalent of six-packs, sips and pint bottles, consumers no longer want to buy it by the truckload. And they resent being told by companies like Viacom that they can't have it, or that if they want it they have to go a different site for every clip owner. Consumers don't mind specialty stores, but they also want online Wal-Marts of media, mega-stores where they can buy whatever they want, without having to go to Viacom for this, ESPN for that, CNN for the next thing, and so on.

I agree with Kedrosky. I like YouTube a lot less since it sold its soul to Google and became less edgy and visionary. I think that the people who loved YouTube precisely because you could watch CBS and Comedy central programs freely and for free without commercials and without following the rules. Consumers are rebelling against the system, which is trying to control a big part of their lives by having them watch shows a given time and a specific way. YouTube worked because it made TV free by putting the consumers at the center of it by allowing to decide what to see and when to see it.

The myth of the flattening of world

Pankaj Ghemawat explains in an article in Foreign Policy “why the world isn’t flat” as Tom Friedman and other “globalization triumphalists” argue. He writes that only a part of the world is integrated while the other part isn’t and has been left on the outside of the integrating process cause by Globalization. Technology has flattened the world or made it more global, but has simply made us more wired. Thus, the world is not fully globalized, but semi-globalized and borders and bridges still matters, which means that Friedman and others have exaggerated the level of globalization and internationalization to be able to argue that the world is flat. However, even if Ghemawat questions the flattening of the world today, he doesn’t question the fact that it will eventually become flat even though he argues that the future of globalization is fragile. Sugary excerpt:

Geographical boundaries are so pervasive, they even extend to cyberspace. If there were one realm in which borders should be rendered meaningless and the globalization proponents should be correct in their overly optimistic models, it should be the Internet. Yet Web traffic within countries and regions has increased far faster than traffic between them. Just as in the real world, Internet links decay with distance. People across the world may be getting more connected, but they aren’t connecting with each other. The average South Korean Web user may be spending several hours a day online—connected to the rest of the world in theory—but he is probably chatting with friends across town and e-mailing family across the country rather than meeting a fellow surfer in Los Angeles. We’re more wired, but no more “global.”

Peeping Tom, the Internet, and their victims

Spiegel has a troubling article on women who became cyber-porn stars in spite of themselves. The article is alarming because it shows that internet can destroy somebody's life and that it is a lot easier to violate a person's rights on the internet precisely because it is still the wild wild west.

"Frenching" Google

“Memo to Chirac: Google and its competitors have already noticed that the French market is different. That's why they have French versions of their sites that respond to search queries in a, well, more Continental way than do their U.S.versions.
Granted, Internet search technology is still young, particularly when it comes to searching for audio, video and pictures. For example, none of the leading search engines offer a way to input a picture or sound instead of a word, then look for matches online. A new, French-funded entrant may be able to seize that opportunity.
But as Microsoft has demonstrated, pouring millions of dollars into research won't guarantee France or any other entity a big following — particularly if the technology aims to serve a cultural or political objective instead of raw market demand. The market is highly competitive, notwithstanding Google's popularity, and Internet users are notoriously fickle. A company that tries to prejudice its results or steer its users in a direction they don't want to go will lose its audience in a hurry.
After all, the expectations of Internet users could be boiled down to a phrase that Chirac may be familiar with: liberté, égalité, fraternité.” LA Times Editorial, “Call it Googlé.”

Blogging and Nihilism

Geert Lovink argues that blogging has nihilist aspect to it in the sense that it leads to decay. Money quote:

Blogs bring on decay. Each new blog is supposed to add to the fall of the media system that once dominated the twentieth century. This process is not one of a sudden explosion. The erosion of the mass media cannot easily be traced in figures of stagnant sales and the declining readership of newspapers. In many parts of the world, television is still on the rise. What's declining is the Belief in the Message. That is the nihilist moment, and blogs facilitate this culture as no platform has ever done before. Sold by the positivists as citizen media commentary, blogs assist users in their crossing from Truth to Nothingness. The printed and broadcasted message has lost its aura. News is consumed as a commodity with entertainment value. Instead of lamenting the ideological color of the news, as previous generations have done, we blog as a sign of the regained power of the spirit. As a micro-heroic, Nietzschean act of the pajama people, blogging grows out of a nihilism of strength, not out of the weakness of pessimism. Instead of time and again presenting blog entries as self-promotion, we should interpret them as decadent artifacts that remotely dismantle the mighty and seductive power of the broadcast media.

Google + Youtube = Microsoft

I have many misgivings about the acquisition of YouTube by Google or over a billion dollar. The first reason for my uneasiness is that Google is getting too big too fast and is concentrating a lot of power. Mark Cuban thinks that Google is crazy and I agree with him except that I think that their madness is created by Gates-like ambition. Google is well on its way to become the Microsoft, which everybody loved to hate in the mid-nineties because it sought to control everything. The second reason is that one of the things that I used to like about YouTube and about Google was the fact that they didn't seem to product and that the first goal of their creators was to give the consumer something that would be both useful and enjoyable. I am afraid that this "fresh" quality will disappear because by acquiring YouTube for that much money, Google is sending the clear and resounding message that it intends to make a lot of  money with it and that YouTube can no longer be just about the consumer and not about the bottom. I guess that soon or later in the business world as in the real world, we become what we hate and Google is fast becoming Microsoft by trying to googlefied the world. I thought that the mantra of this new era was that Small was the new big, oh well some things just never change. Om Malik has a post of the winners and losers of this list (Mark Cuban is among the losers).

The best of Yesterday

The best article, which I read last weekend, was the Sunday's Times article on the biggest news story of last week Lonelygirl15 pondering whether it was a prank or art. Here is the money quote:

There is nothing new about the simulations of Lonelygirl15 except the technology,” said the author E. L. Doctorow, whose own novels are well known for manipulating the tensions between reality and invention by placing historical figures and circumstances alongside fictional ones. “There will be more and more of this genre blurring and some genuine art could come out of it.”

And what of Lonelygirl? Can it be called a false document, and thus gain some credibility as a work of art?

“If the author wants to truly fool his or her audience, it’s not a false document,” said Eileen Pollack, an English professor at the University of Michigan. “If the intent is just to say ‘gotcha,’ it’s a prank.”

I believe that the whole think was a prank, whose purpose was to attract a lot of attention, to create a buzz and eventually to make a lot of money. Of course, one doesn't need to have noble motives to create a work of art, but the intention of the creator combine with the fact that the clips on youtube will stop to matter a year, a month from now tells me that this whole affair wasn't about art. If anybody remembers this scandal in the future, it won't be because of the content of the video, but rather for the fact that it was a scam, which worked.

Chernobyl, 20 years later

Today is the twentieth of the Chernobyl disaster and I’m stricken by how little more we know about this catastrophe twenty years later.

1. We don’t know how many died and how many suffered from the radiation. The estimates vary between a few thousand and hundred of thousand of victims.
2. We don’t know the extent of the harm that was done not only in Ukraine, but also in the countries surrounding Ukraine and even to countries such as France, which were touched by the radiations.
3. I believe that the Chernobyl disaster showed how disastrous the use of nuclear energy could be when it isn’t used carefully. I wonder if more nations are going to be willing to take the risks of using energy giving the fact that the price of energy. Tony Blair has talked about doing just that and Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace has argued that nuclear energy is the future and that it will be good for the environment. May be they are right, but I have to admit that I don’t want them to be.

Bill Gates vs. George Bush: who is the most powerful person of the world?

Before coming to Washington, Hu Jintao will first come to Seattle, which is of course the capital of the Microsoft Empire. He will meet with Bill Gates, and dine in his house with other businesses. I can’t help but thinking that by meeting Bill Gates before meeting George Bush, Hu Jintao, and the Chinese are sending a message about their priorities and about whom they consider the most important man in the United States for them. Besides with Bill Gates, they can negotiate without having to give much since Microsoft is willing to respect restrictive Chinese laws (as Google and Yahoo) to have access to the Chinese Market. George Bush will try to negotiate with the Chinese, but he does not have as much to offer them as Bill Gates given his current political situation and especially given the fact that right now the US need China to support tough sanctions on Iran. We are living in the world where increasing economic power is more important than political power or rather where economic power has political consequences. I bet than Hu Jintao will feel a lot more at ease with Bill Gates than he will with President Bush.

Does Mac + Windows = success?

Apple just unveiled software that will make it possible to people who own a Mac to use a windows operating system. What took Apple so long? It is about time that it did this, for I believe that this software will make Apple more attractive if not more competitive. However, the big question remains unanswered: Will this change drive enough people who will never buy a Mac to buy one? Or will ill it just enable Mac to keep its customers happy and to regain its old customers (people such as me) who stopped using a Mac because they needed to use Windows? We will know the answer a year or two from now.

Should ideology affect science?

Science seems to have become more and more like social science in recent years in the sense that ideology affects it. Whether it is the debate about Darwinism or about global warming, it seems that your views on science depend on your ideology. George Will wrote on Sunday that, “Suppose the Earth is warming and suppose the warming is caused by human activity. Are we sure there will be proportionate benefits from whatever climate change can be purchased at the cost of slowing economic growth and spending trillions? Are we sure the consequences of climate change -- remember, a thick sheet of ice once covered the Midwest-- must be bad? Or has the science-journalism complex decided that debate about these questions, too, is "over"?” The question after reading his article is whether science is a matter of point of view. If it is, then it means that ideology bridges a gap between people that is unbridgeable. That is worrisome because if we cannot agree on science, on math and on reality, then togetherness becomes impossible.

Family feud in Cyberspace

I thought that since it is Saturday, it would take a short breather from heavy stories by talking about a more amusing one and I found this story on the Guardian. It is about a father, Steve Williams who spurred his 20-year-old daughter into cleaning her messy room by building a website (www.shameit.com) with pictures of her filthy room. The daughter, Claire cleaned her room but to get over the public humiliation she fought back by creating her site with pictures of her father in compromising positions.

France bites Apple

Last week, the French lower house of parliament has passed a law that requires Apple to share I-tunes with others mp3 players so that its downloaded music can be used by all of them for the sake of giving consumers freedom of choice and of sharing  online culture. The goal of the law is to open up the market of digital music by forcing big companies such as Apple, Microsoft, and Sony to share their technology, and thus to enable other companies to enter the market. My guess and it is only a guess is that the real motivation behind this goal is in fact to create a French company at best or even a European that would offer the same services that Apple does. If this is the purpose of the law, I am afraid that it will not work for Apple will never share I-tunes unless it has too. I think that the French members of parliament have the mistaken that they can create French technological companies out of thin air or rather by forcing foreign companies to share their technology. The problem is that the law if it passed (the French senate still has to approve it) will be limited to France, which means that all Apple and the other have to do is to strike French from the map when it comes to I-tunes. It would have been better to provide incentives to those companies to share for I am afraid that in this era of globalization, states are going to have less and less power.

On Google vs. the government: the end of privacy?

As most people, I feel uneasy about the fact that a judge has allowed the government to see some  of Google’s data. However, I am not sure if my uneasiness is based on something that is becoming passé that is outdated, the concept of privacy. Is it still reasonable to expect privacy in a society where technology makes it possible to find almost anything about everything and everybody? I fear that slowly but surely we are entering an era where in the name of openness, security, and even curiosity (which is becoming a virtue), it is going to become impossible to justify keeping some doors closed. Privacy after all originated from the noble idea that individuals have the right to keep some things about themselves hidden from everybody else. Privacy used to come pretty close to a guarantee in Modern society but that was before technology, before tools existed to find out what people wanted to keep hidden or rather to keep out of the public arena. The times are changing and I fear that this ruling by the judge is just one of the first indications that we have that privacy is no longer a sacred right.

Bill Gates on the future

Bill Gates has written an article on what he believes to be ahead for our world. To him it is about knowledge and the economy is “the knowledge economy, a phenomenon that has transformed the business of business and helped entire emerging economies to compete globally.” He also believes that we live in what he calls a “information democracy” because it is becoming increasingly possible to tap into sources of information worldwide. He concludes by emphasizing the power of search engines and by saying that “The next step is pattern-recognition engines and mental models to help people mine and assess the value of all that information, and technologies that infuse online data with meaning and context.” It is hard not to be impressed by Bill Gates, but my question is what is going to happen to those who do not have the "knowledge"? Are we going to have to live in a world where technology is everything?