Press Freedom — what freedom?

From Karlin Lillington’s weblog…

Gavin’s link to Tom McGurk’s amazing conversation last Sunday with venerable BBC correspondent Katie Adie, on the US censorship of how journalists present the situation in Iraq, has been picked up by Megnut, so imagine this will get a good and needed airing in the US. Basically, the Pentagon has told journalists they may well be fired upon as they try to upload information back to networks (presumably because the signals may be confused — obviously not because the journalists are considered hostile to the US POV – but really, this is a shocking sort of threat even as it stands). There’s a link to the show transcript as well. Unfortunately, Megnut seems to doubt this could be true because the US media isn’t reporting on it [mirthless laughter]. As an American journalist living abroad, who’s been back several times to the US in recent weeks, I can tell ya, folks: the US MEDIA DOESN’T REPORT a whole heck of a lot of perspectives/stories/breaking news/background that would conflict with the Bush admin position and what it does report is done so as if reporting on the home team at a football match. I noted Dan Gillmor’s wholly correct take on this recently; Gavin also links to it here. The worst perpetrators are Fox and CNN — CNN of course also being the main source of many American’s news on the pending war. What has become of this once-pioneering network? It is just a yapping lapdog these days.

Small worlds and networks

I’ve been reading Barabasi’s book Linked: the New Science of Networks, which is not the world’s greatest read but very interesting nonetheless. It’s clear that there’s a lot of intriguing mileage in the notion that the principles underpinning networks span both technical and social systems. Then I came across Steven Johnson’s article about social network mapping software, which in turn reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Cat’s Cradle and Howard Rheingold’s new book, Smart Mobs, which I’ve ordered and Amazon have just told me in an email is being delivered tomorrow. I’ve also had a look at the MIT work in this area. And all without leaving my study. No wonder people love the Web.

Paranoia and chips

According to Today’s Specials: Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast, Congressman Bob Ney (R-Ohio) ordered the cafeterias in the House of Representatives to remove the word “French” from all menus. Now being served: Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast. Wonder if this is true. [Thanks to: Boing Boing Blog]

Why are the US media so supine?

Scarifying analysis of Dubya’s press conference and of the way the White House Press Corps has lost whatever bottle it once had. It’s pathetic. Where is the Fourth Estate when the country really needs it?

Auden on war

W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939”

“All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police
We must love one another or die.”

A plague on all (pro- and anti-) war houses

Thoughtful London Review of Books piece by Perry Anderson which manages to take everyone’s position apart. Confirms my feeling that there are no morally unambiguous stances to be had on this issue.

File-sharers continue to outsmart record labels
BBC Online story.

“The record industry has become the National Rifle Association of showbusiness. It has declared jihad on its customers who it calls pirates,” said Wayne Rosso, head of Grokster.

File-sharing services such as Grokster now boast millions more customers than Napster, the original file-swapping music service, had at its peak.

“Last year, around about the stage that file-sharing was ramping up, there was a huge window of opportunity for the record industry to do something before it became too ingrained but that moment has disappeared,” said Mark Mulligan, senior analyst at Jupiter Research.

Jupiter Research’s latest study reveals that legitimate internet music services are struggling to get off the ground despite the fact that nearly 40% of Europe’s digital music fans are willing to pay for music online.

With the music industry refusing to offer up any but a small percentage of its artists for digital download, millions of music lovers are using services such as Kazaa to swap tracks and build up online libraries of free, if illegal, music.

File-swapping services are becoming almost as easily recognisable as the music labels themselves and boast an enviable number of users.

Why did Google buy Blogger?

Steven Johnson’s answer.

En passant: I have lots of non-techie friends. I wonder what they would make of the above headline.

Repetitive Mistake Syndrome

This is what makes it worth while sitting up late and reading the Web — a lovely, spiky, acute essay by Doc Searls and David Weinberger on the essence of the Net. Here’s a sample:

“When it comes to the Net, a lot of us suffer from Repetitive Mistake Syndrome. This is especially true for magazine and newspaper publishing, broadcasting, cable television, the record industry, the movie industry, and the telephone industry, to name just six.

Thanks to the enormous influence of those industries in Washington, Repetitive Mistake Syndrome also afflicts lawmakers, regulators and even the courts. Last year Internet radio, a promising new industry that threatened to give listeners choices far exceeding anything on the increasingly variety-less (and technologically stone-age) AM and FM bands, was shot in its cradle. Guns, ammo and the occasional “Yee-Haw!” were provided by the recording industry and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which embodies all the fears felt by Hollywood’s alpha dinosaurs when they lobbied the Act through Congress in 1998.

“The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,” John Gilmore famously said. And it’s true. In the long run, Internet radio will succeed. Instant messaging systems will interoperate. Dumb companies will get smart or die. Stupid laws will be killed or replaced. But then, as John Maynard Keynes also famously said, “In the long run, we’re all dead.”

We’d like to avoid the wait.

All we need to do is pay attention to what the Internet really is. It’s not hard. The Net isn’t rocket science. It isn’t even 6th grade science fair, when you get right down to it. We can end the tragedy of Repetitive Mistake Syndrome in our lifetimes — and save a few trillion dollars? worth of dumb decisions — if we can just remember one simple fact: the Net is a world of ends. You’re at one end, and everybody and everything else are at the other ends.”

Metaphors again

Interesting Weblog reverie by Jonathan Peterson on how to explain the special characteristics of the Net. Think of it as being like the electrical network. “A comparison that David and Doc touched on, but didn?t go into (and which I haven?t seen used much) is the Internet as electricity.  Telling people the metaphors they are using are wrong is fine, but people NEED analogies, so putting forth a better analogy and hammering it home seems like a good idea to me.

The electrical network is also a completely dumb network that was terribly underutilized initially (since DC current was generated at neighborhood electrical stations they were largely dormant during the day, as home lighting was the first widespread commercial application of elecricity).

The entire value of electrical networks is delivered by the devices on the end, and those devices are drastically different than those it was designed for (electricity really took off with the invention of home refrigeration, leading to constant demand, from that follow the rise of Tesla?s AC network, which allowed an interconnected grid to replace spot generation.  The simularity to the rise of email/web driving people away from the old world of BBSs is left as an exercise is probably not coincidental.”