I guess it comes down to the obvious answer that “sex sells,” but with the recent arrest of two Vietnamese songwriters, I can’t help but notice the overwhelming silence on social media in stark contrast to the outpouring of support for Pussy Riot. Okay, I get it. Mini-dresses on leggy, Russian girls wearing brightly colored balaclavas are hard to beat ...
Forget that tomorrow is Election Day in the U.S. or that many of our fellow Americans are still digging out of the damage done by Hurricane Sandy. It’s Guy Fawkes Day, and the hacktivist group Anonymous wants to you focus on, well, them. At the risk of being targeted myself, I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge the ...
One of my main topics of interest with regard to the Internet is the notion of what my friend, the writer Jeff Turrentine, calls “epistemic closure.” Let’s face it: when it comes to information, it’s all too easy to find evidence out there for just about any bias or belief we can name; and I am far from the only ...
This week, Newsweek announced that the final print edition of the 80 year-old magazine would appear this coming December 31. This site launched with an interview with Newsweek veteran Christopher Dickey, who writes this morning, “Digital does not mean dead. Far from it.” Read his post on Shadowland Journal. I remember the proclamation “paper is dead” being echoed almost immediately ...
Last week, MPAA CEO Christopher Dodd spoke in San Francisco about fostering better collaboration between the entertainment and Internet industries. Not surprisingly, two voices from the tech industry, TechDirt and the Electronic Frontier Foundation rang out with rebuttal. Mike Masnick, editor of TechDirt, called Dodd a “predictable dissembler” and proceeded to attack him personally for “lacking the vision” for his role. ...
