Anonymous and Scientology

February 9th, 2008 Richard

Recently, a promotional video Tom Cruise did for Scientology, showed up on YouTube. Not long after, a movement, orchestrated by an organization calling themselves anonymous, began, starting with this spooky video, where they suggest that the Scientology organization “should be destroyed”. They’ve called for a world wide demonstration to be held tomorrow.

My first thought about this situation is the, only via the web, feeling. Such a fervor is enabled by the wide distribution of rich media currently afforded by the web. My second thought is that it seems unfair to single out the scientologists. In my life I have researched and experienced everything from born again Christian to psychedelic explorer, and much in between. The fact is, there are many instances of things the Scientologits are being accused of within Christian/other religion/spiritual/new age/whatever. There are many beautiful, transcendent, and fulfilling things associated with all these traditions, but the fact is that many people want to know the truth, and they prefer to find someone/thing that will tell them what it is so they don’t have to think about it, and they will give anything to anyone to find “peace” in that way. Sounds screwed up, but I’m not sure if I begrudge these people since I’d be a hypocrite if I did.

I’m not saying what the Scientologists do is good, I’m just saying, that, in my opinion, it’s not that unusual or evil, in comparison to other things that have been done in the name of religion/spirituality in this complex, really bad, really cool, and perfect world.

By the way, my friend Steve Garfield just published an interview of two members of the anonymous group in Boston, who plan to participate in the protest tomorrow.

Posted in religion, scientology, web and new media | 12 Comments »

Open Source Academic Journals

February 9th, 2008 Richard

Not surprisingly, some people think that it’s a jip that tax payers support the National Science Foundation, Public Universities, and similar agencies that fund research; while, at the same time, this research is published in very high price journals, not easily available to most. Some would even suggest that all of this type of research information should be readily available to the public (e.g., medical journals). This is compounded by the fact that journal costs are extremely high compared to other types of publications. Some argue that this is because journal publishers take advantage of the fact that academic libraries feel obliged to carry major journals. Further, there is also almost no decrease in cost for electronic editions, despite the lower production overhead. Academics are so frustrated by this situation, that some, such as the Stanford Faculty senate, have encouraged libraries to cancel subscriptions, and academics to withhold reviews and publishing, for overly high priced journals.

As a consequence, there is growing movement in academics and elsewhere to push for open access journals, where information can be accessed for free via the web. Such an idea is not as unreasonable as it may seem on the face of it, since academics themselves do most of the work anyway. They write and review the articles, for free; and often serve as editors for little or no wages. I, personally, support this view and, in fact, my colleagues and I recently published an article in the open-access web periodical, the Journal of Learning, Technology, and Assessment; which includes traditional academic peer review, an editorial board as prestigious as any other major educational research journal, and is highly regarded in the field. In fact, there are more and more open access journals available, many of which are listed in the directory of open access journals.

This issue came to light again for me recently with this passionate blog post by Dana Boyd, a PhD candidate in the School of Information at Cal-Berkley and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. She argues a more extreme position, where she calls for academics to boycott all but open access journals, an idea that I find intriguing. Of course, it’s easy for me to be brave enough to consider such a thing when I am a tenured full professor. Not so easy for a non-tenured assistant professor whose career is dependent on publishing in prestigious journals, most of which are still not open access. Further, there are certainly pragmatic issues having to do with infrastructure costs - such as marketing, distribution, and copy editing - costs that would most likely fall to universities, or foundations in an open-access world. Many of these issues come to light in the comments/responses to the blog post cited above.

Posted in academics, open_source, web and new media | 10 Comments »

Mahalo Daily Summarizes Debates

February 7th, 2008 Richard

One of my favorite new video blogs, Mahalo Daily, created some short entertaining videos “summarizing” the January 31 Republican and Democratic debates.

Posted in politics, web and new media | 5 Comments »

The upTake and Citizen Journalism

February 7th, 2008 Richard

My video blogging friend Chuck Olson and others formed a media company, the uptake, the purpose of which is to cover politics via citizen journalists.

Posted in politics, web and new media | 3 Comments »

Does the Web Transform Politics?

February 7th, 2008 Richard

The answer to the title of this post is “yes” if you believe Micah L. Sifry, one of the founders of the techPresident blog, which is blog dedicated to discussion of how the presidential candidates are using the web. He explains in this post why he believes the internet has resulted in the decline in big media and big money and the author goes so far as to say that Hillary Clinton would have already wrapped up the nomination if not for the internet.

Posted in politics, web and new media | 6 Comments »

Cool Stuff I found on the web yesterday.

January 31st, 2008 Richard

  • MyBoneYard: Recycles electronic stuff. But unlike other similar efforts they will actually give you some cash for stuff you recycle. (Learned about it from GeekBrief.TV).
  • An interesting piece on Mobuzz TV: Daily Buzz about the “micro blogging” twitter phenomenon, including a more secure wordpress service called prologue, and tweetmeme that keeps track of the most popular twitter conversations. (This 5 minute episode also includes some other, bizarre stuff, such as a woman who’se trying to get us to pay for her breast transplants - bymeboobs.)
  • An very creative and interesting (and typical) episode of rocketboom, which is mainly about buying property on the moon.
  • A really interesting web site with a video podcast from The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, FactCheck.org, where they present facts that both democratic and republicans got wrong.

Posted in cool stuff, politics, recycle, web and new media | 12 Comments »

Smart Mobs

January 31st, 2008 Richard

Strongly related to James Surowiecki’s concept of The Wisdom of Crowds is Howard Rheingold’s concept Smart Mobs. (The two seminal books that presented these concepts, were published in 2004 and 2002 respectively.) To try and succinctly represent this concept and criticisms I selected two articles from edge. The first is an interview with Howard Rheingold, and the second is a criticism of web-collective-wisdom concepts/theories by Jaron Lanier. (Note that the last link is to Lanier’s Wikipedia page, which he criticizes in the article - here’s his home page.)

Posted in smart mobs, web and new media | 6 Comments »

Wisdom of the Crowds

January 31st, 2008 Richard

Our theme for this week is virtual communities/crowds/mobs. As far as the crowds, I saw an excellent talk at the 2006 SXSW interactive conference given by James Surowiecki. This whole 1 hour talk is on line on the sxsw site. The talk is loaded with many examples that support his ideas, and theories/research from a number of sources. If we accept these things, the most important question becomes: what factors are important in determining when “crowd wisdom” will be more accurate than expert wisdom, so I made a seven minute clip, from different places in his talk, that focus on these important factors: objective aggregation (my term), diversity, independence.

Posted in web and new media, wisdom_of_crowds | 11 Comments »

Creative Commons

January 28th, 2008 Richard

Creative Commons represents a potential revolution in copyright, where the default all-rights reserved, is replaced by some rights reserved, allowing content creators to specify ways their materials can be used and shared, without needing to give permission to each individual who wants to use materials in ways that are not consistent with all-rights reserved. The motivation is to encourage innovation and derivative works.

The following videos on the creative commons site, describe creative commons, successes, and its evolution. The last two videos were the first and second place winners in a moving image contest, sponsored by creative commons, to help “market” the creative commons concept.

Posted in copyright, intellectual property, web and new media | 7 Comments »

Future of Darknets

January 28th, 2008 Richard

In 2006 I saw a wonderful panel on “The Future of Darknets” organized by J.D. Lassica, that included a representative from the MPAA, a person whose job is to identify illegal downloaders for prosecution, and others who were advocates for less copyright restrictions, and elimination of DRM. As you might anticipate the panel was well worth my time. I recorded the session, and created a video of clips from the session. (For the record, creating this video and posting it on the web is consistent with a press/videographer agreement I signed with SXSW that allowed me to post short clips of videos from sessions).

The most prominent theme was the issue of intellectual property and all the complications associated with copyright, DRM, and illegal downloading.

Posted in copyright, intellectual property, web and new media | 6 Comments »

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