ecopolis

Robert McChesney argues that the media, far from providing a bedrock for freedom and democracy, have become a significant antidemocratic force in the United States and, to varying degrees, worldwide. Rich Media, Poor Democracy addresses the corporate media explosion and the corresponding implosion of public life that characterizes our times. Challenging the assumption that a society drenched in commercial information “choices” is ipso facto a democratic one, McChesney argues that the major beneficiaries of the so-called Information Age are wealthy investors, advertisers, and a handful of enormous media, computer, and telecommunications corporations. This concentrated corporate control, McChesney maintains, is disastrous for any notion of participatory democracy. Combining unprecedented detail on current events with historical sweep, McChesney chronicles the waves of media mergers and acquisitions in the late 1990s. He reviews the corrupt and secretive enactment of public policies surrounding the Internet, digital television, and public broadcasting. He also addresses the gradual and ominous adaptation of the First Amendment (”freedom of the press”) as a means of shielding corporate media power and the wealthy. Rich Media, Poor Democracy exposes several myths about the media—in particular, that the market compels media firms to “give the people what they want”— that limit the ability of citizens to grasp the real nature and logic of the media system. If we value our democracy, McChesney warns, we must organize politically to restructure the media in order to affirm their connection to democracy.

via University of Illinois Press

Creative Commons announced the launch of a research study that will definy differences between commercial and noncommercial uses of content. The study will explore how the definitions of “commercial use” and “noncommercial use” are understood among various communities and in connection with a wide variety of content.

Eric Steuer, September 18th, 2008

San Francisco, California, USA — September 18, 2008

The nonprofit organization Creative Commons has launched a research study that will explore differences between commercial and noncommercial uses of content, as those uses are understood among various communities and in connection with a wide variety of content. Generous support for the study has been provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Creative Commons provides free copyright licenses to creators who want to give the public certain permissions to use their works, in advance and without the need for one-to-one contact between the user and the creator. “Noncommercial” or “NC” is one of four different license terms that creators may choose to apply to their Creative Commons-licensed content. Works distributed under a Creative Commons license including the NC term may be used by anyone for any purpose that is not “primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation,” provided the use also complies with the other terms of the license. Works distributed under a Creative Commons license without the NC term may additionally be used for commercial purposes, an option that promotes creative reuse in a broader range of contexts.

“The study has direct relevance to Creative Commons’ mission of providing free, flexible copyright licenses that are easy to understand and simple to use,” said Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito. “The NC term is a popular option for creators choosing a Creative Commons license, and that tells us the term meets a need. However, as exponentially increasing numbers of works are made available under CC licenses, we want to provide additional information for creators about the contexts in which the NC term may further or impede their intentions with respect to the works they choose to share, and we want to make sure that users clearly understand those intentions. We expect the study findings will help us do a better job of explaining the licenses and to improve them, where possible. We also hope the findings, which will be made publicly available, will contribute to better understanding of some of the complexities of digital distribution of content.”

Full original press release here.

Open Source Art is the idea of rethinking to the discarts of human beens as a code produced by a huge community as the population of planet hearth. In this days I’m doing a workshop on re-think the re-cycle with a group of students of the Academy of Fine Art in Lecce.  The results of the workshop will be exhibited into a beautiful “Chiostro” in Lecce during the event Ring2008.

A pastor from North Carolina posted a ilarious phrase in front of the Jonesville Church of God. Pastor Roger Byrd said he just wanted to make people think…
He wrote: “Obama, Osama — humm, are they brothers” in front of the Jonesville Church of God.
The problem is that as i’m posting it the rumours of the web is encreasing, the interference is changing it and people are commenting. At the end of the process, someone even believe it…

A professor at MIT, Edward Lorenz was the first to recognize what is now called chaotic behavior in the mathematical modeling of weather systems. In the early 1960s, Lorenz realized that small differences in a dynamic system such as the atmosphere–or a model of the atmosphere–could trigger vast and often unsuspected results.

These observations ultimately led him to formulate what became known as the butterfly effect–a term that grew out of an academic paper he presented in 1972 entitled: “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”

Lorenz’s early insights marked the beginning of a new field of study that impacted not just the field of mathematics but virtually every branch of science–biological, physical and social. In meteorology, it led to the conclusion that it may be fundamentally impossible to predict weather beyond two or three weeks with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

Some scientists have since asserted that the 20th century will be remembered for three scientific revolutions–relativity, quantum mechanics and chaos.

In 1991, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize for basic sciences in the field of earth and planetary sciences. Lorenz was cited by the Kyoto Prize committee for establishing “the theoretical basis of weather and climate predictability, as well as the basis for computer-aided atmospheric physics and meteorology.” The committee added that Lorenz “made his boldest scientific achievement in discovering ‘deterministic chaos,’ a principle which has profoundly influenced a wide range of basic sciences and brought about one of the most dramatic changes in mankind’s view of nature since Sir Isaac Newton.”

Google, the world’s largest Internet search engine, is on several
fronts a danger that has to be stopped, a study released by Austria’s Graz University claims.

A research team led by Prof. Hermann Maurer, chairman of Graz University’s Institute for Information Systems and Computer Media, argues that Google is turning into a new version of George Orwell’s “Big Brother” – creating unacceptable monopolies in many areas of the worldwide web.

According to his research, around 61 billion Internet searches are conducted each month. In the US, on average 57 percent of searches are conducted with Google, and up to 95 percent of Internet users use Google at least sometimes.

It is dangerous enough that single entity such as Google is dominant as a search engine, Maurer and his co-writers say, but the fact that Google is operating many other services and is probably colluding with still further players was “unacceptable”.

“Google is massively invading privacy,” the study said with the company knowing more than any other organization about individuals and companies, but not bound by national data protection laws. Google was amassing data by using data mining tools in its applications like
Google Earth or Gmail in connection with being its search engine function.

Thus, the search engine could potentially turn into the world’s largest detective agency, the Austrian researchers warned, using the data it was collecting from its users via its applications. Even if Google did not use that potential now, it might have to do so in the future in the interest of its shareholders.

The study argues that Google is influencing economies in the way advertisements and documents are ranked. “The more a company pays, the more often will the ad be visible.” The study believes influence may be increased by also ranking results from queries, and that Google could, for business reasons, in the future rank paying customers higher in search results.

Moreover, Maurer was worried that Google could use its “almost universal” knowledge of what was happening in the world to play global stock markets to its advantage.

The danger of a distorted “googling” reality loomed ever closer, the report said. “Google has become the main interface of our reality,” the study authors said.

Most material written today was in some way based on Google and Wikipedia – and if those did not reflect reality, a distortion was possible, the researchers said, recalling biased contributions frequently placed on Wikipedia.

Furthermore, there is some indication of cooperation between Google and Wikipedia. Sample statistics showed that random selected Wiki entries consistently ranked higher on Google than on other search engines, the Graz team said.

Maurer also criticized journalists who increasingly started researching their stories by googling them, as well as students copying significant amounts of their work from the Internet.

“Google’s open aim is to know everything there is to know on Earth,” the researchers concluded. “It cannot be tolerated that a private company has that much power: it can extort, control, and dominate the world at will.”

Stopping the insidious aspects of Google was however not possible by a head-on strategy, as the company was too powerful, the Austrian researchers warn. Rather, they say, the “Google effect” can be minimized by the introduction of special-purpose search engines that are better in their areas of application that the larger company is.

The last few years have been hard on poor old television.

Viewership has fallen across the board as core audiences — guys aged 18 to 34 in particular – are abandoning the device that raised them, opting instead for game controllers and the internet. Meanwhile, those who have remained loyal to TV are failing to remain similarly loyal to the advertising that makes it profitable, increasingly choosing to get their tube fix via commercial-annihilating digital video recorders, advertising-light DVDs, and (horror of horrors) pirate downloads.

With viewers putting up blinders to the ad-program-ad rhythm of for-profit television, the desirability of conventional 30-second commercial spot is tanking. For the first time in decades, a number of key markets have witnessed decreases in the amount spent on traditional ads, as marketers demand the ever-elusive bigger bang with in-program product placements and full-on brand integration within storylines. The result: as much as 15 full minutes of every hour of programming in North America is now dedicated to thinly veiled product placements, with shows like American Idol topping out at over 4,000 placements per season — all of this in addition to the average of 14 to 22 minutes out of 60 still set aside for traditional spots.

Given televisions’ incredible shrinking credibility, especially in the case of broadcast journalism, it is little wonder that we have suffered through the ceaseless debate over whether we live under the thumb of a “liberal media” or a “conservative media.” Luckily, we can safely disregard the question of television’s political affiliation, since we are rapidly approaching a sort of McLuhan-esque implosion which will render the answer irrelevant. It’s that moment when the specifics of the rock ‘em sock ‘em, talking-head debates may be school massacres or missing pageant queens, but the message itself always remains the same. That message is television, an ingenious device for the capturing of eyeballs. Increasingly, this device is being pressed into the service of a singular purpose. While this purpose could hardly be called a philosophy in the proper sense, as a system of narrow values it does require the exclusion of dissonant ideas to efficiently function.

Adbusters began, in large part, as a product of outrage over just how destructive, self-serving, and at times downright insane the deliberate exclusions of this system have become. We’ve learned, for example, that the keepers of the airwaves will permit you to expose the perils of cardiovascular disease; you may not, however, tell the truth about a major advertiser’s fat-laden products. Similarly, you are allowed to tell kids to get more exercise, but you can’t tell them to turn off their TVs in order to do so. You may encourage women to ignore the images produced by the beauty industry and to feel good about their own bodies, no matter the shape or size — but only if you’re selling soap in the process. And, most gallingly, you can pay lip service to the urgency of tackling climate change, and yet you can’t challenge people to buy less stuff as a way to actually go for it.

But it’s possible that you don’t care. Maybe you gave up on television a long time ago. Maybe you don’t even own a TV set anymore. For your personal peace of mind, that was probably a good move; with an estimated 112 million television households in the United States alone, however, we ignore the stirrings of TV at our own peril. The last couple of decades have seen unprecedented levels of consolidation in the realm of mass media. Today, the movers and shakers of TV are the very same people and corporate entities who control the majority of newspapers, of radio stations, of book publishing, of outdoor advertising, of music distribution, of film production, and of your favorite social networking sites. The dirty tricks and the sleights of hand that are used to keep urgent, dissonant messages off the air aren’t in any way specific to that TV. They are the natural consequences of corporate rule, and they will be brought to bear whenever we are too distracted to stand in the way.

Not by accident, more and more people are doing just that — stepping up to join the ongoing battle against a media system that has left civil society out in the cold and in the dark, a media system that has been busily propagating itself at the expense of our social, cultural, political and environmental health. It’s a battle that Adbusters has proudly taken up with its ongoing lawsuit against CanWest, Canada’s biggest media conglomerate.

What’s at stake in this struggle is not just access, but the creation of a whole new media aesthetic: a messier one, more spontaneous and unpredictable, one that fosters participation and social relevance, a genuine engine for the positive change. If Adbusters’ lawsuit is a success, one of the first manifestations of this aesthetic will be a strange new mood – exciting, challenging, even slightly dangerous — every time you switch on the box in your living room, where previously there was only a moribund device completely sewn-up by private, for-profit interests. This strange new mood will prove once and for all that television (just like newspapers, magazines and radio before it, and just like the internet after it) has the capacity to perform services other than selling us on the idea of buying, services of vital importance to the health of our species and its democracies. And like with all exciting, challenging, and slightly dangerous new moods, we’re betting it will prove to be pretty damned infectious.

by Clayton Dach from Adbusters