Berkman Buzz: Week of June 16, 2008

June 20, 2008

BERKMAN BUZZ:  A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations.  If you'd like to receive this by email, just sign up here. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University

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*danah Boyd takes a look at teens and online status
*Tim Armstrong celebrates an open access success story
*The Internet & Democracy project gives us a glimpse into South Korean protests of US Beef
*The Digital Natives Project asks, are digital natives forgetting how to remember?
*David Ardia examines fair use issues in the AP's tussle with the Drudge Retort
*Weekly Global Voices: "Vietnam: Detention of journalists sparks web debate"
*Weekly Publius essay: "David Clark: What Would a More Secure Future Look Like?"

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The full buzz.

"Speculating on social status in an age of networked participation, Clay Shirky accurately points out the ways in which metrics for status have become diversified. It is possible to gain satisfaction from achieving high status in World of Warcraft, even if popularity there is quite niche. In our ethnographic study of new media and youth culture, the Digital Youth group at Berkeley and USC also found that many youth involved in interest-driven digital practices rejected traditional status markers in preference for those that could be achieved in subcultures..."
danah boyd, "markers of status: different, and yet the same"

"I’m traveling to Baltimore tomorrow, where I’ll be speaking later this week at UMD, one of the few law schools that can claim to be older than my own. The occasion is this year’s CALI Conference for Law School Computing, and I’ll be delivering an updated version of my talk on the open access movement.  As it turns out, I’ll also be delivering an unexpected bit of good news. The open-access project I blogged about here last October has yielded some impressive results..."
Tim Armstrong, "An Open Access Success Story, Just in Time for CALI"

"Sine May 2nd, South Korea has seen nearly daily protests against its new president, Lee Myung-bak, over his decision to resume imports of U.S. beef, which were suspended in 2003 after an outbreak of mad cow disease. In the history of South Korean collective action, these protests show the merger of Korea’s penchant for both the Internet and street demonstrations. Some media have dubbed this protest movement as “Web 2.0 protest,” which build off of the themes we identified in our case study on the impact of the citizen journalism site OhmyNews during the 2002 Presidential election..."
The Internet & Democracy Project , "South Korean Web Protesters Take To The Streets Over US Beef"

"Are Digital Natives forgetting how to remember? This was Anne Balsamo’s parting suggestion at the Berkman luncheon last Tuesday, and it chilled the gathering instantly. Up to that point, Balsamo’s talk had been largely upbeat, a primer on the power of what she calls the 'technological imagination' — the 'quality of mind the enables people to think with technology, to transform what is known into what is possible, and to evaluate the consequences of such creation from multiple perspective' (as she explains in her essay 'Taking Culture Seriously')..."
The Digital Natives Project, "The Way We Remember Now"

"Last week, the Associated Press ('AP') sent a takedown request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to Rogers Cadenhead, the founder of Drudge Retort, a liberal alternative to (and parody of) the well-known Drudge Report, demanding that he remove six user-submitted blog entries and one user comment on the site that contained quotations from AP articles. Today, the New York Times reported that AP was reconsidering its request while it creates a set of guidelines for bloggers and websites that excerpt AP material..."
David Ardia, "Associated Press Sends DMCA Takedown to Drudge Retort, Backpedals, and Now Seeks to Define Fair Use for Bloggers"

"It would seem like the press in Vietnam is getting freer and freer, but the arrest of two journalists and a once-renowned investigator shows that any recent progress is tenuous.  In the run up to Vietnam’s admission to the World Trade Organization in 2006, newspapers reported with never before seen gusto. In the biggest story since the arrest and execution of mob boss Nam Can, in mid 2006 the Project Management Unit 18 (PMU 18) scandal broke. Newspapers reported on ministry of transportation officials who were accused of embezzlement and bribery and for losing millions of foreign dollars. These reports made the international press and greatly embarrassed the Vietnamese Communist Party...."
Caroline Finlay for Global Voices, "Vietnam: Detention of journalists sparks web debate"

"Most users of the Internet today would probably say that they are concerned about the state of Internet security. And they would probably be more concerned if they understood the true state of affairs. While many technical improvements have been added to the network over the last decade, many new attacks have been invented as well. More importantly, the motivation for the attacks has changed. The early history of attacks was almost playful, with the computer hacker as a symbol of rebellious technical mastery. Today, attacks are the business of organized crime and cyber-warfare. Attacks originate in parts of the globe with weak laws, little appetite for enforcement and little chance of extradition. Or they originate at the hands of 'patriotic hackers', who launch attacks that may or may not have official state backing..."
David Clark for the Publius Project, "What Would a More Secure Future Look Like?"