Berkman Buzz, week of January 7
BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
Week of January 7, 2008
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What's going on... take your pick or browse below.
* Wendy Seltzer supports local practices
* David Weinberger doesn’t trust the carriers
* The Citizen Media Law Project on Lawrence, Kansas anonymity
* danah boyd tracks teen ecommerce and photography
* Dan Gillmor wants to train new tricks to old dogs
* Doc Searls enjoys the twivering live web
* The Internet & Democracy Project reacts to Nima Mina’s paper on the Iranian blogosphere
* Weekly Global Voice: Kenyan Pundit reaches out
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The full buzz.
"I’m accustomed to thinking of digital restrictions in the U.S. intellectual property context. We’re told that DRM use restrictions are trade-offs for getting material in digital form, but generally, the trade is a bad one for the public.
The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari archive Kimberly Christen helped an Australian Warumungu community in Tennant Creek to construct puts digital restrictions in a very different light.
As Kim described when I met her at a conference over the summer, the Warumungu have a set of protocols around objects and representations of people that restrict access to physical objects and photographs. Only elders may see or authorize viewing of sacred objects; other objects may be restricted by family or gender. Images of the deceased shouldn’t be viewed, and photographs are often physically effaced. When the Warumungu archive objects or images, they want to implement the same sort of restrictions..."
Wendy Seltzer, "Mukurtu Contextual Archiving: digital 'restrictions' done right"
"Here’s a worrisome report on AT&T’s willingness to inspect packets, filter out what it thinks are copyright violations, and limit peer-to-peer interactions. Because the reporting is sketchy and is coming through an advocacy group (that I support), I’m not perfectly confident that this is the whole story. But as a partial story, it’s damn disturbing. If Net traffic needs to be 'shaped' (i.e., packets purposefully blocked or delayed) because of technical limitations, the carriers are the last people I trust to make decisions about what’s important and acceptable. And that, to me, is the essence of the argument for Net neutrality..."
David Weinberger, "AT&T ready to filter our Internet for us"
- continued -
"Last month, an investigator at Kansas University delivered a search warrant to the Lawrence Journal-World, a highly regarded newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, demanding access to their computer servers in order to get information about the identity of a user who had posted comments on the paper's website, LJWorld.com. The warrant, which appears to violate the federal Privacy Protection Act, raises serious concerns about governmental overreaching and highlights the need for adequate procedural protections for anonymous online speech..."
Citizen Media Law Project, "Kansas Court Issues Search Warrant to Lawrence Journal-World Seeking Identity of Anonymous User"
"I had just finished giving a talk about youth culture to a room full of professionals who worked in the retail industry when a woman raised her hand to tell me a story. It was homecoming season and her daughter Mary was going to go to homecoming for the first time. What fascinated this mother was that her daughter's approach to shopping was completely different than her own.
Using Google and a variety of online shopping sites, Mary researched dresses online, getting a sense for what styles she liked and reading information about what was considered stylish that year. Next, Mary and her friends went to the local department store as a small group, toting along their digital cameras (even though they're banned). They tried on the dresses, taking pictures of each other in the ones that fit. Upon returning home, Mary uploaded the photos to her Facebook and asked her broader group of friends to comment on which they liked the best. Based on this feedback, she decided which dress to purchase, but didn't tell anyone because she wanted her choice to be a surprise. Rather than returning to the store, Mary purchased the same dress online at a cheaper price based on the information on the tag that she had written down when she initially saw the dress. She went for the cheaper option because her mother had given her a set budget for homecoming shopping; this allowed her to spend the rest on accessories.
Mary's mother was completely flabbergasted by the way in which her daughter moved seamlessly between the digital and physical worlds to consume clothing. More confusing to this mother, a professional in retail, was the way in which her daughter viewed her steps as completely natural..."
danah boyd, "Technology and the World of Consumption"
"Paul Conley is telling trade journalism honchos to, 'No More Training' — a plea to employers to stop offering training in Web journalism to their employees. Huh?
There’s reason for this apparent madness, though I don’t entirely agree with it. Conley says:
First, 'You cannot train someone to be part of a culture.' He means the Web culture.
Second, he says, 'When the fighting begins, the training must end.' Here he means that it’s too late to start getting journalists web-savvy.
On the second point I could not disagree more. Soldiers train in between battles, to stay sharp and learn new tactics..."
Dan Gillmor, "Stop Training Journalists? Uh, Oh…"
"I see Twitter as a River of Tweets, which are 140-character posts. The Twitter concept is Evan Williams’, Biz Stone’s and Jack Dorsey’s The river concept is Dave’s. I don’t know who named the tweet, but that’s what matters. Twitter is an easy thing to which anybody can add value.
What makes Twitter so good is that it’s lightweight and not ambitious about running your life. It’s more service than site. It’s part of the live Web, even though you can still find it in the static one..."
Doc Searls, "Let’s call it a twiver"
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About Doc Searls:
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"We just read an excellent paper on the Iranian blogosphere by Nima Mina from SOAS at the University of London entitled 'Blogs, Cyber-literature and Virtual Culture in Iran.'...Perhaps the most interesting part of Mina’s paper is the four case studies that show how the Internet has supported the grassroots democracy movement within and outside of Iran. These cases include discussions of the online daily newspaper ROOZ and the 'citizen journalism' Radio station Zamaneh, as well as the ability of banned literary figures such as Reza Hassemi and Mahshid Amirshahi to connect, communicate and find new audiences inside Iran. The ability of users to connect on the Internet to produce media, news and literature is well established, but the chance for exiled literary figures and their fans at home to connect in this way is an interesting and exciting phenomenon to study and better understand. We look forward to more work from Nima Mina on this theme..."
Internet & Democracy, "Understanding the Iranian Blogosphere"
"After a week of killings, looting and the political madness witnessed in Kenya after last month’s general elections, Kenyan Bloggers are at the forefront of reconciliation, urging people to reach out, regardless of their ethnic background.
Kenyan Pundit chronicles the feelings of all Kenyan and how they were affected by the violence. In the post; Diary 12 - Reach Out, she urges people to make deliberate efforts to reach out to others:
'However, if there is a silver lining from this, at least from a personal perspective, it is that I will make deliberate effort to reach out to people from more different communities and my hope is that if we all did a little of reaching out, those preconceived notions and stereotypes will be dispelled and may be, just may be, we’ll know better next time some politician tries to exploit our diversity. That’s not to say that the authorities don’t need to address the underlying socio-economic issues.'..."
Rebecca Wanjiku, "Kenya: Bloggers seek to heal a wounded nation"