Berkman Buzz: March 25, 2011
What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.
* Ethan Zuckerman reviews a new paper on three philosophers' hypothetical personal search profiles on Google
* Radio Berkman dives into the platinum record world, interviewing the people behind the music
* Chris Soghoian outlines the privacy concerns stemming from AT&T's purchase of T-Mobile
* Christian Sandvig describes an epic saga through the finer points of Comcast's customer service
* David Weinberger battles his own mobile provider, Verizon
* Dan Gillmor explains who will win and who will lose as a result of the AT&T/T-Mobile deal
* Weekly Global Voices: "South Korea: Controversial Memoir Mixes Art, Sex and Politics"
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The full buzz.
"Martin Feuz, Matthew Fuller and Felix Stadler have a very clever paper in a recent edition of First Monday, titled “Personal Web searching in the age of semantic capitalism: Diagnosing the mechanisms of personalization.” ...it’s both a serious and methodologically defensible piece of research as well as a clever prank, demonstrating that Google will try to assign Immanuel Kant to a psycho/demographic group and target content based on those assumptions."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post, "In Soviet Russia, Google Researches You!"
"Behind almost every successful musician — from the platinum selling pop idol to the quirky regional artist who only sells records by the handful — you’ll probably find at least one person, if not a team of people working hard to make sure the business side of the music business stays going. And if you think that’s changed with the digital revolution, you’d be surprised."
From Radio Berkman 176, "Label Success (Rethinking Music IV)"
"While there are many who have raised antitrust concerns about this deal due to the impact it will have on the price of wireless services and mobile device/application choice, I want to raise a slightly different concern: the impact this will have on privacy."
From Chris Soghoian's blog post, "The negative impact of AT&T's purchase of T-Mobile on the market for privacy"
"In some of my academic writing I deal in legal anthropology. That area of scholarship makes a lot of noise about the big differences between laws as they are written in the book and laws as they are lived in the field. In the spirit of evolving, unfinished field notes, this blog post is a description of what happened last month when I tried to become a Comcast customer. It is about telecommunications regulation. Sort of."
From Christian Sandvig's blog post, "Comcast: Dysfunctional, Unregulated"
"Some other knowledgeable people tell me that Verizon must mean $20/gigabyte, not per megabyte. So, this may have been a mistake by the the service rep. I would happily take the blame for any misunderstanding, except that I confirmed that the rep said "megabyte" by inquiring, "PER MEGABYTE? PER MEGABYTE? ARE YOU FREAKING CRAZY!!!!!!!!!!," to which he replied in the affirmative to the first two of the three questions."
From David Weinberger's blog post, "Yet another reason to hate your mobile provider"
"Let’s be clear. If the Obama administration fails to block this deal, it will be setting the lowest possible bar in approving mergers and buyouts. This buyout could not be more obviously bad for competition — and therefore bad for customers — and antitrust enforcement is designed precisely for protecting competition."
From Dan Gillmor's blog post, "AT&T Plus T-Mobile Equals AT&T, and That Sucks"
"Shin Jeong-ah, a Korean art history professor and chief curator at the Sungkok Art Museum was convicted of forging a Yale doctorate degree and embezzling funds from corporate sponsorship in an art gallery in 2007 and sentenced to an 18-month prison term. Called the 'art world Cinderella', Shin's alleged relationships with high-profile political and social figures along with the nude photos of her that have been leaked on the internet and published in local newspaper, have made her something of a celebrity."
From Lee Yoo Eun's blog post for Global Voices Online, "South Korea: Controversial Memoir Mixes Art, Sex and Politics"
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Compiled by Rebekah Heacock.
The weekly Berkman Buzz is selected from the posts of Berkman Center people and projects and sometimes from the Center's wider network.
Suggestions and feedback about the Buzz are always welcome and can be emailed to buzz@cyber.harvard.edu.