Month: April 2008

Censorship in comics?

I think this article is very pertinent to our discussion of comics. It discusses censorship in comics in the mid-20th century in a very balanced way. One possible criticism of it is that it doesn’t separate the medium/grammar of comics from the content of comics. Anyway money quote:

In the two years after Wertham’s book came out, more than a dozen publishers and hundreds of cartoonists left the field. Those publishers that remained were severely restricted by a self-imposed code that prevented comics from publishing anything but the most anodyne kiddies’ fare. Only with the rise of graphic novels in the last few years have comics recovered from the stigma of the Wertham years. For Hajdu, the comic-book crackdown was a “purge,” a precursor to later panics over rock music and video games.

Wikipeding on Facebook Chat

I’m sure many of you where taken aback by Facebook’s newest feature, Chat. It will be interesting to see how successful this is. I for one think the way Facebook releases new features is a bit curious. They release the new feature and then a few days later put a post in the mini-feed about. I think they would have less backlash against change if they gave more of a warning about their features before they released them.

But regardless I thought Wikipedia should know about this new feature. So I did this and this. It will be interesting to see how the community takes my changes. I might add footnotes later, but I couldn’t find any news articles on Facebook chat yet.

I also made a change on the blogger, Andrew Sullivan’s page.

Reading responses for 4/8

The bulk of Benkler’s book for this week focuses on how network culture impacts our political processes. What issues and arguments seem particularly relevant to you, especially in light of the ongoing campaign that many people are referring to as the “YouTube Election”? Do you see evidence of increased autonomy and freedom emerging around politics in the networked ecology?

Government Search Engine Blocks the Term “Abortion”

Hi everyone,

Here’s a Wired.com article that I think has some relevance in relation to Benkler’s work and larger issues running through the course. A health service search engine (known as Popline) run by USAID, the office of the federal government in charge of health care aid for developing nations, brings up no results after a search for “abortion” – despite the fact that the database contains several journal articles and health literature with the word “abortion” right in the title. Popline is hosted at Johns Hopkins University, and a representative there reported that because the project is federally funded, “abortion” is one of the so-called “stop words.”

Even setting aside the undoubtedly contentious issue of abortion, this seems to raise several questions. The search engine’s policy of disabling searches for “abortion” does not simply block articles touting the beneficial if ethically controversial effects of increased access to abortion in developing nations; it blocks any and all information on abortion, period. This attitude toward encouraging a specific platform of the Bush administration seems quite similar to the attitude of Hollywood and the music industry with regard to content ownership and copyright. It’s a blanket restriction of information, regardless of the actual effects of that information. Some of the literature in the database might show the detrimental effects of abortion in the same developing nations. In any case, the underlying assumption on the part of the top-down industrial-information model at work here seems to be that information about abortion, just like information about birth control (which the engine does allow searching for) will lead to only one result: the unacceptable (according to social conservatives) increase in abortions and sex before marriage.

Do you guys know of any other examples of government-imposed censorship on the internet?

South Park

Did anyone see last night’s episode of South Park? It was amazing. It talks a lot about digital media and parodies many of the “viral videos” we have all seen on youtube. While the episode is hilarious on the whole, the last few minutes are the big pay off as it relates to our class.
http://www.southparkstudios.com/
click on the episode called “canada on strike” which is currently on the right side of the homepage, but it can also be found by going to “full episodes”-> “season 12”-> “Canada on strike”

Here is the clip of the last 30 seconds.
http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/165199/

It should be noted that the South Park creators are NOT members of the Writers Guild of America, and continued to produce new episodes throughout the writers strike. Also, the episode is dripping with irony as every South Park episode is available free online, distributed by the show’s creators.

Responses for 4/3

Sorry for the delay in posting this…

Benkler offers a new vision of economics to account for the internet era. What strikes you as particularly compelling about this approach to economic and social relations? Are there specific examples from your own experience that speak to the redefinition of markets, production, and consumption that he lays out?