Category: Politics

The Man who wrote 200,000 books!

Hey Guys, This is a really cool article from NYT. Phillip M. Parker uses a team of computers to compile public information from the net. He then frames all the pertinent stuff into books for consumers. This seems to be one of the more important changes to the way that we link to together information and is certainly a function of the “wealth of networks.”

“Comparing himself to a distant disciple of Henry Ford, he said he was ‘deconstructing the process of getting books into people’s hands; every single step we could think of, we automated’.”

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?

Political Comedy

Its astonishing the role comedy has played in this election cycle. Barack shows up on SNL for halloween, McCain announces his candidacy on Letterman; Thompson on Leno; Edwards on The Daily Show in ’04 (this time too?).

Now, I know he doesn’t believe in evolution, but Huckabee’s appearance on SNL last night is pretty funny:

[youtube xvSXpM5qGmg]

Presidential Platforms

This New York Times Article compares Obama to Hillary using a Mac vs. PC analogy. It also mentions Obama’ s use of blogs and social networking sites. Apparently Obama is also proposing to “make all public government data available to everybody to use as they wish.”

What do you guys think?

Kyle’s Images of Media Response

Giving that we are currently witnessing perhaps one the most thrilling and important presidential races in our lifetime (and that’s coming from a guy who until now has never voted or really followed politics), the Macro-level medium questions that Meyrowitz addresses seem very relevant and timely. No more so than the question he raises on p. 63 of how different medium environments might “affect the criteria that are used to evaluate political leaders?” As an Obama supporter, I couldn’t help but notice how a lot of the pundits (both left and right) and so called “objective journalists” deem Obama’s physical presence as his greatest strength. So if he loses this primary or this election, would it really be a stretch to claim that the average american’s reliance on non face-to-face mediums for information about the candidates cost him the presidency? Who knows. I don’t deny that there is some validity in claiming that a speaker’s physical presence not an important quality for a president to have. But perhaps it doesn’t matter what you or I think because it looks like the succesful politician of tomorrow will be someone who is camera friendly and has a well funded blogging unit.