It’s tempting to think of the Internet as the world’s best weapon against authoritarianism. Where it goes, democracy will follow, if we can just figure out how to strategically drop enough thumb drives, cell phones, and “shadow” technology. But, of course, the relationship between the Internet and democracy is much messier. And what we are now beginning to understand about it – with scientific rigor, that is – suggests that the laws governing this latest technology are not so different from its predecessors like radio and TV. “The Internet can play a role and facilitate ... Read More
Talmud, Internet Unlock James Madison
March 23, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
James Madison’s Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 has never been a bestseller. Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, randomly flips open his own copy of a published edition to page 129 and starts reading aloud to illustrate why. “Mr. Randolph's plan,” Madison wrote, “as reported from the Committee June 13 being before the house, the 1. propos: ‘that a Natl. Govt. ought to be established consisting &c.’ being taken up.” For one, this stuff doesn’t translate out loud very well. The book continues like this for some 600 ... Read More
SOPA Debate Highlights Congress’s Ignorance
December 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
When members of Congress earlier this month considered the Stop Online Piracy Act — better known to anyone who actually hangs out on the Internet as #SOPA — the most notable feature of the debate turned out to be the sheer ignorance of the elected officials discussing it. One after the other, members of the U.S. House of Representatives professed — nay, bragged about — approaching this weighty legislation from the vantage point of someone who is not “a nerd” or a “tech expert.” Nerds and tech experts, and plenty of savvy Internet users who don’t consider themselves either ... Read More
Does This Make My Antenna Look Big?
November 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
"Imagine a vest or shirt, or even a fancy ball gown made with this technology. The antennas would be inconspicuous, and even attractive. People would want to wear them." That's John Volakis, a professor at Ohio State University, trying to convince fashionistas that radio antennae incorporated into clothing, using plastic film and metallic thread — for cell phone, Internet, and emergency care access, much like soldiers' uniforms already have — is the next wave in fashion. This, of course, gives new meaning to the term wireless bra. Looks That Kill Talk about a cold case: The Egyptian ... Read More
Civil Rights Groups’ Surprising Net-Neutrality Bedfellows
September 23, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
For the most part, media-justice advocacy groups present a unified front in support of net neutrality, the concept — which many would like to see enshrined in federal regulation — that says telecom companies shouldn't be able to discriminate against users, content, or applications on the Internet. The telcos shouldn't be able to block controversial stories, or degrade traffic to websites that can't afford to pay more, or dictate the nature of online public debate. Net neutrality, its supporters argue, is nothing less than the civil rights issue of the 21st century. In an awkward ... Read More
Culturomics 2.0 Aims to Predict Future Events
September 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Last week, shortly after Idea Lobby blogger Emily Badger wrote about "a new R&D project to test tools that would mine publicly available data to predict political and humanitarian crises, disease outbreaks, mass violence and instability," a professor at the University of Illinois published his findings on how a computational analysis of millions of news stories could have predicted the Arab Spring. Kalev H. Leetaru, writing in the online journal First Monday, showed how data mining in the worldwide news archive could have "have forecasted the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, ... Read More
Spy Agency Seeks Digital Mosaic to Divine Future
September 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Governments have been caught off guard a lot lately: by revolutions, by riots, even by unemployment rates (or, to go back even further, by events like 9/11). In the information age — where there's no limit to publicly available data on everything from political chatter to gas prices — it seems policymakers should be better at predicting major societal shifts and events than at any point in history. Shouldn't all these little pieces of information be telling us something big? Shouldn't they be telling us about where the next mass migration will come from or where the next riot will ... Read More
Crowdfunding Puts Money with Public Interest
August 18, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
After losing their London-based publisher, co-editors Ruby Russell and Katherine Hunt of the grassroots art magazine Teller were forced to look in a new direction for their second issue. Self-funding was out of the question, so the editors launched a campaign on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to ask the public for help. "It allowed us to pre-sell copies of our magazine and put the full cover price toward production costs, with some people donating larger sums," says Russell. "It's very easy to set up and use, and people responded very generously." With an original funding goal of ... Read More
