Ch 12 Global cultures

Marshall McLuhan’s vision of a “Global Village” arrived in the 1960s with a global network of satellites, television and radio. The hope was to bring the world closer together and foster intercultural understanding, along the same lines  as telegraph inventor Samuel Morse’s idea of a “National Neighborhood.” The fear, later summarized in the  United Nations’ 1980 McBride report, was that the US and Western Europe would dominate global communications.  

That network is now established and that dominance has broadened into a more diverse system, but the vision of unity has proven elusive. 

True,  digital networks allowed billions of people to communicate across national boundaries, instantly, at no cost, in any media format— from text to video — for the first time in human history.  

Within these new global media cultures, information about an earthquake in China, violence in Kenya, an invasion of Ukraine or a protest in the Middle East is easily shared among millions of people, each with only a few hundred dollars worth of technology.  Within these new global media cultures, a cognitive surplus (as Clay Shirky once calls it) easily creates a Wikipedia with a mere 100 million hours of human intellectual labor. 

As expected, the vast changes in modern communications have both ennobled and corroded social structures.   

Personal privacy and large-scale political manipulation are among the concerns.  New media technology is making personal privacy a thing of the past, says Zeynep Tufekci in a May, 2022 New York Times article.  We need “a full legal and political reckoning with the reckless manner in which digital technology has been allowed to invade our lives. The collection, use and manipulation of electronic data must finally be regulated and severely limited. Only then can we comfortably enjoy all the good that can come from these technologies.”   

On the other hand, the goal remains for communications technology to help develop a successful, cooperative, inter-dependent world system that advances the many beneficent aspects of human nature, which is something predicted in Jeremy Rifkin’s 2010 book,  Empathic Civilization. (* For more about empathy and media, see this Psychology Today article “Empathy and the News”  from May, 2019).   It’s also easy, in hindsight, to see this as an overly optimistic assessment of the potential for new media technology.   

 No easy path  

Despite the possibilities, there is no easy path to a successful Global Culture, and there are many people who want no part of any culture but their own. 

For instance, following the murder of journalists and police at the offices of humor magazine Charlie Hebdo, crowds gathered in the Place de la République on Jan. 7, 2015, (above, by Godefroy Troude ), and many people are wondering how on earth global culture is going to reconcile so many conflicts.

Within this new global media culture,  a cartoon that depicts ayatollahs coming from the rear end of a praying Muslim — the kind of crude humor that comes from Charlie Hebdo  magazine — can provoke outrage from people whose exposure to modernity lacks the empathy that was originally part of Modernization Theory. Let’s not forget that similar images provoked mass European violence during the Protestant Reformation (1500s – 1900s).

The idea of an emerging global culture now raises questions about what will be done — and what could be done better  —  with the extraordinarily powerful new varieties of communication made available by the digital communications revolution.  How can we create real empathy and avoid the problems associated with the clash of cultures? 

The problems are seen in the way Julian Assange, editor of Wikileaks, used digital media to abruptly bring down barriers between global cultures and trigger the Arab Spring in 2011.  As he fought the US government, Assange insisted that Americans live in a media bubble which prevents them from learning about the rest of the world.

But by 2016, Assange’s  recklessness in putting innocent sources in harms way earned rebukes from human rights groups. And after leaking Hillary Clinton’s emails in the 2016 campaign, Wired magazine declared that “WikiLeaks Has Officially Lost the Moral High Ground.” 

Assange’s ongoing unresolved status  complicated efforts to support global freedom of the press and support net neutrality.  For instance, in  2012, Google, Wikipedia and thousands of other sites simply shut down for a day, in protest of new proposals from Republicans in the US Congress to cut net neutrality. Ironically, it was the Republicans who complained most bitterly that their own voices were being sidelined by Google, Facebook, Apple and the rest of what has become “Big Tech” in the post-Trump years.      

It goes to show, said Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia:  “The people are the media.”  Contrast this with  Marshall McLuhan’s deterministic  “medium is the message” theory.  It’s not that one is wrong and the other right. Rather, Wales’ statement can be seen as a milepost in a recognition that media technology has come full circle:  from top-down narrowly deterministic structures to the emerging socially constructed nerve system of a global culture.

“We are rapidly entering into a new world of hyper-connectivity,” said  Carl Bildtis foreign minister of Sweden, in a July 5, 2012 New York Times op-ed. 

“We cannot accept that the Internet’s content should be limited or manipulated depending on the flavor-of-the-month of political leaders. Only by securing access to the open and global Internet will true development take place.

The governments of the Human Rights Council now for the first time have confirmed that freedom of expression applies fully to the Internet. A global coalition for a global and open Internet has been formed… The challenge now is to put these words into action to make sure that people all over the world can use and utilize the power of connectivity without having to fear for their safety. This work is far from over.

In 2016, the election of Donald Trump illustrated another kind of flaw in the new structure of hyper-connectivity.  While Trump’s election owed a great deal to Russian interference in the campaign, the new media was an enormous factor for voters.  David Simas, former President Obama’s political director, told a reporter for the New Yorker just after the election: 

“Until recently, religious institutions, academia, and media set out the parameters of acceptable discourse, and it ranged from the unthinkable to the radical to the acceptable to policy,” Simas said. “The continuum has changed. Had Donald Trump said the things he said during the campaign eight years ago—about banning Muslims, about Mexicans, about the disabled, about women—his Republican opponents, faith leaders, academia would have denounced him and there would be no way around those voices. Now, through Facebook and Twitter, you can get around them. There is social permission for this kind of discourse. Plus, through the same social media, you can find people who agree with you, who validate these thoughts and opinions. This creates a whole new permission structure, a sense of social affirmation for what was once thought unthinkable. This is a foundational change.”

This raises  questions about regulating social media. It’s a “slippery slope,”   Peter Suderman says in an argument for free speech in a Sept. 2018 Times op-ed.  “Speech on Twitter and Facebook should not be treated like a collective good that  should be subject to political control,” Suderman says.    

 Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, writes  in a Nov. 24, 2019 op-ed  that we need to “eradicate incentives that reward clickbait or the spread of disinformation.” Part of the problem is lack of transparency, he says.

“Targeted political advertising is giving political parties the ability to subvert the debate. We need platforms to open their black boxes and clearly explain how they’re minimizing or eliminating risks their products pose to society. In my view, governments should impose an immediate ban on targeted political advertising to restore trust in our public discourse.”  

The reward of disinformation goes beyond advertising and deeply into support for conspiracy theories on a grand scale, says Charlie Warzel in the New York Times in August 2020.    

Facebook’s recommendations systems, designed to prioritize the growth of groups, most likely supercharged the QAnon community — exposing scores of people to the conspiracy theory and then forging bonds among like-minded believers who could communicate, organize and spread their message further…  

The anonymous person(s) named “Q” have accused (without evidence) actors,  politicians, and high-ranking officials of. (among other things) being members of an international child sex trafficking ring and working with the “deep state” to force Donald Trump from office.  The accusations are believed by a loud, violent minority of Americans and have become a factor in political campaigns.    

Some of this has led directly to violence, for example, the lunatic assault on a Washington DC pizza restaurant.  It can and should be regulated by government (under the 1969 Brandenberg v Ohio “imminent action” standard).  Conservative scholars argue that preventing harms caused by fake news or hate speech  “lies well beyond the jurisdiction of the government,” and that tech firms can deal with it. Others question the willingness or ability of tech firms (Facebook, Twitter, etc) to do so.     

After the Jan. 6, 2021 coup attempt in Washington DC, libertarians have begun to back away from the “marketplace of ideas.”  NY Times columnist Timothy Egan said:  “I used to believe that the remedy for bad speech was more speech. Not anymore.”  The level of toxic misinformation has reached the turning point, he said. We need education, more legal remedies for libel, and a way to dis-incentivize social media misinformation. 

Discussion questions

1. How will false information be regulated on social media?  Among 2020 and 2019 documentaries and investigative reports  articles ask that question are The Atlantic’s “Wikipedia War,” PBS Frontline’s “Facebook Dilemma,”  and others. Can the US be governed by reason? 
2. Imagine global digital culture a century from now. How will regular people communicate? How will governments deal with traditional cultures that want freedom but are wary of foreign influences?
3. Does Wikileaks deserve the same First Amendment / Article 19 protection as traditional journalism organizations?  Why or why not?
4. In ““Looking  for the Mouse,” Clay Shirky is asked by a TV reporter  where people get the time to participate in Wikipedia.  He’s incredulous. No one who works in television gets to ask that question, he says. Why do you suppose that is? 
5.  What is a cognitive surplus? How does it relate to the idea of “monk power” we discussed in Chapter 1? 
6. How can we protect the Web in the future?  Tim Berners Lee asks those  questions on the 25th anniversary of the web in 2014. See the anniversary website,  Webat25.org 
7. Digital media have created a revolution in American political communication, according to Jill Lepore in this Feb 22, 2016 New Yorker article.    “Revolutions in communication  tend to pull the people away from the élites.  The printing press is the classic example; think of its role in the Reformation. But this happens, to varying degrees, every time the speed and scale of communication makes a leap.”
   
8. Is Julian Assange a journalist?   Would a US indictment for leaking documents be a threat to press freedom, as Trevor Timm argues in this Guardian op-ed from April 21, 2017?.
9. When we think about the collapse of the traditional news media, do we ever consider how much of the old system was socially constructed by people like America’s first postmaster Benjamin Franklin?  Ethan Zuckerman tells why this matters in a Dec. 9, 2018 MIT media lab article. Is he right? Is the shape of the media a choice? If so, what shape would you prefer? 
10. Facebook company  misled the public and investigators about the leaks of personal data during the 2016 election.  How much could these leaks have helped Russia influence US elections? What kinds of regulations are needed in the future? 
11. Is technology inherently democratic? Not according to this 2018 Atlantic article by Yuval Noah Harari.  
12. Will the creative frontier of the internet be closed off by the new “app” economy? Check out Zittrain’s book The internet and how to stop it, and also the related blog, for an idea of what might be going wrong — or right. 

For this link:

1. Identify four roles the media performs in our society.
2. Recognize events that affected the adoption of mass media.
3. Explain how different technological transitions have shaped media industries.

People & Events

Ithiel de Sola Pool, Julian Assange, Jimmy Wales, Jonathan Zittrain,   Clay Shirky,  Ward Cunningham, Edward Snowden, Mark Zuckerberg,   Pierre Omidyar, Craig Newmark, Brian Chesky, Lawrence Lessig, Jeff Bezos,  Ray Kurzweil, Sean MacBride, 

Documentary Videos

1. History of a disruptive technology with Vint Cerf  (2014).

   

2. Wikisecrets: The Inside Story of Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and the largest intelligence breach in US history.  Frontline video. Public Broadcasting Service.  The video was controversial among some hackers, who disliked the emphasis on Manning’s personal issues and protested by hacking the PBS web site in May, 2011.
3. Digital Nation — PBS documentary on activism and the effects of digital media on society.
4. Democracy Now talks about the legacy of Aaron Swartz and Robert McChesney’s new book Digital Disconnect.  April 12, 2013.  “Americans pay far more for cellphones, they pay far more for broadband wired access, than any other comparable country in the world, and we get much worse service. It has nothing to do with the technology. It has nothing to do with, quote-unquote, “economics.” It has everything to do with corrupt policy making and the power of these firms.” — McChensey’s comments sound very similar to those made about the Western Union telegraph monopoly a century ago.
5. Lawrence Lessig on Laws that Choke Creativity, 2007.
6. Tim Berners-Lee on the 20th anniversary of the WWW.    2009.
7. Clay Shirky How Social Media are making history.  2009.
8. Jimmy Wales on the Birth of Wikipedia 2009
9. Johnathan Zittrain on Random Acts of Internet Kindness. 2009.
10. Clay Shirky on How Cognitive Surplus through Social Media is changing the world. 2010.
11. Markham Nolan, Storyful. How to separate fact from fiction online. 2012.
12. Sergey Brin on Google Glass – Feb. 2013  TED video.  In the beginning, the idea was to avoid having to look down all the  time.  Then it grew.
13. Edward Snowden – Here’s how we take back the Internet. 2014.
14. A collection of TED talks about the internet.  Especially recommended: Negroponte’s 30 year history of the future;
15. Operation Infektion, Nov – Dec 2018 New York Times. (Excellent) 

Arab Spring and Jamal Khashoggi  

1. Fractured Lands: How the Arab World Came Apart, New York Times, Aug  10, 2016.
2. Arab Spring and social media – Wikipedia
3. Arab Spring five years on, Amnesty International, 2016
4. Jamal Khashoggi: “What the Arab world needs most is free expression” Washington Post, Oct. 17, 2018 (published posthumously): “The Arab world was ripe with hope during the spring of 2011. Journalists, academics and the general population were brimming with expectations of a bright and free Arab society within their respective countries. They expected to be emancipated from the hegemony of their governments and the consistent interventions and censorship of information. These expectations were quickly shattered; these societies either fell back to the old status quo or faced even harsher conditions than before…  [Now, repressive acts by Arab governments] no longer carry the consequence of a backlash from the international community. Instead, these actions may trigger condemnation quickly followed by silence… The Arab world is facing its own version of an Iron Curtain.” 
5. What happened to Jamal Khashoggi?  CIA has evidence that Mohammed bin Salman, prince of Saudi Arabia, ordered the journalist’s assassination.  

Media reform

1. National Conference on Media Reform, 2013, Denver. Featured Evangeline Lilly, Susan Crawford, Craig Aaron,  Amy Goodwin and others.  Final Conference report (pdf).
2. Robert W.  McChesney –– How the media reform movement stalled and what to do about it.  Monthly Review, Feb. 2014.
3. Media Reform refers to proposed attempts to reform mass media towards an agenda which is more in tune with public needs and away from   corporate  biases.   A related concept, Media Justice, refers to a regional, grassroots movement led by historically disenfranchised communities to transform media in the service of social justice. (Wikipedia text & link)
4. Marc Andreessen sees eight possible new business models.
5. Torching the modern-day Library of Alexandria, by James Somers, The Atlantic, April 20, 2017, describes Google’s efforts to digitize all of the world’s books. “Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.”
6. Camille Paglia, Professor of Humanities, in an interview from 1995, predicts McLuhan’s resurgence and significant influence on 21st-century thought. How did she do?

Creative cultures 

1. A Pandemic winner: How Zoom beat the tech giants to dominate video chat.  NPR March 19, 2021. 
2. Mark Zuckerman (Facebook) and internet.org,  Bill Moyers, May 2015.
3. Blodget, Henry. “Interview with Jimmy Wales: How Wikipedia Became a Monster,” Business Insider, May 3, 2010
4. As the WWW turns 25, a global internet Magna Carta is needed, says Tim Berners Lee.
5. More Wikipedia editors needed — PC World, August 7, 2011
6. Like Wikipedia, volunteers created the Oxford English Dictionary in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The best of these volunteers is profiled in The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester.
7. Wikipedia Foundation needs a new chair. April, 2014.
8. Creative commons  licenses provide simple, standardized alternatives to the “all rights reserved” paradigm of traditional copyright.
9. Civic Technologies and the Future of the Internet  —  Jonathan Zittrain
10. Information technology is not linear – Ray Kurzweil
11. Craig Newmark talks about Craigslist
12. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
13. Four “titans” (Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google) are racing to be king of the digital age, says  Jia Lynn Yang of the Washington Post, Aug. 16, 2011.
14. Fast Company: The women of Twitter  Vogue magazine, March 2012.
15. Oliver Boyd-Barnett, News agencies in the turbulent era of the Internet (Government of Catalonia, 2010). Available as free e-book. European perspective. Translated from Spanish.
16. A universal library is (finally) within reach, says Pamela Samuelson. Copyright law poses considerable challenges, but any barriers to mass digitization of the world’s books can — and should be — overcome.
17. Latin America’s information revolution reflects new-found empowerment.  By United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in Latin America and the Caribbean, March 8th, 2023
18. Total Internet regulation proposed in Mexico – June 2012.
19. “Enemies of the Internet” report by RSF, March 2014.
20. Wikinomics – How mass collaboration changes everything.  A  book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams first published in 2006.
21. Uber and Lyft are replacing regulated taxi companies.
22. The best place they hated to work: Amazon  — New York Times, Aug. 15, 2015.

23. Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine,  New York Times, Aug 22, 2016.

24. College is the new cable bundle, Washington Post, Feb 5, 2016

Free software versus tethered applications (social construction versus determinism)

1. The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it by Jonathan Zittrain
2. Brown, Peter. “Free software is a Matter of Liberty, Not Price,” Free Software Foundation, December 27, 2010.
3. Kulash, Jr, Damian. “Whose Tube?” The New York Times, February 19, 2010, A17.
4. iPad isn’t the solution for magazines, Rolling Stone publisher says.
5. Apple’s Darker Side – A revealing article from China.net about pollution and poisonings in the Apple supply chain
6. Apple iPhone Games for Children Rack up Shocking Bills – Washington Post, Feb. 2, 2011
7. How the Internet has changed us, interview with Michael Wesch, Vancouver Sun, Oct. 27, 2013.
8. Open culture: The best free cultural and educational material on the web.
9. How techno-libertarians took over.   (AlterNet, April 2015).

Fake news and cyber wars 

1. “All Roads Lead to Mar A Lago,” Vanity Fair, Sept. 2021. “Florida has always been the “sunny place for shady people,” to quote Roger Stone quoting Somerset Maugham, the traditional haven of mobsters, drug kingpins, Ponzi schemers, and Joad-like last chancers on the road to salvation or meth addiction. Pablo Escobar had a home here, and Fox News chief Roger Ailes escaped here after being fired for rampant sexual harassment… (Florida)  is the state that gave us the Florida Man meme and the rogue weekly National Enquirer, precursor to the paranoid and factually challenged style of Fox News and Newsmax, and a crucial ally in Trump’s political ascent. A tabloid state for tabloid people. And now the place is lousy with comers. As Laura Loomer, a friend of Stone’s and radical right-wing activist, tells me, “Every grifter and their mom now wants to move to Florida and establish themselves as the new conservative media network or new conservative publication.”
2. Belonging is stronger than facts, NY Times, May 7, 2021. 
3. From Tahrir Square to Donald Trump, MIT Technology Review, Aug. 14, 2018. “How did all this happen? How did digital technologies go from empowering citizens and toppling dictators to being used as tools of oppression and discord? There are several key lessons. First, the weakening of old-style information gatekeepers (such as media, NGOs, and government and academic institutions), while empowering the underdogs, has also, in another way, deeply disempowered underdogs. Second, the new, algorithmic gatekeepers …  make their money by keeping people on their sites and apps; that aligns their incentives closely with those who stoke outrage, spread misinformation, and appeal to people’s existing biases and preferences. Old gatekeepers failed in many ways, and no doubt that failure helped fuel mistrust and doubt; but the new gatekeepers succeed by fueling mistrust and doubt, as long as the clicks keep coming.” 
4. From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece, NY Times Jan. 18, 2017 article about fraudulent news about Hilary Clinton that affected the election.
5. The true history of fake news, by Robert Darnton, NY review, Feb 12, 2017, describes fake news in France and Britain in the 1700s.   “Much of this muckraking concerned little more than the sexual peccadillos of the great, but some of it had political implications, just as today in the case of the fake news about supposed orgies involving Hillary Clinton.”  Sophisticates knew not to believe it, but some of the fake news items had political impacts.
6. Commenting and trolling in news articles — and what can be done about it. “Me and my troll” by Jason Ponton, MIT Technology Review, April 12, 2017.  Interesting review of commenting software and (believe it or not) a link to a Princeton professor’s paper “On Bullshit.”
7. Facing down the Russian trolls gets a Finn journalist in trouble. New York Times, May 30, 2016.
8. “The Information War is Real, and We are Losing it,” Seattle Times, March 29, 2017, about study of the dark web by Kate Starbir
9. Experts Paint Sinister Picture of Russian Meddling, Associated Press, March 30, 2017   
10. Fake news is affecting the way people read Facebook, according to Nieman Reports April 13, 2017.
11. Five ways to spot fake news, March 3, 2016.
12. Fake news is trending, CBS 60 minutes, March 30, 2017.
13. The Problem with Facts, Financial Times, March 3, 2017.  The problem, as seen in the 1950s – 60 tobacco / cancer “debate,” is that authoritative institutions and detailed studies are not enough to overcome smokescreens of doubt.
14. Predicting the information apolcalypse, Buzzfeed, Feb. 2018: “A reality-distorting information apocalypse is not only plausible, but close at hand.”
15. Could we build the  Facebook era equivalent of public broadcasting? Mathew Ingram, Columbia Journalism Review, April 5, 2018.
16. Collaboration and the new journalism commons, By Carlos Martínez de la Serna March  30, 2018 Columbia Journalism Review
17. Sandy Hook parents sue Infowars for defamation, New York Times, April 4, 2018  and   Parkland parents sue Infowars  for defamation  New York Times, April 3, 2018.
18. The Facebook Dilemma, Frontline, December 2018 . 
19. Twitter’s disinformation data dumps, Wired Magazine, July 2019. 
20. NYT on the contrasting personas you’ll see from political figures (such as Tom Cotton and Donald Trump) on various platforms:
    
    

    “A tweet like that is obviously a distraction and not a point of view we need to better understand others. It is meant to confuse and confound, by littering claims and counterclaims all over the media landscape to make it hard for many to put together all the pieces.

    It reminds me of the groundbreaking idea in Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”: “The medium is the message.” 

    That was 1964. So, let me update that for you to reflect the rage-baiting stylings of Mr. Trump and Mr. Cotton in 2020: The mediums are a mess. And that’s just the way they like it.”    

21. Fake Online News: Rethinking News Credibility for the Changing Media Environment

International free speech / technology issues

1. Global internet Magna Carta needed, says Tim Berners Lee.
2. Google’s “Dont Be Evil” creedo,  published 2004.
   

   Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served-as shareholders and in all other ways-by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.

3. China threatens its own future with repression, American Political Science Review, May 2013.
4. China’s  bloggers under attack.  New York Times, Oct. 16, 2013.
5. Scheeres, Julia. “Lech Walesa: Tech Freedom Fighter,” Wired, June 19, 2002.
6. Iran Vows to Unplug Internet – May, 2011
7. “Tunisia: IMF ‘Economic Medicine’ has resulted in Mass Poverty and Unemployment,” Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 2011.
8. Columbia University President and First Amendment scholar Lee C.  Bollinger proposes an American World Service in the July/August 2011 issue of Columbia Journalism Review.   “Now, with globalization well underway, it is imperative that we begin to think more systematically about how we will build and develop the concept of a free press for a new global public forum.”
9. Facebook Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg derived the company’s name  from  the generic term “facebook,” usually a magazine of classmate mugshots, names and home towns distributed to incoming college freshmen. In August, 2011, Facebook claimed that it owns the rights to “___ book” in a lawsuit against Teachbook.
10. The “Occupy Wall Street” movement relies on the rapid exchange of videos of pepper spraying, club wielding police.”Instead of being reliant on information given to the public through media channels, we are now able to instigate our own broadcasts. Immediately connected to a global audience, two YouTube videos alone are prime examples of how witness reports to scenarios like this are no longer chained to censorship or secrecy.” This is something to celebrate, says the Guardian — and something to be wary about.
11. Twitter censorship policy announced January 2012 is an interesting victory for freedom of speech.  Twitter’s policy and its transparency pledge with the censorship watchdog Chilling Effects  “is the most thoughtful, honest and realistic policy to come out of a technology company in a long time. Even an unsympathetic reading of the new censorship policy bears that out.” So says Paul Smalera of Reuters.   
12. Google also  adds a feature to overcome China’s search engine censorship. May 2012.
13. Cat and mouse censorship game over internet  mentions of dissident Cheng Guangcheng in China. Washington Post,  May 1, 2012.
14. Security of cyberspace – Special report by Washington Post, June 3, 2012.
15. The assumption that communication technologies will lead to freedom is foolish “iPod liberalism” says Evgeny Morozov.  LA Times June 21, 2012.
16. Battle for internet freedom looms in December 2012. Associated Press, June 23, 2012.
17. Draconian restrictions may result from Pacific trade talks. Vancouver Sun, June 27, 2012.
18. When has China blocked internet sites, and why?  Washington Post Oct. 29, 2012.
19. Evgeny Morozov notes that the bastion of openness and counterculture is just another bit of discreetly imposed conservatism.
20. Controversy at the International Telecommunications Union in December, 2012.  SF Chronicle and DW coverage.  Also the LA Times weighs in.  Looks like the MacBride Commission all over again.
21. Reddit’s online witch hunts  following Boston Marathon bombings. NYTimes, April 29, 2013.
22. The right to anonymity by Bill Keller, April 29, 2013.
23. A double non-sequiter about people supposedly  ‘self-radicalized’ through Internet sites. Thomas Friedman, NY Times, April 27, 2013.
24. What if the digital future is so efficient there are  no more jobs? Google’s Larry Page worries that 9 out of 10 existing jobs will be eliminated.
25. Transferring ICANN to an independent international body presents problems for freedom of expression, opines the Washington Post on Jan. 5, 2015.
26. Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia censorship in China. HuffPo, Sept. 14, 2015.
27. The Secret Rules of the Internet, The Verge, April 2016.  Excellent article about moderating YouTube video in the early days.
28. Censorship doesnt work, Cuban activists say — Voice of America, July, 2017
29. Six tales of censorship in the internet era, Wired Magazine, January 2018
30. CBS censored a segment of The Good Fight because of a critical segment that took aim at Chinese censorship.  PBS. May 11, 2019. 
31. Asch conformity experiment – If one person stands up for the truth, conformity declines from 30 percent to five percent.
    
    

Wikileaks / Snowden / Panama papers   

Connections to the  Wikileaks website in Switzerland are often overwhelmed or blocked.  However, some news organizations like McClatchy have tried to keep track of  Wikileaks releases and commentary.

1. David Samuels, “The shameful attacks on Julian Assange,” The Atlantic magazine, Dec. 10, 2010.
2. Apps, Peter. “Wikileaks Stirs Debate on Info Revolution,” Reuters, December 6, 2010.
3. Why Shouldn’t Freedom of the Press apply to Wikileaks? — Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone, Dec. 15, 2010.
4. U.C. Berkeley forum  (video)  April 2011 on Wikileaks with Assange.
5. Assange loses extradition appeal, June 2012.
6. Why Assange applied for asylum in Ecuador,  LA Times June 21, 2012.  (article / video)
7. Guardian newspaper’s web site covering the Snowden leaks.
8. Looking Back: One Year after the Snowden leaks.  May 14, 2014.  Common Dreams. Great overview.
9. The Panama Papers, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, April 2016.
10. How reporters pulled off the Panama Papers, Wired Magazine, April 2016
11. The $2 billion trail that leads to Vladimir Putin, Guardian, April 3, 2016
12. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was taken from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had taken refuge, and indicted by prosecutors in the US.  in April 2019.  

 Russia, social media, fake news and the 2016 election   

1. Russian Active Measures Campaign (Senate Intelligence Committee, Oct. 2019.) 
2. Did Russia’s Facebook Ads Actually Swing the Election?, NY Magazine, Oct  20 2017
3. Facebook is fixing the system, Slate, Oct 28, 2017
4. Russian trolls would love the ‘Honest Ads’ act, Bloomberg, Oct 20, 2017.  Argues that proposed disclosure legislation doesnt go far enough.
5. The US is losing at ‘influence warfare’ Defense One, Dec 5, 2016
6. Here’s what fake  Russian Facebook posts looked like, Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct 6, 2017.  
7. Inside the Muller indictment: A Russian novel of intrigue, Wired, Feb  20, 2018. 
8. Operation Infektion, New York Times, Nov.12,  2018.  Meet the KGB spies who invented fake news.    
9. How Russian trolls used meme warfare to divide America. Wired Magazine, Dec 17, 2018.   
   
   “There’s a meme on Instagram, circulated by a group called “Born Liberal.” A fist holds a cluster of strings, reaching down into people with television sets for heads. The text declares: “The
   

   Fake Orwell quote from “Being Liberal,” an effort of the Internet Research Agency troll farm in St. Petersburg, Russia.

   People Believe What the Media Tells Them They Believe: George Orwell.” The quote is surely false, but it’s also perfect in a way. “Born Liberal” was a creation of the Internet Research Agency, the Russian propaganda wing that might as well be part of Oceania. In other words, we live in a time when American democratic debate is being influenced by liars spreading memes about our inability to understand the truth. 
10. Regulating Facebook — US, Canadian and European governments are investigating whether Facebook violated national and local laws in allowing third parties access to private user information through  (as a Canadian investigation said) “superficial and ineffective safeguards and consent mechanisms.”  New York Times, April 25, 2019.    
11. The Facebook Dilemma – Frontline documentary Oct. 2018 
    
12. How’s your news diet? From Psychology Today – 
    
    “Researchers found that only 10 percent of Facebook users shared any fake news during the 2016 presidential campaign (Guess et al., 2019). During that campaign, 0.1 percent of Twitter users were responsible for 80 percent of the fake news shared on the site (Grinberg et al., 2019).”
13. Liberals Read, Conservatives Watch TV – Richard Hanania explains why Trump emerged on the right, why only liberals debate filibuster reform, how anti-vax became a partisan issue, how David Shor is half right, “Dems are the real racists” and much else. The most in-depth breakdown on the current (2024) political climate you’ll find.
14. This NYT article touches on how the fringiest of candidates have ignored conventional means of authority and have usurped so much influence.

Unexpected technologies 

1. SceneTap tells you what’s hot around town, how busy a bar is, the male-female ratio, and the average age. It’s all based on automatic facial recognition software. Some people think its kind of a creepy bro-tard thing.
2. Google glass and Google Now are just part of the way Google is going to own your brain, says Ray Kurzweil.  (OK, just kidding, but close).  Marketplace, May 5, 2013.
3. The Globe & Mail’s “Fort McMoney” combines documentary film and video gaming to explore the future of a major environmental justice issue.

Technology Changing Perception

1. Arthur Koestler in The Darkness at Noon – 
   
   “Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people’s level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization.”
   
   Also, John V. Fleming gives a lecture on Koestler
2. 

   Arjun Appadurai

   Arjun Appadurai is a world renowned expert on the cultural dynamics of globalization, having authored numerous books and scholarly articles. The nature and significance of his contributions throughout his academic career have earned him the reputation as a leading figure in his field.

   • From Appadurai’s Flesh and Affect: On Alexander R. Galloway’s “Uncomputable”:

     “rich interaction between weaving (a quintessentially analog practice) and the early history of computing, exemplified by figures such as Ada Lovelace. In each of these cases, and many others, Galloway shows that he is a master of what we might call the reverse-branching method of archival research, which follows the trace of a phenomenon to its familiar branches, and then again to smaller and more exotic branches until they yield a counterhistory. In Galloway’s hands, this method allows him to move seamlessly from his understanding of web design to a reading of Aeschylus’s tragedies.”

   Does the growth of digital systems limit the scope of critical thinking and human experiences?

3. Ezra Klein asks, is the internet altering our brain’s function?
   
   Ezra Klein asks Sean Illing how TV, Twitter and TikTok shape our brains — and our politics.
   
   
   Ezra, you really need to read more widely on this subject. Start with Gregory Ulmer on Electracy. Move to Johanna Drucker’s Graphesis. For good measure Donna Haraway’s Staying With The Trouble certainly isn’t going to hurt. Haraway isn’t about the Internet, but about acceptance of current conditions. Those old mid-century white guys made their point but it’s limited. We aren’t getting our attention spans back.
4. Death by PowerPoint – Did Powerpoint really play a role in the Columbia disaster? The pamphlet’s core argument, channeling Marshall McLuhan, was that the media of communication influence the substance of communication, and PowerPoint as a medium had an obfuscatory, dumbing-down effect.

   “The cognitive style of PP compromised the analysis,” he declared months before the NASA investigation report reached a very similar conclusion.

Communication Theories and Literature

1. Harold Innis’ theories. 
2. Preview of a heavily illustrated Communications history book. 
3. Cognitive Media Theory
4. Heroes and Villains in media, and what it teaches us about ourselves.
5. Arjun Appadurai’s Global Cultural Flows – 
   
   ethnoscapes — flow of people Human migrations
   mediascapes — flow of cultural industry networks
   also – media ecology and information and communications technology
   technoscapes — flow and configurations of technology
   financescapes — flow of money and global Business networks; and
   ideoscapes — flow of ideas, images, and their nexuses.
   
   For in-depth info on each of the ‘scapes
6. The case for technological comparison in communication history – This article makes the case for a comparative approach to communication technologies throughout history, arguing that various types of comparisons could enrich both historical research and technology theorization.

7. Temporalities and theory in New  Media  – This essay discusses what the topical approaches to history—digital history and different concepts of historical temporality—have to offer for media history studies especially in terms of defining a common theory of media history.

8. Full PDF of Marshall McLuhan’s “Understanding Media – The Extensions of Man”

The future of information 

Civic Technologies and the Future of the Internet with Jonathan Zittrain  (2009 but this talk has aged well).   

History of a disruptive technology with Vint Cerf  (2014) 

The End is Nigh?

All the way back in 1995, Carl Sagan predicts:

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…”

Do you see any parallels to society today? If this applied to us, what stage would we be in?