a fantastic story about Lawrence Lessig’s speech at the Ninth World Wide Web conference in Amsterdam. One thing that he neglects to mention but forms the backdrop of the whole story is that the Telecom Reform Act (the one that the CDA came packaged within) explicitly paved the way for AT&Ts current behaviour. That should have been a bigger story than the CDA at the time – it sure is now. By allowing mergers and combinations in the telecom space that were previously illegal, it opened the door to many really cool business combos that weren’t possible before. But it also raised the spectre of a virtually private network that could be controlled by capital in ways that the net cannot be. And, really, who needs CDA-style censorship when you have a closed network in the first place?
There’s an interesting
story at Wired News today about Artistic commentary on genomics and issues that arise from such work. Many will dismiss it, I’m sure. I think McLuhan was right though – artists are probes, and we disregard their work (whether sophisticated or naive) at our own peril.
Interesting
news about people’s online behaviour today. Wired News reports that people focus much more on text than graphics at online news sites.
It raises a lot of questions – but the preliminary one is “which online news sites really use lots of graphics?” I can only think of the single little photo (usually about 200×200 or so) that most sites put up. And an image like that doesn’t provide the detail that a well-printed newspaper photo has.
It also brings to mind McLuhan – is the web a hot or cool medium? TV was cool and movies were hot – it’s all about resolution and the infinitely higher resolution of film as opposed to NTSC-standard pixels. The imagination is even higher res, so radio was/is hot, not cool like TV. I tend to think the web has elements of both, and that’s what this study might point to.
Good news:
Schizophrenia gene suspected. This sort of news always modifies my generally suspicious attitude towards gene therapy and genetic research.
Parody:
A lot of people linked to the Elian-Whassup parody yesterday. As expected, Wired News has the story today. The story is interesting though: the guy from AP admits that “[we] police our copyright as aggressively as we can, although this is the first time that I can remember us going after a parody site.”
Uh, if you’re claiming copyright infringement, it’s probably not a good idea to be quoted admitting that the infringing item is a parody, which is generally considered to fall under the scope of fair use.
