From the conclusion of Chopra & Dexter's (2007, p173) Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software:
Jacques Ellul imagined an iron cage constructed of technology (Ellul 1967), but never the possibility that the cage could be unlocked by its prisoners. We began with a historical note on hacking: ...
Lawrence Lessig is the originator of Creative Commons and the author of Free Culture, Code 2.0 and the The Future of Ideas. An online campaign has been setup to encourage him to run for the congressional seat vacated by Rep. Tom Lantos (who recently passed away) in California. Having a ...
I was just reading through the Wired article on Facebook's role in the Burma protests.
The marches, organized at a lightning pace by volunteers using Facebook, show the increasing power and reach of a social-networking site originally designed to help college students find drinking buddies.
An interesting theme which runs through the ...
"The corporations want us to have experiences only through their products." -- Statement of Belief
I've finally gotten around to posting some footage from the Critical Mass at Union Square on 07.27.07. Below the fold you'll find two videos and a slide show of pictures. The first video documents the organization of Critical Mass in Union Square North from 6:45 PM (15 minutes prior to ...
After reading David Pogue's review of the XO - a $200 laptop created by One Laptop Per Child (O.L.P.C.) - and spending time on O.L.P.C.'s website, I'm absolutely fixated on the mesh-networking feature of this computer (check out the "mesh demo" here). While the XO is light, durable and energy ...
According to the U.S. State Department, democracies can be organized under two general categories, direct and representative. In both forms the public participates in governance yet in a representative democracy elected or appointed officials mediate this participation, whereas in a direct democracy this participation occurs "without the intermediary of elected ...
While reading Walter Lippmann's "A Preface to Politics" my attention was mainly drawn to his discussion of the red herring. The red herring -- a metaphor used to describe the obfuscation of, or distraction from, a particular object(ive) -- is portrayed by Lippmann (1913, p261) as both "pest" and "benefit," ...
Embracing the so called 'cybercity' as a specific unit of analysis, my second doctoral exam reading list will explore how processes of education and citizen participation are transmuted by the cybercity and how these transmuted processes in turn produce and reproduce the cybercity. In order for this exploration to begin ...
