Posts tagged Media

#Change_you_can_believe_in?

By admin on April 5, 2010
This entry is filed under Politics and tagged , , , , .View Comments

Late Monday, the United States Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, released the redacted report on the case, which provided some more detail.

…a bit of ridiculousness from the NYT’s story ‘Video Shows American Killing of Photographer‘ on the video leaked via the power of the interwebs and Wikileaks, which is well on its way to becoming the Internet’s foremost repository of documents exposing government secrets.

Wikileaks’ upload page reads:

WikiLeaks accepts classified, censored or otherwise restricted material of political, diplomatic or ethical significance.

…

The information you submit will be technically anonymized and we do not retain any information on you. We will never cooperate with anyone seeking to identify you.

Not long after its role in the disclosure of the Trafigura “Super Injunction” leak – the documents pertaining to a gag order in a UK toxic waste dumping scandal – The Guardian’s editorial ‘In praise of… Wikileaks‘ had this to say:

The site…serves as an uncensorable and untraceable depository for the truth, able to publish documents that the courts may prevent newspapers and broadcasters from being able to touch.

Unsurprisingly, there are many powerful interests spending lots of money on lawyers attempting to have Wikileaks shut down. You can help here, a link that reads: wikileaks.org/#Change_you_can_believe_in

The Intenet: the only place where you can find the Smooth Jazz version of Metallica’s Enter Sandman and as many censored documents as your heart desires.

EAVB_DHLUYPKEGH

Dissolve the CRTC

By admin on March 22, 2010
This entry is filed under Communications, Media and tagged , , , , , .View Comments

My friend @DuncanKinney reminded me that the fee-for-carriage decision (a.k.a. the end of the annoying “Save Local TV” vs. “Stop the TV Tax” campaigns) is coming out today. It reminded me of the most brutal dismantling of the Canadian Radio Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) that I ever had the pleasure of reading.

Broadcast industry veteran Howard Bernstein brings out the hammer and the blowtorch in Liars Poker at the CRTC:

The CRTC has seldom, if ever, had close ties to the real world. The consumer is always at the bottom of the CRTC’s list of cares. The CRTC’s job, as they see it, is to protect Canadian TV. Not TV production as in new dramas and comedies, but TV distributors and stations. The reason: without a bunch of TV stations operating in Canada there is no need for the CRTC to oversee television. So they protect the millionaire owners. More important to the CRTC is cable. Every decision they make is to fortify cable. As long as most Canadians get their TV through cable the CRTC is powerful. You see, you cannot block over the air signals at the border, you cannot stop satellite feeds from entering Canadian air space, but you can control Canadian companies who distribute these signals over cable to millions of Canadian homes. Thus, over the years the CRTC has become the political arm of Rogers Cable. I have appeared before the CRTC five or six times and on each occasion at least half the commissioners were former Rogers employees. In many cases they went back to work at Rogers after their term was up at the CRTC. The connection is too obvious and has been going on for too long to call this a coincidence. CRTC decisions inevitably favour the cable companies first, the broadcasters second, the satellite companies third and I have to say it, the consumer never.

Some sensible people have created a Dissolve the CRTC slacktivist Facebook page. I do suggest that you join.

I can haz less censorship?

By admin on January 2, 2010
This entry is filed under Communications, Media, Politics and tagged , , , , , , .View Comments

Do LOLCats help fight censorship? The surprising answer is that yes they do.

funny pictures of cats with captions

This year’s Dalton Camp Lecture in Journalism was a feast for media nerds like me. Former CBC reporter and producer Sue Gardner, now executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, made more insightful comments about the future of media, journalism and the way the web is changing our relationship with information than I can recount here. But one comment on the resiliency of the web in adressing would be censors of widely adopted social media platforms really stuck out for me.

Reflecting on the usefulness of Twitter to the Iranian election protests last June, Sue Gardner said (with my added emphasis and links):

Things like Twitter are really hard to censor because they are tools that lots of people use for lots of different reasons. There’s a guy named Ethan Zuckerman, who is a fellow at the Berkman Institute at MIT and he calls this the “cute cat theory.”

So the theory is that if millions of ordinary people use a tool like Flickr, or YouTube, or Twitter, or Facebook, or whatever – and they use it to share cute pictures of cats, or their grandchildren, or party invitations, or snapshots, or whatever – and meanwhile a few activists also use that same tool for other purposes, to share “information that wants to be free,” that people want to suppress: that makes censorship really difficult.

What happens is that if you try and shut down the tool that people are using to share cute pictures of cats they will freak out, right?  Because they want to share the pictures of the cats.

So what that means is that the pictures of the cat lovers provide cover for tools that are also used for, frankly, more important purposes such as for sharing information that would otherwise be suppressed. So the utility, the sort of general broad utility, of something like twitter makes it much much harder to censor.

Unsurprisingly, I’d recommend that you listen to the entire hour long 2009 Dalton Camp Lecture in Journalism, and while you’re at it, subscribe to the CBC Ideas podcast where I found this gem among many others. Lastly, a hat tip to the I can has cheezburger network, including the infamous FAIL Blog, for their enormous lack of FAIL.

The difference between science and ideology

By admin on December 7, 2009
This entry is filed under Media, Politics and tagged , , , , , .View Comments

The difference between science and ideology is that science tries to explain all known observations, whereas ideology selects only those observations that support a preconceived notion. As world leaders negotiate this week in Copenhagen, let’s hope science, not ideology, guides their discussions.

Thomas Homer-Dixon and Andrew Weaver in today’s Globe and Mail debunking four common nonsensical statements about climate change.

Ehrenreich on positive thinking as a system of social control

By admin on November 9, 2009
This entry is filed under Politics and tagged , , , , , .View Comments

Barbara Ehrenreich has a PhD in cell biology, a 40 year career as an activist and an incredibly impressive curriculum vitae as an academic, journalist and writer. Listening to several interviews promoting her new book, including this appearance on The Daily Show, we hear the incredibly griping story of how her battle with breast cancer illuminated the immense problems with the ‘power of positive thinking’-fueled self help industry and the effects of an ideology Jon Stewart calls a “secular religion” on our society.

On one such interview on CBC’s The Current, Ehrenreich explained how the positive thinking ideology infiltrated corporate culture and contributed to the 2008 financial collapse:

Anna Maria Tremonti:

So what are the consequences for a world full of people who believe that everything you decide is true, is true ?

Barbara Ehrenreich:

I think we saw the consequence in 2008 when the huge financial meltdown happened. Because what I got very interested in tracing in this book is how is positive thinking became the corporate culture; how it infiltrated the corporate culture through the motivational speakers who were brought in, through the many many books, motivational books …

It really grew: in the middle of this decade you could be fired for being a negative person.

That meant if if you said, “hey, I’m worried our bank has too much sub-prime [mortgage market] exposure,” [they would say] “hey, that’s negative that’s a downer. Let’s get rid of this person.”

…we created  – around this positive thinking – a workplace culture  where the idea is not to get a job done, so much as it is to flatter and reassure the boss. Just say good things. Never be the bearer of bad news. Never raise a question or a doubt.

Sound familiar?

AMT:

What’s so bad about feeling bad?

BE:

Well, this is an ideology, what can I say? It is an ideology that says everyone should be cheerful and smiley at all times. And if you want to, you can think of it as a brilliant form of social control. If you tell people who are suffering from one thing or another, illness or layoffs or whatever, that they’re really supposed to be happy about it, and that the solution is in their minds anyway, you don’t get a lot of social protest.

Listen to the whole interview: [MP3]

Barbara also blogs at ehrenreich.blogs.com

I leave you with her answer to Jon Stewart’s question about ends vs. means: “I never think delusion is OK.”

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