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Viewing all posts tagged "internet"
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Is Investigative Journalism Dead?
All the words and images pouring in from Haiti remind us how social media have revolutionized the standards for communicating in times of crisis. In spite of the gut wrenching imagery, it’s a positive thing that anyone with a camera, phone, or computer can publish their thoughts and feelings globally.
Crowd-sourced news and freelance / celebrity writers have reduced the need for traditional investigative journalism. We no longer rely on “the professionals” to challenge existing orthodoxies; rather, we leave the critical thinking to the people we know and trust and respect.
As other have said, disasters of the scale that struck Haiti this week usually see a huge outpouring of cash and interest in the immediate aftermath, which almost disappears within the first year. And who will do the follow up reporting? Professional journalists, or the crowd?
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I’ve been thinking more and more about the internet and democracy, specifically bloggers’ rights vs journalists’ rights with regards to free speech. As it becomes easier for writers to get set up with their own personal publishing platforms, the distinction between “blogger” and “journalist” becomes grayer and much less relevant.
Work is generally acknowledged as journalism if meets three criteria:
- it is written by a careerist (ie someone who identifies him or herself as a reporter or columnist),
- it is published or transmitted by an established organization,
- it covers topics related to current events, people, trends and issues.
And yet, high quality writing that meets the 3rd criteria is being produced daily by thousands of individuals who do not enjoy the same protections and rights that traditional journalists enjoy. These such writers are known collectively by the pejorative term “bloggers” and judged as second class simply because they self-publish.
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What's the carbon footprint of ... email?
I’d never thought about the impact of spam messages on the environment, and the “rebound effect” that occurs when a low-carbon technology results in higher-carbon living simply because we use it more. From today’s Guardian.
Our recent piece on the carbon footprint of the internet generated plenty of coverage, so next up in our map of the world’s carbon emissions is … email.
Of course, sending and receiving electronic message is never going to constitute the largest part of our carbon footprints. But the energy required to support our increasingly heaving and numerous inboxes does add up.
Very roughly speaking (remember that all complex carbon footprints are really best guesses), a typical year of incoming mail for a business user – including sending, filtering and reading – creates a carbon footprint of around 135kg. That’s over 1% of of a relatively green 10-tonne lifestyle and equivalent to driving 200 miles in an average car.
According to research by McAfee, a remarkable 78% of all incoming emails are spam. Around 62 trillion spam messages are sent every year, requiring the use of 33bn kilowatt hours (KWh) of electricity and causing around 20 million tonnes of CO2e per year.
McAfee estimated that around 80% of this electricity is consumed by the reading and deleting of spam and the searching through spam folders to dig out genuine emails that ended up there by accident. Spam filters themselves account for 16%.
The actual generation and sending of the spam is a very small proportion of the footprint. Although 78% of incoming emails sent are spam, these messages account for just 22% of the total footprint of a typical email account because, although they are a pain, you deal with them quickly. Most of them you never even see. A genuine email has a bigger carbon footprint, simply because it takes time to deal with.
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Kuwait bans the use of cameras in public places, joins Syria in the club of ridiculousness
The image you see could get it’s photographer in serious legal trouble in Kuwait after authorities there have banned the use of DSLRs in public places unless you’re part of the press. Which is just ridiculous.
Speaking of things that are “sort of” banned in the Middle East, here in Syria you cannot access the following without doing some computer nerdery:
- facebook.com (or any of its subdomains, eg m.facebook.com)
- youtube.com
- skype.com (are you serious?! you can still use Skype, you just can’t visit the website or download the latest version of the software)
- wikimedia.org (you can access Wikipedia just fine, but because all its images and web style sheets are hosted on wikimedia.org, the Wikipedia pages look all lo-fi and broken)
- the entire Android app market
- amazon.com (although amazon.co.uk works just fine)
- all blogspot.com blogs
- 150+ other websites deemed by the government as too politically sensitive for Syrians to handle (including websites of political parties, Arabic newspapers, reform oriented groups, and individual journalists and bloggers — both internal and external to Syria)
To access these websites, you must go into your web browser’s connection settings and define an off-shore proxy server (the ones we’ve been using are located in Cyprus and Sri Lanka, I think).
The OpenNet Initiative’s profile of internet censorship in Syria states the following:
The telecommunications market is Syria is the most regulated in the Middle East and is among the least developed…
The vast majority of Syrian users get online at Syria’s ubiquitous Internet cafés, and from houses using dial-up connections via landlines…
Repressive legislation and the imprisonment of journalists and bloggers for their activities online have led many Syrians to engage in self-censorship. Meanwhile, the government continues to promote the growth of the Internet throughout the country.
By comparison, Kuwait’s internet media is said to be some of the most outspoken in the Middle East, and besides a few politically sensitive and extremist/pro-terrorist sites, pornographic websites are about the only ones that are blocked by the Kuwaiti government on the basis of content. In Syria, on the other hand, you regularly find men in internet cafes clicking through photos of naked women. Maybe that’s why the lights are always so dimmed in these places — to get you in the mood?
What do you think? Comments
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Thoughts on technology, global interconnectedness, and violence
Communications technologies are enabling individuals to connect regardless of the physical distance and political barriers which separate them. I’ve always presumed this to be a good thing, although recently I’ve been led to question my presumptions and think hard about the what happens when traditional separation barriers — the ones designed to keep people from escaping — are broken down and replaced with new sorts of barriers (both virtual and physical) designed to prevent people from coming in.
The segregation of people is the reality of economic globalization, and many of the humanitarian crises that just seem to keep popping up all over the world — the ones we hear about in bullet point headline form, coupled with disheartening and brutal images, endorsed by celebrity personalities and philanthropists like Sean Penn, Wyclef Jean or Bill Gates who helping put out urgent appeals for charitable donations, these sorts of conflicts liberals love to espouse as driving mission in live — seem to have actually been caused by the very system that was supposed to prevent violence.
“In the much-celebrated free circulation opened up by global capitalism,” writes Žižek, “it is ‘things’ (commodities) which freely circulate, while the circulation of ‘persons’ is more and more controlled.” The violence we perceive with our own eyes constitute a “subjective” violence, and it is the very process of reproducing such violent images that masks the underlying causes of the violence. “Objective” violence, in other words, is rendered invisible while the traumatic, gut-wrenching, visible “subjective” violence dominates the airwaves.
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Facebook Unblocked in Syria, But Sees Little Change in Traffic
My guess, which has also been suggested by others around the net, is that Facebook, YouTube and all Blogspot blogs were unblocked so that the Syrian government could more closely monitor users’ activity on these social networking sites. As Jennifer said, this was a really clever move by the Syrian government because it has the appearance of a progressive change in policy; indeed, human rights groups and net freedom activists have already praised the move. But as the below article suggests, there was no real change in usage patterns from Syrians. They had all found ways to access these social networking sites despite the 3-year ban — namely, by using proxy servers (that is, by putting a code into your web browser which makes it seem like your computer is accessing the internet from another location in the world) — and so lifting the ban wouldn’t necessarily have attracted new users or increased traffic from existing users. Now that the ban is lifted, I’d be interested to know whether Syrians will continue to use proxy servers in order to mask their physical locations.
The Syrian government recently announced they planned to lift a five-year-long block on Facebook, YouTube and Blogger. The move was welcomed by the State Department’s Alec Ross as a “positive move.” Indeed, traffic to YouTube appears to have markedly increased.
But over at Facebook, they aren’t seeing major changes in usage patterns in the country.
» via The Atlantic
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The Internet back when it was just Internet
I stumbled across our old family World Book encyclopedia set last night. Printed in 1988, the year in which World Book received a major design overhaul including new typeface and page layouts, the term Internet is nowhere to be found. It’s mentioned for the first time in the encyclopedia’s 1994 annual supplement under the updated entry for Library.
Internet was viewed principally as a means for individuals to search the catalogs of libraries around the world. In 1993, the supplement reports, the Cleveland Public Library became the first U.S. library to offer public access to Internet. Other libraries then linked up to Internet, thus creating a collection of computer networks that spanned the globe. Planning began on the construction of an “information superhighway” to link persons with computers to information databases.
The 1999 World Book supplement describes how Clinton Administration officials sought to spur private investment in Internet by setting communications standards, making government data available on the network, and proposing laws that foster competition.
Ironically, I suppose, Internet played a major role in the 1998 scandal regarding the relationship between President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern and cigar receptacle of sorts. Reports of their relationship broke via the Drudge Report, a new independent Internet Website. Kenneth Starr’s report to Congress on his investigation into the affair was allowed to be released publicly via Internet.
I remember downloading the Ken Starr report on the old Macintosh LC using our BEEE BEE BEEE BOOOOOO WISSHHHHH BOP BOP dial-up connection. It was a text-only file and took a few hours to download. That was some literally juicy reading.
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