Media can reinforce and support agencies of socialization and agents of control – such as parents, educators, the state. At the same time, media can be viewed as potentially disrupting, undermining or otherwise threatening the established way of doing things in society. This fundamental premise – outlined most clearly in Denis McQuail’s unparalleled work on […]
Software developers have been playing an increasingly crucial, if unseen, role in anti-SOPA/PIPA protest activities. According to data compiled by Fight for the Future, “super easy to use” WordPress plugins like Simple Stop Sopa (written by Brooke Dukes) may have been employed by as many as 40% of the 115,000+ sites participating in Wednesday’s blackout. […]
Just a quick follow up on the discussion of SOPA; people keep asking me what kind of legislation would be more appropriate than SOPA and PIPA, and that might have a better chance of gaining the support of the technology industries, users, and Congress. I’m not in the business of writing laws, but as a […]
The recent attention to SOPA and PIPA has gotten me thinking about the role that contested facts have played in how mainstream journalism represents public debate. Case in point, the media has been calling attention to the MPAA’s estimates of the amount of money the entertainment industry supposedly loses due to piracy. The pattern seems to […]
Since I supported the blacking out of the MSR Social Media Collective blog to which I sometimes contribute, and the blacking out of Culture Digitally, which I co-organize, in order to join the SOPA protest led by the “Stop American Censorship” effort, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reddit, and Wikipedia, I though I should weigh in […]