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 […]
If you want to understand new media and politics from a practitioner’s perspective, a great place to start would be this interview with Zac Moffatt, the Digital Director of Romney’s presidential campaign, in the Atlantic. It offers a wonderfully detailed look at the organizational and technical challenges that practitioners face in their uptake of new […]
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 […]
Starting midnight tonight (Jan. 18th), Culture Digitally will be blacking out for 24 hours. We are doing this to join others in expressing our opposition to SOPA and PIPA. To find out more about SOPA and PIPA and learn why we are joining the blackout, see americancensorship.org, sopablackout.org/learnmore, or www.eff.org. Our site will return on Jan. 19th.
Moveon.org began circulating this infographic yesterday; The (much more detailed) original is from OWNI.eu. It tells a now-familiar-but-still-important story about the increasing consolidation of commercial media (and by implication, a concern about its impact on public discourse). Despite the times, the attention here is not on online media or new forms of information distribution, though that attention would shift […]