Now that Bill C-11, Canada’s Act to Amend the Copyright Act, has undergone its second reading in the House of Commons, it will be subject to two more votes before it likely heads to the Senate and finally to royal assent. Given our current majority Conservative government, this long-impending introduction of a “Canadian DMCA” will […]
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 […]
NPR aired a wonderful story yesterday about Occupy Chicago activists’ organizing of protests in advance of the simultaneously held NATO and G8 summit meetings in May. The story is interesting because so much of both journalistic and scholarly attention to movements and protest events happens during and after moments of contentious politics. By contrast, the NPR story […]
“Anon hackers are ‘criminals’ in so far as any hacker has inevitably broken a host of laws; some individuals involved may also have a criminal history. And yet most hackers either implicitly or explicitly have critiques of the laws they are willing to transgress. Thus, the analyst must provide some account of the way that […]
As reported by the Wall Street Journal last Thursday, Google faces a potential civil antitrust investigation from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for practices that include privileging certain search results based on how much a company is willing to pay for such ‘advertising.’ This lack of transparency in Google’s advertising business practices, along with the […]