Category: Ideas
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Information is not in itself harmful…
As an addendum to a comment I left on a post this morning by Prof. Dunleavy, here’s a bit of Harry Blackmun from Virginia State Board of Pharmacy v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council, 425 U.S. 748 (1976). “There is, of course, an alternative to this highly paternalistic approach. That alternative is to assume that this…
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What are your “shining ideals” when it comes to citizen journalism?
Tom Grubisich’s article in the Online Journalism Review this week runs down a list of Citizen Journalism hubs and checks how things are turning out. (Be sure to read the comments for insta-reactions from the proprietors and users of some of the sites.) His thesis, after reviewing the sites, is that few, if any, live…
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Fantasy President Index, a la Weinberger
David Weinberger mulls over the number of fake/fantasy/fictional U.S. presidents on television and asks: How many TV shows about fictitious presidents do we need to get the taste of the current one out of our mouths for at least a few minutes? Sounds like a fun little research project for someone with more time on…
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Tom Delay on the wrong side of Dystopia
I just noticed last Thursday’s New York Times sitting around the newsroom. This picture jumped out at me from the front page: photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images We’ve seen a thousand pictures of talking heads at press conferences, but something looks different in this one. Delay’s pout is a given, the wide angle/low angle seems…
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Hotel Rwanda
We watched Hotel Rwanda last weekend. We skipped it on the big screen – sometimes we let movies slip by, even though we know we want to see them, especially when we know they’re going to make us sad or angry in the end. I’ve been having a hard time all week putting into words…
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Reporters Without Borders Publishes How-To For Dissident Bloggers
Reporters Without Borders has published the Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents. It’s available for download in English, French, Chinese, Arabic and Persian. The handbook is designed to encourage free speech online, regardless of what your local laws might have to say about it. There are tips on maintaining your privacy, blogging anonymously, and, perhaps most…
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It’s Margarita Time for “Brownie”
AP: “Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael Brown, the principal target of harsh criticism of the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, was relieved of his onsite command Friday.” So Brown gets sent home to Washington to manage the situation from there, right? And do his job, right? Like solving the simple bureaucratic that problem…
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Why did the media know more than the government this week?
All week long, anyone reading a newspaper, listening to the radio, watching a television, or checking a blog in their RSS reader knew more than the President of the United States and his high-level staff seemed to know about what was going on in New Orleans, Gulfport, Biloxi, and everywhere else torn up by Hurricane…