Loomnie

1. Why is Hosni Mubarak clinging to power? Maybe because the life of an exiled dictator isn’t what it used to be – FP

2. Ms Merkel: Eurozone nations would have to agree on retirement age, tax and spending rules – Guardian

3. German companies great and small are making the most of globalisation. Their success owes more to judgment than to luck – The Economist

4. “If Marx were alive today he would be 193 years old. Keynes would be 128. Discussions of what they would think today implicitly assume that they would have retained the intellect of their prime and adjusted their thinking to later events. How can anyone know how they would have done this?” – FT

5. “Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces.” – Brought to you by Google

6. The Oscar Curse (or, Why It Stinks to Be a Successful Woman) – Economix

1. Google’s Africa play

2. Microsoft opposes a filing by Apple that seeks to trademark the phrase App Store

3. When the whole family is staring at screens, maybe it is time to try tech detox?

4. The informal economy: a story of ethnography untold

1. Missionaries save languages

2. Nigerians, self-congratulatory much?

3. At least 40 East African (CEOs) take public HIV tests

4. The most beautiful images in Google street view

5. Google street view presents: A Hole-Filled Version of Germany

6. Africa: Hitchhiker’s Quick Guide to the Mothership

7. ‘For the record, big butts do not, in fact, pose any danger to your sexual health.’

Remember the Google and China issue? I recently came across part of the text of a keynote address delivered by Tricia Wang, ethnographer and PhD candidate in sociology at UC San Diego, at the New Direction in the Humanities Conference, UCLA. Her take on the China and Google saga is encapsulated in this excerpt:

And here’s the kicker – in leaving China because the Chinese government wouldn’t conform to their rules, Google reproduced the very imperialistic behavior that have characterized the greatest imperial powers: leaving a country or region when they couldn’t get the natives to abandon their own way of thinking or adopt a new way of behaving

What’s emerging is a new rhetoric of development and globalization in what I am calling neo-informationalism: the belief that information should function like currency in free-market capitalism – border-less, free from regulation, and mobile. The logic of neo-informationalism rests on an moral framework that is tied to what Morgan Ames calls “information determinism,” the belief that free and open access to information can create social change. This moral framework of neo-informationalism is so naturalized that Google and like-minded companies work their way around the world unquestioned for their position on open information. Phrases such as “information wants to be free” reflect the techno-anthropomorphizing of information, a necessary step in naturalizing any neo-informationalist agenda.

Neo-informationalism is a re-visioning of a non-redistributive laissez-faire ideology of modernization theory transplanted into Western technologies that assumes surely people cannot be self-sufficient without unlimited access to the tools that connect them to the world wide web. Underlying this ideology is the notion that information openness and market openness are inseparable and non-mutually exclusive. Information openness can only be achieved through free-market conditions.

This is a model of social change that puts faith in objects, not in governance processes. Neo-informationalism and neo-liberalism work symbiotically to create what Wendy Brown calls the governed citizen who seeks solutions in products as opposed to the political process. While Wendy wasn’t speaking of technological objects per se, I make the case that this is indeed a variant of the hacker ethic; social change is made through direct programming of software code and interaction with technological devices while maintaining distance from the state.

What I want to point out is that while this is a very reasonable process being accomplished by very reasonable people — Westerners creating products and policies for Westerners – I am not comfortable with pushing this belief on others in the name of a “higher calling.” This is a simply a redux of cultural imperialism that says “we know better than you, and if you don’t believe us, too bad you have no choice, because we’re offering you emancipation by giving you access to our Internets.”

We should question any ethical system that reproduces a familiar trope of colonialism. Whereas past waves of imperialism used Religion, Science, or Globalization as a rhetoric of development, the new rhetoric of neo-informationalism is used as a guiding principle for entering new regions—ethical principles that can be used as proxies for pushing our belief system onto other people. As a result, the work can be less about free information and unlimited compassion and more about desires for free-access to new markets and new commodities.

The whole article is here.

A lot, argues journalist Patchen Barss, who has just published a book titled The Erotic Engine: How Pornography has Powered Mass Communication, from Gutenberg to Google. From the publishers’ website:

From cave painting to photography to the internet, pornography has always been at the cutting edge in adopting and exploiting new developments in mass communication. And in so doing, it has helped to promote and propel those developments in ways that are rarely acknowledged. Without pornography, the internet would not have grown so quickly. The e-commerce payment systems that are now commonplace would be at a far more primitive stage security and usability. Without video streaming software developed for pornography sites, CNN would be struggling to deliver news clips. Without advertising from sex sites, Google could not have afforded YouTube.

danah boyd writes in the closing paragraph of a beautifully brilliant rant:

Zuckerberg and gang may think that they know what’s best for society, for individuals, but I violently disagree. I think that they know what’s best for the privileged class. And I’m terrified of the consequences that these moves are having for those who don’t live in a lap of luxury. I say this as someone who is privileged, someone who has profited at every turn by being visible. But also as someone who has seen the costs and pushed through the consequences with a lot of help and support. Being publicly visible isn’t always easy, it’s not always fun. And I don’t think that anyone should go through what I’ve gone through without making a choice to do it. So I’m angry. Very angry. Angry that some people aren’t being given that choice, angry that they don’t know what’s going on, angry that it’s become OK in my industry to expose people. I think that it’s high time that we take into consideration those whose lives aren’t nearly as privileged as ours, those who aren’t choosing to take the risks that we take, those who can’t afford to. This isn’t about liberals vs. libertarians; it’s about monkeys vs. robots.

Being scared of the privacy issues was what made me leave Facebook two years ago.

NYTimes, Germany Looks at Ways to Protect Online Journalism: As Angela Merkel begins her second term as chancellor of Germany, her government is promoting a novel way to help embattled newspaper and magazine publishers manage the transition to a digital future.

The new governing coalition, led by Ms. Merkel’s Christian Democrats and including the Free Democratic Party, has pledged to create a new kind of copyright to protect online journalism. The goal is to level the playing field with Internet companies like Google, which German publishers accuse of exploiting their content to build lucrative businesses without sharing the rewards.

“The Internet cannot be a copyright-free zone,” the coalition says in a document setting out its policies.

Supporters of the proposal include Hubert Burda Media, a magazine publisher, and Axel Springer, owner of the newspapers Bild and Die Welt, who say it could be employed to help build new online business models. Analysts say it might allow them to try to claim royalties for the use of their content by Google or other online “aggregators” of news, for example.

But the plan is raising hackles on the Internet, where opponents say an extension of copyright law runs counter to the spirit of openness that characterizes the Web. The government, they say, has succumbed to lobbying by big publishing interests that are fighting a rear-guard action against technological changes.

The proposal “has no value for our society,” said Markus Beckedahl, a blogger based in Berlin and advocate of an unfettered Internet. “It only has value for publishers who see a threat from the democratization of the media. Continue reading

From the Atlantic Wire: On Monday, the Wall Street Journal’s Jessica E. Vascellaro threw bloggers into a tizzy by proclaiming the dethronement of e-mail as the electronic “king of communications.” Social media, instant messaging and Google Wave deserve crowns now, she said, because they are more suited to the modern expectations of real-time interactivity. While some bloggers found her arguments persuasive, many were quick to defend e-mail’s lasting importance. Continue reading