ideometric

I thought about making a ‘cyberculture’ category for my postings, but is there really any point to distinguishing online from offline culture now that ‘cyberculture’ is mainstream? Is the line between the two, to the extent that it exists, largely irrelevant?

Vanity Fair maps the blogosphere. Part of it, anyway.

This blog (Kotaji) has good coverage of the Korean beef protests, among other things.

The Associated Press has decided that fair use no longer applies to them, and is attempting to charge $12.50 (and up) to quote as little as 5 words from an article.

This is an example of the tension embedded in new media, between cultural autonomy, democratization, and the enhancement of capability on the one hand, versus the creation of potentially more invasive methods of control, censorship, cooptation, and extraction of profit on the other. It’s a political issue (at the very least). We need smart policies regulating technology and communications, and smart laws protecting our rights.

This post from Making Light sketches the alternative…

“Welcome to a world in which you won’t be able to effectively criticize the press, because you’ll be required to pay to quote as few as five words from what they publish.

Welcome to a world in which you won’t own any of your technology or your music or your books, because ensuring that someone makes their profit margins will justify depriving you of the even the most basic, commonsensical rights in your personal, hand-level household goods.”

In the same vein, Bruce Schneier echoes this concern in light of wider designs for embedded limitations, such as kill-switches in OnStar that can remotely shut-off your car, or overrides in your cell-phones and other gear that might forcibly set them to silent in a movie theater, or turn them off in an airplane, (etc.).

“This is really about media companies wanting to exert their control further over your electronics. They not only want to prevent you from surreptitiously recording movies and concerts, they want your new television to enforce good “manners” on your computer, and not allow it to record any programs. They want your iPod to politely refuse to copy music to a computer other than your own. They want to enforce their legislated definition of manners: to control what you do and when you do it, and to charge you repeatedly for the privilege whenever possible.”

THE magazine is yet another trend-spotting zine, but it’s pretty accessible, had a few things that I found genuinely interesting, and the hype is kept at a bearable level.

Found via 

Some random girl in China uploaded a 4 minute video clip of herself ranting at the victims of the earthquake. I guess her name and address have already been publicized. It sounds like the makings of another e-vigilante story (see Korean dog poop lady for another example). Video with English subs below.

BEIJING, May 23 (Xinhua) — When a video clip surfaced on YouTube showing Zhang Ya cursing Wenchuan earthquake victims with lots of profane words, a small earthquake was triggered in China’s Internet community.

Millions of Chinese Internet users posted furious condemnation messages, accusing the 21-year-old girl of “no humanity,” “insulting the victims” and calling her “scum”.

In the near-5-minute video, Zhang, a native of Shenyang, capital of the northeastern Liaoning Province, showed that she was annoyed with the three day period of national mourning during which she could neither watch her favorite television programs nor play any games online. Shockingly, the girl chose to vent her anger through throwing nasty words upon the victims of the Sichuan quake, whose number has now topped 55,000.

Source: Xinhua
(The article is interesting too, it talks about the role of the net and grass-roots self-organizing in response to the earthquake).

But here’s the video…

Analysts expect Take-Two to rake in more than $1 billion in GTA IV [Grand Theft Auto] revenue by selling roughly 18 million copies through 2009

Source

You can talk to the people in the news, if you want to. In a story about the Spitzer prostitution scandal, the NY Times links to the Myspace profile of the woman he was with. Edit: One of my friends just added her on Facebook, haha.

CNN also posts AIM transcripts or screen names. What’re the ethics on that?

It’s like invasion of privacy, but not really. The net blurs the lines between public and private…

CNN has a story about this here.

After she was identified by The New York Times, throngs of journalists staked out her home.

At the same time, she appeared to have jumped on her MySpace page, which was identified by the Times, and a Facebook profile with the same name and photos.

It seemed she was trying to stay one step ahead of journalists, attempting to limit what information they could access.

She was seemingly aware that the press would have access to her friends and every word, photo and comment on her profiles, so she began by deleting connections between her friends on Facebook.

And this bit:

The page had received more than 1,100 friend requests on Facebook. Initially, she ignored them.

The US State Department has a government take on Snopes.com called ‘Identifying Misinformation’.

I know I’m predictable but Daft Punk’s tron suits, their pyramid, control panels, the glowing orchestra behind them, and Kanye’s cyberpunkesque gear made me happy. style over substance aside.

I haven’t watched it yet, but it sounds like it could be good. It was only a matter of time for something like this, but these are professionals — I’m still waiting for some of the more popular Youtube directors to get a deal.

“NBC has concluded a first-of-its-kind deal to acquire the talked-about new Internet and social network series ‘Quarterlife’ for distribution as an hourlong drama series on the NBC network after it has first played in eight-minute segments on [myspace].”

Apparently the show centers around a character with a videoblog, and life in general for the Facebook generation. The episodes are already viewable online on the Quarterlife website — which doubles as a social network for “creatives.”

I don’t see the appeal 0f the web community angle, that market is kinda saturated already and it’d take a lot of innovation/creativity to make it successful. But it’s a nice thought…

Quarterlife website | Wikipedia entry | NYT article

Update: Haha, I still haven’t watched it, but apparently on its network TV debut, it had the lowest ratings of any new show in decades. Oh well.