CommPilings

January CommQuote

2012-01-17T06:58:00.000-08:00

We now view computers as prostheses to ourbodies, albeit prostheses as dazzling as amulets. We no longer go to aparticular place in our homes or offices to "log on" or "dialin" to something called "the Internet" or a "chatroom." Apple helped erode the spatial nature of how we imagined"cyberspace." We touch devices directly with our oily skin. Wemanipulate data and images as if there were no lens between them and us. We areembedded in a lattice of devices and digital radio signals. And those devicesand signals are embedded in us...

While we praise the products and designs Jobssold to us, we must remember that the designs themselves hide the realbrilliance, and the hard work, that Californian engineers—and Chinese factoryworkers—put into them.

My 5-year-old daughter can practice her"sight words" on an iPhone app that sits in a folder with her name onit. Yet neither of us gets to glimpse the code that underlies that remarkablepiece of software. We can't begin to imagine the work and skill that went intodesigning it.

More troubling, I marvel at the thinness andprocessing power of the iPhone 4S that I ordered this morning. But I rarelyinterrogate the working conditions in the factories in which the parts for thatphone are made. As it turns out, Apple has a troubling record of contractingwith factories that have employed children and seen workers poisoned, andothers that have seen a spike in worker suicides.

For the sake of those workers, engineers, andourselves, we should resist any attempt to think of human-built technologies asmagical. It's imperative that we demystify complex information technologies sowe remember that they are collections of circuits and machines built byfallible and talented humans. We must remind ourselves that fragile humanbodies often get injured or disfigured by the processes that forge the glassand metal components.

--Siva Vaidhyanathan, Apple,Demystified, The Chronicle Review (October 11, 2011)

Media Consumption Data from Nielsen

2012-01-10T06:36:00.000-08:00

From Nielsen, a report on media consumption in the home and on the go.

State of the Media: Consumer Usage Report

Almost one in three U.S. TV households – 35.9 million – owns four or more televisions, according to a new report on media usage from Nielsen. Across the ever-changing U.S. media landscape, TV maintains its stronghold as the most popular device, with 290 million Americans and 114.7 households owning at least one. In contrast, 211 million Americans are online and 116 million (ages 13+) access the mobile Web.

Congressional Research Report on Government Cell Phone Tracking

2011-12-20T11:53:00.000-08:00

A recent Congressional Research Report Governmental Tracking of Cell Phones and Vehicles: The Confluence of Privacy, Technology and the Law has just been released.

Summary
This report will briefly survey Fourth Amendment law as it pertains to the government's tracking programs. It will then summarize federal electronic surveillance statutes and the case law surrounding cell phone location tracking. Next, the report will describe the GPS-vehicle tracking cases and review the pending Supreme Court GPS tracking case, United States v. Jones. Finally, the report will summarize the geolocation and electronic surveillance legislation introduced in the 112th Congress.

December CommQuote

2011-12-16T07:40:00.000-08:00

British author, journalist, intellectual Christopher Hitchens frequently placed himself in military hotspots, up close and personal with despots; he wa an astute observer.

Well, as Hannah Arendt famously said, there can be a banal aspect to evil. In other words, it doesn't present always. I mean, often what you're meeting is a very mediocre person. But nonetheless, you can get a sort of frisson of wickedness from them. And the best combination of those, I think, I describe him in the book, is/was General Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina, who I met in the late 1970s when the death squad war was at its height, and his fellow citizens were disappearing off the street all the time. And he was, in some ways, extremely banal. I describe him as looking like a human toothbrush. He was a sort of starch, lean officer with a silly mustache, and a very stupid look to him, but a very fanatical glint as well. And, if I'd tell you why he's now under house arrest in Argentina, you might get a sense of the horror I felt as I was asking him questions about all this. He's in prison in Argentina for selling the children of the rape victims among the private prisoners, who he kept in a personal jail. And I don't know if I've ever met anyone who's done anything as sort of condensedly horrible as that.”
― Christopher Hitchens (A Conversation with Christopher Hitchens, posted by Hugh Hewitt, July 14, 2010

Introducing EUscreen

2011-12-06T08:55:00.001-08:00

EUscreen, is an ambitious audiovisual, mostly television, archive project whose aim is to bring together in one digital space millions of items from libraries, archives and museums from all over Europe (20 countries). The selection policy is currently three-pronged. Items are selected either to inform 14 historical topics, as part of a virtual exhibition on themes that content providers select themselves, or as part of exhibitions on comparative themes across the region. Topics are broad: Arts and culture, Being European, Disasters, Education, Environment and Nature, Health, History of Euroropean Television, Lifestyle and Consumerism, National holidays, festivals..., Politics and Economics, Religion and Belief, Society and Social Issues, Special Collections, The Media, Transportation, Science and Technology, War and Conflict, and Work and Production. Genres are: Advertisements, Drama/Fictions, Entertainment and Performing Arts, Factual, Interstitials and Trailers, News, and Sport. 15 languages are represented. These video, audio, image and text materials range from the early 1900s to the present day.

In early 2012 EUscreen will launch an eJournal dedicated to the history of European television. The journal will live on the EUscreen site. Besides the searchable database of materials, the site will showcase curated exhibitions from member archives.

EUscreen is currently in beta but it is up and available. Keep an eye on it in the coming year as it goes into full breakout mode.

Computer and Internet Use at Home

2011-11-17T06:20:00.000-08:00

The latest report from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Exploring the Digital Nation: Computer and Internet Use at Home, has just been released (here).

Previous reports going back to 1995 can also be accessed from the site, including the historical data files from which the reports are built.

Abstract:
The Department of Commerce's Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA) and National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) released a report, “Exploring the Digital Nation,” that analyzes broadband Internet adoption in the United States. Overall, approximately seven out of ten households in the United States subscribe to broadband service. The report finds a strong correlation between broadband adoption and socio-economic factors, such as income and education, but says these differences do not explain the entire broadband adoption gap that exists along racial, ethnic, and geographic lines. Even after accounting for socio-economic differences, certain minority and rural households still lag in broadband adoption.

The report analyzes data collected through an Internet Use supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS) of about 54,300 households conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau in October 2010. Earlier this year, NTIA released initial findings from the survey, showing that while virtually all demographic groups have increased adoption of broadband Internet at home since the prior year, historic disparities among demographic groups remain. This report presents broadband adoption statistics after adjusting for various socio-economic differences.

Journal Feature: Critical Inquiry on The Wire

2011-11-16T08:21:00.000-08:00

"Way Down in the Whole": Systematic Inequality and The Wire, by Anmol Chaddha and William Julius Wilson, leads off a discussion in the latest issue of Critical Inquiry 38 (Autumn 2011). Patrick Jagoda (Wired), Kenneth W. Warren (Sociology and The Wire), and Linda Williams (Ethnographic Imaginary: The Genesis and Genius of The Wire) provide the critical response. Finally, Chaddha and Wilson have the last word with The Wire's Impact, A Rejoinder.

Critical Inquiry is available from Penn Library's e-resources.

November CommQuote

2011-11-15T13:08:00.000-08:00

This month's quote features a brief transcript from NPR's The World on the improvisational poets of Kyrgystan and their role as reporters and commentators on their local political scene. The piece, by Lily Jamali, aired on November 14.

The small Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan held a presidential election recently. It was the first peaceful handover of power since the end of the Soviet Union.A violent revolution last year overthrew the previous president. As the country’s fledging democracy moves forward, the local media have been covering events closely. But so has an older, arguably more powerful institution in Kyrgyzstan. For centuries, the people of Kyrgyzstan have used improvisational poetry as a way of telling their nation’s story.The poets are called “akyns” – and in a country that’s experiencing rapid political change – they are considered the voice of the Kyrgyz.

At this performance in the ethnically-torn southern city of Osh, two of the nation’s most prominent akyns, Aaly Tutkuchov and Jenishbek Jumakadyr, banter about the power they wield over politicians, some of whom are in the audience. “They’re afraid” – sings Tutkuchov. “They’re thinking “What will they say about me?” Jumakadyr responds: “Someone’s taking cell phone video of us. They must be with the National Security Service.”
Akyns are masters of improvisation. The two-person performance itself called an “aytish” – is like a cross between an American rap battle and a stand-up comedy routine.In another routine, the akyns talk smack about fellow performers. Tutkuchov jokes that a guy waiting in the wings to come on is so short, he has to wear high-heels – Jumakadyr responds that even then, he can hardly reach the microphone.

The men play a small three-string guitar-like instrument called the Komuz in between insults.But like the best rap artists, akyns take their role in Kyrgyz society very seriously. Tutkuchov says he sees himself almost like a journalist, creating a political dialogue for the public and keeping lawmakers in check.

If one akyn is promoting the government or some leader, the second akyn should take the opposite point of view, he says. He should judge how that akyn is supporting the government. And politicians try to curry their favor. Tutkuchov says when that fails, politicians sometimes threaten akyns after a performance. He’s had to change his phone number to stop harassing calls.

“We know – when we point out wrongdoing – they will try to put pressure on us. Or make us scared of them but we’re not afraid of them. This is the important thing about akyns. We need to tell the truth,” Tutkuchov says.

Kyrgyzstan’s akyn tradition is making a comeback after decades of Soviet rule. Ethnomusicologist Elmira Kochumkulova says Soviet officials would force akyns to tell them what they planned to say ahead of time – even though akyns are supposed to improvise. And sometimes, the Apparatchicks would make akyns an offer they couldn’t refuse. They knew they could use their skills – oral art – because they were quite popular among the people. They used them to spread soviet ideology, to spread soviet culture to remote villages, mountain villages among the Kyrgyz. Oral poets were used like propaganda tools.

Two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, the status of the Kyrgyz akyn is returning to its former glory. Kuchumkulova says the power of akyns shouldn’t be underestimated. They really are the social commentators of Kyrgyzstan. They’ve helped the country transition to democracy and deal with some of the traumatic events of the past year.

That includes the death of dozens of people in an uprising that led to former President Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s ouster. When the April 7 events happened and over 80 young men died, they were key players at the funeral, improvising funeral songs for these men at the burial site. “My dear Kyrgyz. You’ve seen so many things, you’ve gone through so much sorrow,” one of the akyans sang.And they have. After the political and ethnic violence of the last six years, last month’s presidential election was peaceful. But it’s also seen as Kyrgyzstan gravitating back into Russia’s sphere of influence. And the akyns will most certainly have something to say about that.

Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA)

2011-11-04T09:23:00.000-07:00

The Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) works to strengthen the support, raise the visibility, and improve the effectiveness of media assistance programs throughout the world. The Center approaches its mission by providing information, building networks, conducting research, and highlighting the indispensable role independent media play in the creation and development of sustainable democracies around the world.

CIMA's website qualifies it for this resource blog because it hosts free research reports and its own bibliographic database of international media assistance resources. it's useful to search such topics such as media and conflict, media and democracy, media development, new media, and sustainability by region.

Recent research reports include:

Media Codes of Ethics: The Difficulty of Defining Standards
Codes of Ethics incorporate best practices that may go beyond the laws of libel, defamation, and privacy. In the not-so-free world, these codes are not always the products of a self-regulating free press. They may represent a cultural and political compromise with a society or government that holds a more restrictive view of what journalists should and should not report.

News on the Go: How Mobile Devices Are Changing the World's Information Ecosystem
Mobile devices now reach the farthest corners of the world. By the end of 2011, about 5 billion mobile phones will be in service in a world with 7 billion people. The implications–for politics, for education, for economies, for civil society, and for news and information–are profound.

Matching the Market and the Model: The Business of Independent News Media explains how lack of management skills and inexperience in developing effective business models poses a significant risk to the sustainability of independent news media. It explores a variety of different business models for media in several countries around the world and examines what lessons can be learned from those experiences.

Media and the Law: An Overview of Legal Issues and Challenges examines the different kinds of laws that affect the media and explains how they are used in many countries to influence the operations of news outlets and the information they offer. It primarily focuses on restrictive laws and legal challenges faced by journalists in developing countries, although laws in developed countries dealing with issues such as libel and terrorism are also considered.

Internet as Public Commons

2011-10-28T12:28:00.000-07:00

The current issue of Daedalus (Volume 140, Issue 4, Fall 2011) is titled: Protecting the Internet as a Public Commons. Explains editor David D. Clark, "This issue is concerned with the experience of using the Internet: how its character shapes the user experience and how our collective online participation raises larger societal and political questions."

Articles:

What are the Consequences of Being Disconnected in a Broadband-Connected World?

A Contextual Approach to Privacy Online

Online Trust, Trustworthiness, or Assurance?

Safety in Cyberspace

Doctrine for Cybersecurity

Reconceptualizing the Role of Security User

Resisting Political Fragmentation on the Internet

Who Speaks? Citizen Political Voice on the Internet Commons

Prosocial Behavior on the Net

WikiLeaks and the Protect-ip Act: A New Public-Private Threat to the Internet Commons

The issue is available from Penn Library e-resources

Fall 2011 Booknotes

2011-10-21T08:53:00.000-07:00

Al Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants, 2006-2009 (MIT, 2011). “Blogging produces reality rather than simply representing it. Ai Weiwei is among our very best guides to this new terrain: one of the greatest living international artists and a fighter for more freedom. Ai Weiwei’s daily blog entries, gathered here, will make the reader see the world in a different and startlingly original light.” —Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine Gallery, London

Bookwork: Medium to Object to Concept Art, by Garrett Stewart (University of Chicago Press, 2011). “Bookwork takes our passion for books to its logical extreme - by studying artists who employ found or simulated books as a sculptural medium and investigating the conceptual labor behind this proliferating international art practice. Garrett Stewart looks at hundreds of book-like objects, alone or as part of gallery installations, in this original account of works that force attention upon a book's material identity and cultural resonance. Less an inquiry into the artist's book than an exploration of the book's contemporary objecthood, Stewart's stimulating blend of visual theory and bibliophilia traces the lineage of these aggressive artifacts from the 1919 Unhappy Readymade of Marcel Duchamp down to the current crisis of paper-based media in the digital era. Ranging from appropriated to fabricated book forms, from hacksawed discards to the giant lead folios of Anselm Kiefer, the unreadable books illustrated and discussed in Bookwork offer timely lessons in the history of reading, writing, and art making.” –Publisher’s description

Communicating and Organizing in Context, by Beth Bonniwell Haslett (Routledge, 2011). Integrates Giddens’ structuration theory with Goffman’s interaction order and develops a new theoretical base—the theory of structurational interaction—for the analysis of communicating and organizing. Both theorists emphasize tacit knowledge, social routines, context, social practices, materiality, frames, agency, and view communication as constitutive of social life and of organizing. Thus their integration in structurational interaction provides a coherent, communication-centric approach to analyzing communicating, organizing and their interrelationships.” –Publisher’s description

Dangerous Curves: Action Heroines, Gender, Fetishism, and Popular Culture, by Jeffrey A. Brown (University of Press of Mississippi, 2011). Explores how action figures are depicted in movies, comic books, television, video games, and literature.

Digital Jesus: The Making of a New Christian Fundamentalist Community on the Internet, by Robert Glenn Howard (New York University, 2011) “One of the best current scholarly contributions to be found on the complex, creative, inventive, evocative world of Internet religion. Howard offers new and exciting insights on the power of non-institutional Christian Fundamentalism.…Mandatory reading for any scholar working to understand contemporary vernacular religion, as well as the ever-changing culture of religious communication. It is equally compelling for general readers trying to perceive the direction of Christianity in post–9/11 America.”—Leonard Primiano, Cabrini College

Front Page Economics, by Gerald D. Suttles (University of Chicago, 2011). “News stories are called ‘stories’ for a reason: they have plots and characters, scenes and metaphors—just like works of fiction… a splendid evocation of the stories that journalists have told during economic crises. In a painstaking comparative analysis of economic news in the crashes of 1929 and 1987, Suttles reveals how popular economic storytelling was transformed in twentieth-century America.”—David Paul Nord, Indiana University

Hedda Hopper's Hollywood: Celebrity Gossip and American Conservatism (New York University, 2011) “A major contribution to our understanding the political importance of gossip. During the 20th century, few gossip columnists had more influence in shaping the ways in which millions of Americans thought about film and politics than this sharp-tongued conservative loyalist. Jennifer Frost reveals the role Hopper played in furthering the power of the Hollywood Right and undercutting that of the emerging Hollywood Left. She offers us an important glimpse into the the power of gossip to influence popular thinking about race, class, gender, and politics in America.” --Steven J. Ross, author of Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics

Helvetica and the New York Subway System, by Paul Shaw (MIT, 2010). There is a common belief, reinforced by Gary Hustwit's documentary film Helvetica, that Helvetica is the signage typeface of the New York City subway system. But it is not true - or rather, it is only somewhat true. Helvetica is the official typeface of the MTA today, but it was not the typeface specified by Unimark International when they created the signage system at the end of the 1960s. Why was Helvetica not chosen originally? what was chosen in its place? why is Helvetica now used? when did the changeover occur? Paul Shaw answers these questions and then goes beyond them to look at how the subway's signage system has evolved over the past forty years. The resulting story is more than a tale of a typeface. It is a look at the forces that have molded a signage system.” –Publisher’sdescription

The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon, by Leo Braudy (Yale, 2011). Bruady “uses the sign's history to offer an intriguing look at the rise of the movie business from its earliest, silent days through the development of the studio system that helped define modern Hollywood. Mixing social history, urban studies, literature, and film, along with forays into such topics as the lure of Hollywood for utopian communities and the development of domestic architecture in Los Angeles, The Hollywood Sign is a fascinating account of how a temporary structure has become a permanent icon of American culture.” Publisher’s description

How to Do Things with Videogames, by Ian Bogost (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). "Gamers often beg for a critic with the persuasive power and range of a Lester Bangs or a Pauline Kael. With this book, Ian Bogost demonstrates his capacity to take up their mantle and explain to a larger public why games matter in modern culture. The book’s goals are simple, straight forward, and utterly, desperately needed. How to Do Things with Videogames may do for games what Understanding Comics did for comics—at once consolidate existing theoretical gains while also expanding dramatically the range of people who felt able to meaningfully engage in those discussions." —Henry Jenkins, University of Southern California

Idolized: Music, Media and Identity in American Idol, by Katherine Meizel (Indiana, 2011). “Through interviews with audience members and participants, and careful analyses of television broadcasts, commercial recordings, and print and online media, Meizel demonstrates that commercial music and the music industry are not simply forces to be criticized or resisted, but critical sites for redefining American culture.” --Publisher’s description

Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle by Leigh Raiford (University of North Carolina Press, 2011). Analyzes the uses of photography in the anti-lynching, civil-rights, and black-power movements.

The Internet of Elsewhere: The Emergent Effects of a Wired World, by Cyrus Farivar (Rutgers, 2011). “Through the lens of culture, [this book] looks at the role of the Internet as a catalyst in transforming communications, politics, and economics. Cyrus Farivar explores the Internet's history and effects in four distinct and, to some, surprising societies--Iran, Estonia, South Korea, and Senegal. He profiles Web pioneers in these countries and, at the same time, surveys the environments in which they each work. ‘After all,’ contends Farivar, ‘despite California's great success in creating the Internet and spawning companies like Apple and Google, in some areas the United States is still years behind other nations.’ Surprised? You won't be for long as Farivar proves there are reasons that: Skype was invented in Estonia--the same country that developed a digital ID system and e-voting; Iran was the first country in the world to arrest a blogger, in 2003; South Korea is the most wired country on the planet, with faster and less expensive broadband than anywhere in the United States; Senegal may be one of sub-Saharan Africa's best chances for greater Internet access. .” –Publisher’s description

Monsters of the Gevaudan: The Making of a Beast, by Jay M. Smith (Harvard, 2011) “Aberrations--the collective kind composed of panic and delusions--cannot simply happen in a causeless void, but as happenings they are a challenge to historians. Jay M. Smith has taken up the challenge in a book about the beast of the Gévaudan, a wolf-like monster that haunted imaginations everywhere in Europe and spread apocalyptic fear throughout the population of the Gévaudan, a remote, mountainous region in southern France in 1764 and 1765...Smith demonstrates that the noblemen and educated clerics of the region outdid the peasants in their fanciful accounts of the killings. Crudely illustrated broadsheets featuring horrific scenes of the monster mauling helpless maids hardly serve as evidence of a culture peculiar to the common people. They circulated among all social classes...What to make of it all--a passing episode or a revealing segment of sociocultural history? Jay Smith makes a convincing case for the latter. By carefully examining every aspect of the events, he demonstrates how disparate elements came together to create a spectacular case of collective false consciousness. The beast, he shows, was something people were drawn to think about, and the trains of thought led through a rich and varied mental landscape. In the end, the crucial factor may have been the media--word of mouth at first, then letters, newspaper articles, and a flood of engravings and broadsheets...” --Robert Darnton (New York Review of Books )

Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War, by Kristin Roth-Ey (Cornell, 2011). “A smart, ambitious, original, and engagingly written contribution to our understanding of late socialism in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The reader learns about changes and continuities between Stalinism and post-Stalinism, stodgy bureaucratic responses to technological change, Soviet mass culture, and the increasing privatization of previously public and collective forms of Soviet life. This is a 3-D history of Soviet media, with attention to the political, cultural, and social factors at play in the development and expansion of film, radio, and television.” --Anne E. Gorsuch, University of British Columbia

Murder, the Media, and the Politics of Public Feelings: Remembering Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr., by Jennifer Petersen (University of Illinois, 2011). Role of the media in shaping the collective emotional response toward two famous crimes taking into account the role of affect in the political and legal public sphere.

Muslims and New Media in West Africa: Pathways to God, by Dorothea E. Schulz (University of Illinois, 2011). How new media have helped to create religious communities that are far more publicly engaged than they were in the past.

No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy, by Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites (University of Chicago Press, 2011). “This authoritative, thought-provoking book analyzes the genesis and reception of key American images from Dorothea Lange's 'Migrant Mother' to pictures of the Challenger disaster and 9/11. Drawing extensively on the recent scholarly literature, it demonstrates the pivotal position of the still photograph in modern visual culture. It will be essential reading for students of 20th-century photojournalism, propaganda and mass media. Highly recommended.”—Robin Lenman, general editor, The Oxford Companion to the Photograph

Places of the Imagination: Media, Tourism, Culture, by Stijn Reijnders (Ashgate, 2011). “I had no idea the media (fictional literature, television, film) inspired so much tourism; now I have been introduced to some wonderful illustrations. Informed by a strong theoretical framework, employing the concept of lieux d”imagination, Reijnders nevertheless recognizes the physical reality of places.” –Karen O”Reilly, Loughborough, UK

The Secret War between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine, by Peter Lunenfeld (MIT, 2011). “'Cultural diabetes,' 'plutopian meliorism,' and 'Teflon objects' are only a few of the extraordinarily vivid concepts Peter Lunenfeld points out in this journey of the key cultural and technological events—from the atomic bomb to the ubiquity of Google—that have landed us in our brave new networked, searchable, and data-filled world.” —Judith Donath, Faculty Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University

Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of alternative media in America, by John McMillian (Oxford, 2011). "Well-informed recollection of the rebellious young journalists whose voices and views breached the high walls of Mainstream Media long before the current Internet-savvy generation rushed in to finish off to what remains of Conventional-Wisdom-based reporting." --Richard Parker, Harvard University

The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption, by Daniel Herwitz (Columbia University Press, 2011). "Can be compared with Stanley Cavell's Pursuits of Happiness, but is more contemporary and less optimistic. The book studies significant movies (Rear Window, The Philadelphia Story), is culturally literate, and is very good on the idea of aura and popular culture as it has evolved since Walter Benjamin. Required reading for any course in film studies." --Arthur Danto, Columbia University

Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies, by Susan Landau (MIT, 2011). “The ability of a citizen to securely communicate with her peers lies at the heart of the rule of law. Landau demonstrates the necessity of protecting that right amidst the technological changes that can greatly alter the balance of power between citizens and governments.” —Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law and Professor of Computer Science, Harvard University

Techno Politics in Presidential Campaigning: New Voices, New Technologies, and New Voters edited by John Allen Hendricks and Lynda Lee Kaid (Routledge, 2011). Writings on the use of Twitter, FaceBook, texting, and other new media in the 2008 campaigns.

Town and Communication, Volume One: Communication in Towns, edited by Neven Budak, Finn-Einar Eliassen, and Katalin Szende, (University of Akron Press, 2011). Topics include “Lines of Communication in Medieval Dublin,” “Places of Power: The Spreading of Official Information and the Social Uses of Space in Fifteenth-Century Paris,” ”Ferry Services and Social Life in Early Modern Norwegian Towns,” “Harbor, Rail and Telegraph: The Post Office and Communication in Nineteenth-Century Dublin,” “The Tramway and the Urban Development of Zagreb in the Period of Modernization,” and “Migrant Development of Communication Space in Sydney."

The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind, by Robin Fox (Harvard, 2011).”A landmark in evolutionary social science, an original contribution to literary history and analysis.” --Roger Sandall, writer, author of The Culture Cult

We Must Not Be Afraid to Be Free: Stories of Free Expression in America, by Ronald K. L. Collins and Sam Chaltain (Oxford University, 2011). “A well written and loving tribute to our First Amendment tradition and to the people who have given it life. The book is packed with original history and a deep understanding of the tensions internal to our commitments to freedom of speech. It is a major contribution to the First Amendment literature."--Steven H. Shiffrin, Charles Frank Reavis, Sr., Professor of Law, Cornell University

Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory, by Clare Hemmings (Duke University Press). Analyzes Signs, Feminist Review, and other texts in a study of the stories of progress, loss, and return feminists tell about the past four decades of feminist theory.

Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive

2011-10-20T12:33:00.000-07:00

The Internet Archive hosts a television archive of the events of September 11 called Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive.

A resource for scholars, journalists, and the public, the Archive includes over 3000 hours of international news coverage from 20 channels over a seven day period, 9/11 through 9/17, 2001. The intentional coverage includes broadcasts from Mexico City, London, Beijing, Baghdad, Paris, Ottawa, Tokyo, and Moscow.

You can also watch the presentations of 10 speakers at the recent Learning From Recorded Memory: 9/11 TV News Archive Conference that was held in August 24, 2011.

While the Vanderbilt News Archive has coverage of the major US networks during this time, the non-proprietary nature of this collection is invaluable to folks outside University communities. The inclusion of international coverage, though limited, is also a plus.

I guess I should have posted this last month closer to the anniversary, but archives are about timelessness as much as timeliness!

October CommQuote

2011-10-14T07:33:00.000-07:00

Here's an offering for our October CommQuote from recently crowned Nobel laureate, Tomas Transtromer.

The Scattered Congregation

I
We got ready and showed our home.
The visitor thought: you live well.
The slum must be inside you.

II
Inside the church, pillars and vaulting
white as plaster, like the cast
around the broken arm of faith.

III
Inside the church there's a begging bowl
that slowly lifts from the floor
and floats along the pews.

IV
But the church bells have gone underground.
They're hanging in the sewage pipes.
Whenever we take a step, they ring.

V
Nicodemus the sleepwalker is on his way
to the Address. Who's got the Address?
Don't know. But that's where we're going.

--Tomas Transtromer:Selected Poems, 1954-1986, edited by Robert Hass, Ecco Press, 1987

Middle East and Islamic Resources from CRL

2011-10-11T13:47:00.000-07:00

The latest issue of the Center for Research Libraries' online publication, Focus on Global Resources, features Middle East and Islamic scholarly source material available from CRL. Articles showcase research using Turkish newspapers, recent efforts to document the "Arab Spring" revolution, and how new technologies, specifically Archive-It, a web-crawling utility, are being used to capture the Middle East web.

CRL is an international consortium of research libraries that jointly collects and preserves newspapers, journals, and other archive materials. A large percentage of their acquisitions are from outside the United States, with major emphasis on the developing world. Member institutions provide students, faculty, and other researchers access to the collection through Interlibrary Loan and electronic delivery.

Health and Poli-Comm Reference Books

2011-10-06T10:09:00.000-07:00

Two solid reference volumes from Routledge published this year are The Routledge Handbook of Health Communication and Sourcebook for Political Communication Research: Methods Measures, and Analytical Techniques.

The Handbook (edited by Teresa L Thompson, Roxanne Parrott, and Jon F. Nussbaurm, 2001) is in its second edition but revamped to "emphasize work in such areas as barriers to disclosure in family conversations and medical interactions, access to popular media and advertising, and individual searches online for information and support to guide decisions and behaviors with health consequences." You can also find overviews on methods.

The Sourcebook, (edited by Erik P. Brucy and R. Lance Holbert, 2011) is a benchmark resource covering "the major analytical techniques used in political communication research, including surveys, experiments, content analysis, discourse analysis (focus groups and textual analysis), network and deliberation analysis, comparative study designs, statistical analysis, and measurement issues. It also includes such innovations as the use of advanced statistical techniques, and addresses digital media as a means through which to disseminate as well as study political communication."

Both volumes are available in the Annenberg Library Reference (just ask if you want to take them home) at JA 86 s68 2011 (Sourcebook) and R 118 H26 2011 (Handbook).

Digital Methods Initiative

2011-10-04T08:19:00.000-07:00

Folks interested in research methods for studying the Internet can check out The Digital Methods Initiative, an Amsterdam-based group of new media scholars who have been developing tools and techniques for this increasingly massive undertaking since 1999.

The Digital Methods Initiative is directed by Richard Rogers (who paid the Annenberg School an extended visit last year).

The website is a hub of many of "the tools and scripts that we use to study the web in particular," as explained in the site's About section. Such tools and methods

"have been made to extend the research into the blogosphere, online newssphere, discussion lists and forums, folksonomies as well as search engine behavior. These tools include scripts to scrape web, blog, news, image and social bookmarking search engines, as well as simple analytical machines that output data sets as well as graphical visualizations....For example, how to study Internet censorship (by using proxies)? How to study information inclusion and exclusion (by interrogating robot.txt exclusion policies)? How to study surfer pathways (using measures of 'related sites')? How to study site reputation (by hyperlink analysis)? How to study a site's search engine placement over time (by storing and querying within engine results)?Additionally the Digital Methods Initiative provides views on the value of visualization. How to output the results of the analyses (in ranked lists, in cluster graphs, in line graphs, in clouds, on maps)? Which visualizations communicate findings? Which visualizations embed critical ways of seeing?"

You can also add their blog to your reading stream for updates on research, lecture slides, and course announcements.

All Things SSRN

2011-09-23T14:01:00.000-07:00

Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is a world wide collaborative of over 169,000 authors and more than 1.3 million users that is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research. It is composed of a number of specialized research networks in the social sciences. Each of SSRN's networks encourages the early distribution of research results by reviewing and distributing submitted abstracts and full text papers from scholars around the world. SSRN encourages readers to communicate directly with other subscribers and authors concerning their own and other's research.

SSRN supports the Open Access movement. All scholars may submit papers for free, and author-submitted content is downloadable at no charge by users world-wide.

SSRN is a network of networks, that is, it is divided into specialized areas including cognitive science, information systems, marketing, negotiations, poltical science, and social science. What you may not realize is SSRN includes the humanities as well (classics, English & American literature, and philosophy research networks).

If you are interested in submitting your own work to SSRN there are instructions on the site complete with a video demo.

But it gets even better because SSRN now has a very cool free app for iPhone and iPad users which enables you to search the Archive's over 260,000 papers (and growing) from anywhere. Papers can be emailed or viewed directely on your device. iPad users can download documents and annotate, etc. as well.

If you can't get enough of SSRN, you can also subscribe to their twitter feed (twitter @ ssrn) and their blog.

September CommQuote

2011-09-12T12:17:00.000-07:00

This month's quote is from a t-shirt. From the September 12, 2011 issue of The New Yorker (page 75). The magazine is available to the Penn community electronically and also in paper in the Annenberg Library.

ASC Library Mobile

2011-09-09T06:44:00.000-07:00

Good news for all comm junkies on the go...the Annenberg Library now has its own mobile access page.
Using this site you can check our hours, search Franklin and VCat, use the handy Penn Text article finder, or access Blackboard and RefWorks much more easily from your mobile devices. Just bookmark the site from the link on the Annenberg Library homepage. In addition, there's a mobile friendly app for EBSCOhosts databases which now not only includes Communication & Mass Media Complete, but also Communication Abstracts. Other mobile friendly databases to search on the train or a park bench are Lexis-Nexis Academic, Scopus, and for health communication folks, Medline Plus. The list of mobile friendly databases will no doubt be growing and I'll try to keep up with good ones to add. Notice too, that your favorite library blog, Commpilings, does not go unrepresented on the page, so no excuse for not being up on the latest (5) posts!

Communicating Risks & Benefits from the FDA

2011-08-24T13:21:00.000-07:00

The Risk Communication Advisory Committee to the Food and Drug Administration has just released Communicating Risks and Benefits: An Evidence-Based User's Guide (edited by Baruch Fischhoff, Noel T. Brewer and Julie S. Downs) in an effort to provide more scientific foundations for effective risk communication. The book is freely available online in pdf format.

Committee chair Baruch Fischhoff, described the book's goals as "to make communication science accessible. Another was to facilitate evidence-based approaches.Each chapter is 3,000 words, each addressing these points: What does the science say?
What does the science mean?...How can you tell how well you've done?...We wanted to make people feel guilty if they didn't do any evaluation."

Communication-Related Mental Measures

2011-08-22T11:28:00.000-07:00

The National Communication Association has published a reference source on communication-related mental measures titled Directory of Communication Related Mental Measures: A Comprehensive Index of Research Scales, Questionnaires, Indices, Measures, and Instruments. Edited by Jason Wrench, Doreen Jowi, and Alan Goodboy, it features over 500 mental measures that have been published in communication journals. This volume will be useful to communication scholars including graduate students, applied researchers, and communication instructors. Divided into 27 chapters that cover a wide range of mental measures in various communication contexts and featuring a comprehensive index, this collection brings together important mental measures published in peer-reviewed academic journals in a singular volume.

More information and a table of contents can be found here.

The book is available in the Annenberg Library Reference, at P 91.3 D574 2010.

August CommQuote

2011-08-22T08:21:00.000-07:00

Plato on rhetoric, from Gorias, one of the Socratic Dialogues written around 380 BC.

Socrates: And now let us have from you, Gorgias, the truth about rhetoric: which you would admit (would you not?) to be one of those arts which act always and fulfil all their ends through the medium of words?

Gorgias: True.

Soc. Words which do what? I should ask. To what class of things do the words which rhetoric uses relate?

Gor. To the greatest, Socrates, and the best of human things.

Soc. That again, Gorgias is ambiguous; I am still in the dark: for which are the greatest and best of human things? I dare say that you have heard men singing at feasts the old drinking song, in which the singers enumerate the goods of life, first health, beauty next, thirdly, as the writer of the song says, wealth honesty obtained.

Gor. Yes, I know the song; but what is your drift?

Soc. I mean to say, that the producers of those things which the author of the song praises, that is to say, the physician, the trainer, the money-maker, will at once come to you, and first the physician will say: "O Socrates, Gorgias is deceiving you, for my art is concerned with the greatest good of men and not his." And when I ask, Who are you? he will reply, "I am a physician." What do you mean? I shall say. Do you mean that your art produces the greatest good? "Certainly," he will answer, "for is not health the greatest good? What greater good can men have, Socrates?" And after him the trainer will come and say, "I too, Socrates, shall be greatly surprised if Gorgias can show more good of his art than I can show of mine." To him again I shall say, Who are you, honest friend, and what is your business? "I am a trainer," he will reply, "and my business is to make men beautiful and strong in body." When I have done with the trainer, there arrives the money-maker, and he, as I expect, utterly despise them all. "Consider Socrates," he will say, "whether Gorgias or any one-else can produce any greater good than wealth." Well, you and I say to him, and are you a creator of wealth? "Yes," he replies. And who are you? "A money-maker." And do you consider wealth to be the greatest good of man? "Of course," will be his reply. And we shall rejoin: Yes; but our friend Gorgias contends that his art produces a greater good than yours. And then he will be sure to go on and ask, "What good? Let Gorgias answer." Now I want you, Gorgias, to imagine that this question is asked of you by them and by me; What is that which, as you say, is the greatest good of man, and of which you are the creator? Answer us.

Gor. That good, Socrates, which is truly the greatest, being that which gives to men freedom in their own persons, and to individuals the power of ruling over others in their several states.

Soc. And what would you consider this to be?

Gor. What is there greater than the word which persuades the judges in the courts, or the senators n the council, or the citizens in the assembly, or at any other political meeting?-if you have the power of uttering this word, you will have the physician your slave, and the trainer your slave, and the money-maker of whom you talk will be found to gather treasures, not for himself, but for you who are able to speak and to persuade the multitude.

Soc. Now I think, Gorgias, that you have very accurately explained what you conceive to be the art of rhetoric; and you mean to say, if I am not mistaken, that rhetoric is the artificer of persuasion, having this and no other business, and that this is her crown and end. Do you know any other effect of rhetoric over and above that of producing persuasion?

Gor. No: the definition seems to me very fair, Socrates; for persuasion is the chief end of rhetoric.

Internet and Social Media Reliability Resources

2011-07-27T10:44:00.000-07:00

Searcher Magazine often provides link lists to their articles that reference resources. Last month they did a piece on the quality of information on the web. You can read the article online via EBSCO Megafile which carries Searcher. In the meantime, here's the article's list of links, including (under Rumor Checkers) our own FactCheck.org, at the top of the list of course.

ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO POST. OR IS IT? QUALITY INFORMATION & THE SOCIAL WEB by Nancy K. Herther
Searcher, Magazine for Database Professionals Vol. 19, No. 5 • June 2011

http://people-press.org/report/543/

http://people-press.org/report/554/news-iq-knowledge-quiz

http://people-press.org/report/319/public-knowledge-of-current-affairs-little-changed-by-news-and-information-revolutions

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NewsRoom/
HarrisPolls/tabid/447/mid/1508/articleId/223/
ctl/ReadCustom%20Default/Default.aspx

http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2010/03/exclusive-us-supreme-court-chief-justice-john-roberts-considering-step-down

http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2010/
PIP_Understanding_the_Participatory_News_Consumer.pdf

http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2010/

http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3768

INTERNET RUMOR CHECKERS

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/technology/05snopes.html

http://www.factcheck.org/

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/

http://www.snopes.com/

http://www.cjr.org/index.php

http://mediamatters.org/tags/issues

American Film Scripts Online

2011-07-26T13:34:00.000-07:00

Introducing a new addition to Penn Libraries e-resources: American Film Scripts Online. ASO contains over a thousand American movie scripts from 1903 to 2006. Many scripts carry additional detailed, fielded information on scenes and characters in the scripts. The database includes facsimile images for over half of the collection. Most of the scripts have never been published before and are available nowhere else online.

Scripts were selected by a team of film librarians and scholars. Selection factors include if the film or screenplay won a major award, if the film was critically acclaimed, or the screenplay has historical or sociological significance. The panel tried to build specific clusters based around genres such as Film Noir, Silent Movies of the 1920's, and key writers. Where possible, shooting scripts selected rather than draft scripts.

There is advanced searching capability for this relatively small database so it's easy to get around, including inside the scripts to search on words and phrases. My search on the the phrase "train robbery" turned up five scripts. You can try something more imaginative.

Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year

2011-07-22T06:31:00.000-07:00

Political junkies can kick back in the Annenberg Library Reading Room with BEST EDITORIAL CARTOONS OF THE YEAR, either the most recent edition (2011) or older ones going back to 1977. The series, showcasing humorous and/or thought-provoking cartoons of the day from US newspapers, is edited by Charles Brooks, past president of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists and long-time cartoonist for Birmingham News. Each volume features award winning cartoons from the past year and an additional sampling of work by leading editorial cartoonists chosen for general excellence. Selections include both left and right leaning perspectives and together do a good job of recapturing the political and satirical flavor of history, as recent as 2010. Pictured here is one of my favorites in the 2011 edition appeared in The State Journal-Register July 11, 2010. It's by Chris Britt.

The call number for the series is: REF E 839.5 B45 but it's not where it's supposed to be. I have the volumes on a special in shelf in the magazine reading area to show them off. If you're confused just ask!

July CommQuote

2011-07-05T13:25:00.000-07:00

Anke Birkenmaier on French radio pioneer Paul Deharme:

In principle, radio broadcasting seemed to Deharme a surrealist medium par excellence. Similar to the surrealist automatic writing, it made its audience listen to the dictate of an unknown voice; also, it allowed for instantaneous communication between audiences all over the world that resembled the quasi telepathic communication achieved by the first members of the movement in their creative sessions. How could the surrealists not be taken in by a medium that seemed to promise liberation from analytical “written” reasoning and grant access to a mass audience that had been out of reach until then? And yet, surrealist radio broadcasting would remain an experimental radio practice that aimed at being better than surrealism itself...

For Deharme, radio broadcasting’s greatest asset was precisely the fact that vision was not available to the audience. The absence, in radio-and also in the surrealist automatic writing-of physical images would lead to the creation of increasingly powerful mental images in the listener. In this way, radio was superior to film or theater. Relying on the work of French psychologist Henri Delacroix and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Deharme put forth the argument that pure words were in fact always associated with “inner” mental images, and that the physical production of words in combination with images in film or in theater deprived the audience of their own mental images, creating “only” sensations and impoverished after-impressions of what should be a creative act. The radio experience, in contrast, was more stimulating because its mental images were sensations at the same time.

One problem with radio broadcasting, as Deharme saw it, was the short attention pan of the listener. All of his professional know-how was invested in preventing it rom becoming a background medium. Due to the absence of physical images, the radio listener’s attention span is smaller; though the voice may seem real, the image associated with it has its origin only in the brain and is accompanied by a feeling of unreality. For that reason, music and sound effects are especially important to lend life and substance to the image-yet this liveliness should always appear to be dream-like, in a realistic yet artificial way.

The distinction between the dream-likeness of radio and the everyday reality of the istening audience was crucial to Deharme, for whom the main task of radio was to ake the listener dream, as opposed to the producer-focused surrealist idea of using dreams to extract or generate words from the inspired artists. The problem with the surrealists, according to Deharme, was that they claimed to rely not on dream images ut on the language of dreams, whose authenticity was generally to be doubted because it is extremely difficult to reproduce. The language produced during a period of half-sleep was not quite the same as the one that would originate from a dream. In short, Deharme contested the relevance of the surrealist automatic writing for a larger audience. He associated the ability to dream with the freedom to imagine alternate worlds, and did not find that surrealist poetry was effective at producing these words for the reader. This is why radio-fiction took a prominent place in Deharme’s radio heory: the listener seemed to understand it and be provoked by it more easily than by poetry.
--From Surrealism to Popular Art: Paul Deharme's Radio Theory, by Anke Birkenmaier, Modernism/modernity (volume 16, Number 2, pp357-374)

Tracking Telecom Issues

2011-06-24T11:07:00.000-07:00

The Telecommunications Industry Association, TIA, has a very useful, information-packed website. Though this is a member-site of over 600 telecommunications companies from around the world, it also serves up a fair amount of free content to the general public. Look for the annual Standards and Technology Annual Report (STAR) (which they've been posting since 2001).

You can also follow what's going on at the FCC with the TIA Legislative Tracker and the TIA Regulatory Tracker. The June 2011 Regulatory Tracker, for instance, boasts 198 pages of up to date information on regulatory policy.

And while TIA's 2011 ICT Market Review & Forecast may be prohibitively expensive, the previous year's report is free for download, as are older white papers and the like. So even at the TIA Store most items are free.

FCC on the Information Needs of Communities

2011-06-16T08:45:00.000-07:00

The FCC Working group on the Information Needs of Communities has just released its eighteen-months-in-the-making Future of Media report—now called “The Information Needs of Communities: The Changing Media Landscape in a Broadband Age.” The 365-page report thoroughly assesses the current news media landscape, including policy and regulation, and provides recommendations, some directed at the FCC, others to the broader community of policymakers, philanthropists, and citizens.

From the Report's Overview:

Thomas Jefferson, who loathed many specific newspapers, nonetheless considered a free press so vital that he declared, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” If he were alive today, Jefferson would likely clarify that his dedication was not to “newspapers” per se but to their function: providing citizens the information they need to both pursue happiness and hold accountable government as well as other powerful institutions.

That sense of the vital link between informed citizens and a healthy democracy is why civic and media leaders grew alarmed a few years ago when the digital revolution began undercutting traditional media business models, leading to massive layoffs of journalists at newspapers, newsmagazines, and TV stations. Since then, experts in the media and information technology spheres have been debating whether the media is fulfilling the crucial role envisioned for it by the Founders. In 2008 and 2009, a group that was both bipartisan (Republicans and Democrats) and bi-generational (“new media” and “old media”) studied this issue at the behest of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The group, the Knight Commission on Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, concluded: “America is at a critical juncture in the history of communications. Information technology is changing our lives in ways that we cannot easily foresee...The digital age is creating an information and communications renaissance. But it is not serving all Americans and their local communities equally. It is not yet serving democracy fully. How we react, individually and collectively, to this democratic shortfall will affect the quality of our lives and the very nature of our communities.”

The Knight Commission’s findings, as well as those of other blue-ribbon reports, posed a bipartisan challenge to the FCC, whose policies often affect the information health of communities. The chairman responded in December 2009 by initiating an effort at the FCC to answer two questions: 1) are citizens and communities getting the news, information, and reporting they want and need? and 2) is public policy in sync with the nature of modern media markets, especially when it comes to encouraging innovation and advancing local public interest goals?

A working group consisting of journalists, entrepreneurs, scholars, and government officials conducted an exploration of these questions. The group interviewed hundreds of people, reviewed scores of studies and reports, held hearings, initiated a process for public comment, and made site visits. We looked not only at the news media but, more broadly, at how citizens get local information in an age when the Internet has enabled consumers to access information without intermediaries.

This report is intended both to inform the broad public debate and help FCC Commissioners assess current rules.

June CommQuote

2011-06-13T08:24:00.000-07:00

Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, has a more more sober view of the internet and social media as great liberators. He wrote a short piece on the subject a few months ago in Wired Magazine.

The last time American leaders were this ecstatic about the power of information was at the end of the Cold War, when illicit fax machines and photocopiers and the work of broadcasters like Radio Free Europe were presumed to have been a leading cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union. (In 1990, Albert Wohlstetter—the ur-technocrat who was one of the inspirations for Dr. Strangelove—told an audience of perplexed eastern Europeans that “the fax shall make you free.”) Today, most historians reject such views as reductionist, but they are still extremely popular among US politicians (probably because celebrating smuggled technology allows them to celebrate the politicians who made the smuggling possible—particularly Ronald Reagan). Such Cold War thinking showed in Clinton’s speech: “Virtual walls,” she said, are “cropping up in place of visible walls,” and viral videos and blogging are “becoming the samizdat of our day.”

But not all blogs are revolutionary. China, Iran, and Russia all have bloggers who are more authoritarian in their views than their governments are. Some of these governments are even beginning to follow the path laid by Western corporations, actively deploying regime-friendly bloggers to spread talking points. Is this “samizdat”?

Cold War baggage, in short, severely limits the imagination of do-gooders in the West. They assume that the Internet is too big to control without significant economic losses. But governments don’t need to control every text message or email. There’s a special irony when Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggests—as he did in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations last November—that China’s government will find it impossible to censor “a billion phones that are trying to express themselves.” Schmidt is rich because his company sells precisely targeted ads against hundreds of millions of search requests per day. If Google can zero in like that, so can China’s censors.

Calling China’s online censorship system a “Great Firewall” is increasingly trendy, but misleading. All walls, being the creation of engineers, can be breached with the right tools. But modern authoritarian governments control the web in ways more sophisticated than guard towers.
--Why the Internet Is a Great Tool for Totalitarians, Wired Magazine, January 2011

Tracking the Crackups: News on the Net

2011-06-01T06:44:00.000-07:00

Searcher Magazine features a roundup of go-to internet sites for breaking news. You can read the article, Tracking the Crackups: News on the Net, by Irene McDermott, online via the Penn Library e-resources. Or you can just rifle through the sites mentioned in the article without context with the useful resource list the magazine provides on the open web for free.
***************************************************************************************
These URLs appear in the column:
INTERNET EXPRESS: TRACKING THE CRACKUPS: NEWS ON THE NET
by Irene E. McDermott
Reference Librarian/Systems Manager
Crowell Public Library, City of San Marino
Searcher, the Magazine for Database Professionals
Vol. 19, No. 4 • May 2011

https://sslearthquake.usgs.gov/ens/

http://www.nytimes.com

http://english.aljazeera.net

http://www.huffingtonpost.com

http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/

Twitter for News

http://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2011/02/ontology-of-twitter.html

http://search.twitter.com

http://muckrack.com

http://www.twitterfall.com

http://listorious.com

http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/

News Aggregators

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com

http://www.storyful.com

http://theweek.com

http://globalvoicesonline.org

Newspapers Online

http://www.onlinenewspapers.com

http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/default.asp

http://www.abyznewslinks.com

http://ipl.org/div/news/

Reports from Responders and International Media

http://www.radioreference.com/apps/audio/

http://www.livestation.com

http://www.inciweb.org

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/dyfi

News Analysis

http://www.wikistrat.com

http://www.theatlantic.com

http://www.thedailybeast.com

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com

http://www.amconmag.com/larison/

The New Media Revolutions

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/learning-to-love-the-shallow-divisive-unreliable-new-media/8415/1

THE NEWS DISAPPEARS

http://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2010/04/how-tweet-it-is-library-acquires-entire-twitter-archive/

http://searchengineland.com/where-have-all-the-old-tweets-gone-33579

http://www.google.com/realtime

http://www.google.com/reader/

News Cities/Informed Citizens; Navigating News Online

2011-05-18T09:41:00.001-07:00

The Aspen Institute's Communication and Society Program has issued it's 2010 report, News Cities: The Next Generation of Healthy Informed Communities, available at their site for purchase or free download.

From the abstract:

The report includes a description of the continuing difficulties, yet encouraging advances in local journalism, and a series of recommendations to strengthen public media, increase government transparency, encourage public engagement, promote digital and media literacy, and provide universal broadband access.

And while we're talking news, I probably don't need to direct folks to Pew as much as I do but their reports are so useful and data-rich I can't resist. Navigating News Online: Where People Go, How They Get there and What Lures Them Away, by Kenny Olmstead, Amy Mitchell and Tom Rosenstiel looks at online news consumption traffic of the top 25 news sites according to Nielsen data. Actually, they point out, their data set includes only 21 of the top 25 sites. The Wall Street Journal, BBC.com, Bing News, and Reuters are structured in a way that prevents Nielsen from capturing this data. The Report delivers graphs and pie charts of traffic to and from Facebook, influence of Drudge Report on top news sites, Twitter traffic to and from news sites, and news site preferences by gender, and much more.

May CommQuote

2011-05-16T07:03:00.000-07:00

Kelefa Sanneh on the genre of reality television in May 9 issue of The New Yorker. He is reviewing several books on the topic, including Brenda Weber's, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity. (Duke, 2010).

Weber sees in these makeover programs a strange new world—or, more accurately, a strange new nation, one where citizenship is available only to those who have made the transition “from Before to After.” Weber notices that, on scripted television, makeovers are usually revealed to be temporary or unnecessary: characters often learn that though a makeover is nice, they were really just fine in their Before states.” On reality television, by contrast, makeovers are urgent and permanent; “the After-body, narratively speaking, stands as the moment of greatest authenticity.” We have moved from the regressive logic of the sitcom, in which nothing really happens, to the recursive logic of the police procedural, in which the same thing keeps happening—the same detectives, solving and re-solving the same crimes. In fact, Weber points out that a number of makeover shows present their subjects as crimes to be solved: in the British version of “What Not to Wear,” makeover candidates line up in front of a one-way mirror, like perpetrators awaiting identification; “Style by Jury,” a Canadian show, begins and ends with the target facing a jury of her peers.

Makeover shows inevitably build to a spectacular moment when “reveal” becomes a noun, and yet the final product is often unremarkable: a woman with an up-to-date generic haircut, wearing a jacket that fits well; a man who is chubby but not obese; a dog with no overwhelming urge to bare its fangs. The new subject is worth looking at only because we know where it came from, which means that, despite the seeming decisiveness of the transformation, the old subject never truly disappears. “The After highlights the dreadfulness of the Before,” Weber writes. “In makeover logic, no post-made-over body can ever be considered separate from its pre-made-over form.” She might have added that no makeover is ever really finished; there is no After who is not, in other respects, a Before—maybe your dog no longer strains at the leash, but are you sure that sweater doesn’t make you look old and tired? Are you sure your thighs wouldn’t benefit from some blunt cannulation? Weber’s makeover nation is an eerie place, because no one fully belongs there, and, deep down, everyone knows it.

Mobile Media Across Europe

2011-05-10T12:28:00.000-07:00

The Internet Advertising Bureau Europe has released a white paper on mobile penetration in Europe. From the Introduction and Methodology of Mobile Media: An IAB Europe White Paper :

Mobile internet advertising spend during 2010 – when advertising revenues generally fell - was worth €710 million, more than double its 2009 total of €279 million. This report, covering 19 European countries, presents detailed research findings behind these figures. It springs from IAB Europe’s mission to prove the value of the market through research and education.

This report is based on a variety of sources that are the most legitimate to use in each local market and bring the potential, audience and usage of the mobile internet. The objective of this report is to provide local marketers with the most accurate mobile data on each European market. In countries where several sources are available, we chose the most recognised one from the local players. We used one source in countries where there is no other data available.

Findings from Ready to Learn 2005-2010

2011-05-10T09:15:00.000-07:00

This 56-page Corporation for Public Broadcasting report addresses the literacy needs of children 2-8 and the role of public media in meeting those needs. Below is a chunk of the CPB press release of last month to which I would add: be sure to check out the extensive bibliography from the five research arms (including the University of Pennsylvania) of the study.

Findings from Ready To Learn: 2005-2010 (3.0MB PDF), developed with cooperation from Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the U.S. Department of Education, an innovative initiative funded by Congress and the U.S. Department of Education, provides definitive new evidence that shows children from disadvantaged families who interact with public media make remarkable gains in mastering the fundamentals of early literacy – letter recognition, letter sounds, and vocabulary and word meaning. In some cases, growth on targeted skills is so significant that children are able to successfully narrow or close the achievement gap with their middle-class peers.

The high-quality literacy programs and content that public media developed through Ready To Learn reach more than five million children a day at cost of less than half a penny per child – significantly less than most other early literacy initiatives.

“When it comes to reading instruction, public media has met the ambitious standard set by Congress more than four decades ago,” said Patricia Harrison, president and CEO of CPB. “This report demonstrates how public media directly and cost-effectively contributes to improving early literacy development of children living in poverty and provides data that prove the overall educational benefits of public media. Few, if any, large-scale educational media initiatives have been as successful, and none has had a greater impact on the literacy development of children from low-income backgrounds.”

“Public media reinvented children’s broadcasting, proving that television can educate while it entertains,” said Paula Kerger, president and CEO of PBS. “Today we’re expanding that innovative idea to include a growing number of media platforms, from web sites to iPhone apps and more. Under the Ready To Learn initiative, PBS KIDS Raising Readers program has developed groundbreaking series, such as SUPER WHY, Martha Speaks, and the re-launched Electric Company that are based on educational research, scientifically proven to effectively boost literacy development and other academic skills of young children, and affordable for all parents, teachers and caregivers.”

The CPB and PBS Ready To Learn grant funded a highly qualified team of educational researchers, made up of leading scholars at the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Maryland, the Education Development Center, SRI International, and the American Institutes for Research, to conduct studies on Ready To Learn content, materials, resources and community engagement strategies.

The U.S. Department of Education recently awarded CPB and PBS another five-year Ready To Learn grant in 2010 to focus on math concepts, continue early literacy projects and develop innovative new teaching tools, including multi-media classroom tools, augmented reality games and transmedia gaming suites.

JTA Jewish News Archive

2011-05-06T07:37:00.000-07:00

JTA, The Global News Service of the Jewish People, (formerly the Jewish Telegraphic Agency) has just launched a digital archive containing 250,000 articles dating from 1923.

A video about the archive is available here.

From the JTA press release:

The JTA Jewish News Archive, which is searchable and free for the public to use, was launched officially Tuesday, May 3 with a celebration at the Center for Jewish History in New York.

Highlights of the archive include extensive reporting from Europe in the 1930s and 1940s -- including perhaps the first article on what has become known as the Babi Yar massacre -- JTA’s reportage on the founding of the State of Israel, close and sustained coverage of the Soviet Jewry movement, and decades of articles chronicling the changing roles and responsibilities of Jewish women.

“The JTA Jewish News Archive has the potential to spark an interest in the past that will transform the future,” said Jonathan Sarna, the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University.

Sarna, a member of JTA’s board of directors, spearheaded the effort to digitally preserve the news agency's reporting.

JTA’s coverage of the Holocaust may be of particular interest to historians.

“There was and still is a lot of conventional wisdom that Americans didn't know about the Holocaust while it was happening, and couldn't have known about the Holocaust while it was happening," said Northeastern University journalism professor Laurel Leff. "One of the values of this archive is that people can actually look at the bulletins that JTA sent out during this period and see what information was, in fact, available."

IJoC's Network Multidimensionality in the Digital Age

2011-05-03T09:13:00.000-07:00

From the latest ICA newsletter: The International Journal of Communication (IJoC) is pleased to announce the publication ([April 11, 2011] of a Special Section, "Network Multidimensionality in the Digital Age," coedited by Manuel Castells, Peter Monge, and Noshir Contractor. Human communication networks, like those typically found in the network society, are highly complex and relationally rich in that they often connect different types of objects with multiple types of relations. This special section presents seven articles that explore the implications of this network multidimensionality. The articles cover a broad array of issues including network sociomateriality, network power, network exclusion, the semantic web, network fuzziness, and network spheres. The theoretical implications of network multidimensionality are explored and a number of relevant social examples are examined including the degrees of freedom in WikiLeaks networks, the kinds of power in societal networks, and the network changes that occur when technologies and other sociomaterial objects are brought inside the network. The keynote article by Bruno Latour argues that network multidimensionality eradicates the long-standing theoretical distinction between individual and society. Collectively, these papers provide a rich compendium of ideas and arguments on the theoretical and practical implications of network multidimensionality.

Evolution of Media Effects Theory

2011-04-26T11:47:00.000-07:00

University of Michigan researchers, W. Russell Neuman and Lauren Guggenheim trace the development of media effects theories from 1956-2005 through citation analysis of over 20 thousand articles from five top communication journals. Their findings are published in the latest Communication Theory (Volulme 21, Number 2, May 2011). This issue can be found in the e-journals section of the Penn Libraries website.

The Evolution of Media Effects Theory: A Six-Stage Model of Cumulative Research W. Russell Neuman and Lauren Guggenheim

ABSTRACT
The literature of media effects is frequently characterized as a three-stage progression initially embracing a theory of strong effects followed by a repudiation of earlier work and new model of minimal effects followed by yet another repudiation and a rediscovery of strong effects. We argue that although this dramatic and somewhat romantic simplification may be pedagogically useful in introductory courses, it may prove a significant impediment to further theoretical refinement and progress in advanced scholarship. We analyze the citation patterns of 20,736 scholarly articles in five communication journals with special attention to the 200 most frequently cited papers in an effort to provide an alternative six-stage model of, we argue, cumulative media effects theories for the period 1956–2005.

Media Piracy in Emerging Economies

2011-04-20T09:14:00.000-07:00

The Social Science Resource Council has just released the first independent, large-scale study of music, film and software piracy in emerging economies, focusing on Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico and Bolivia.

Media Piracy in Emerging Economies is "based on three years of work by some thirty-five researchers [and]tells two overarching stories: one tracing the explosive growth of piracy as digital technologies became cheap and ubiquitous around the world, and another following the growth of industry lobbies that have reshaped laws and law enforcement around copyright protection. The report argues that these efforts have largely failed, and that the problem of piracy is better conceived as a failure of affordable access to media in legal markets."

Major Findings
* Prices are too high. High prices for media goods, low incomes, and cheap digital technologies are the main ingredients of global media piracy. Relative to local incomes in Brazil, Russia, or South Africa, the retail price of a CD, DVD, or copy of MS Office is five to ten times higher than in the US or Europe. Legal media markets are correspondingly tiny and underdeveloped.

* Competition is good. The chief predictor of low prices in legal media markets is the presence of strong domestic companies that compete for local audiences and consumers. In the developing world, where global film, music, and software companies dominate the market, such conditions are largely absent.

* Antipiracy education has failed. The authors find no significant stigma attached to piracy in any of the countries examined. Rather, piracy is part of the daily media practices of large and growing portions of the population.

* Changing the law is easy. Changing the practice is hard. Industry lobbies have been very successful at changing laws to criminalize these practices, but largely unsuccessful at getting governments to apply them. There is, the authors argue, no realistic way to reconcile mass enforcement and due process, especially in countries with severely overburdened legal systems.

* Criminals can’t compete with free. The study finds no systematic links between media piracy and organized crime or terrorism in any of the countries examined. Today, commercial pirates and transnational smugglers face the same dilemma as the legal industry: how to compete with free.

* Enforcement hasn’t worked. After a decade of ramped up enforcement, the authors can find no impact on the overall supply of pirated goods.

Mobile Stats

2011-04-18T11:11:00.000-07:00

mobiThinking is a great site for free information on the mobile technology on the global scale. It includes practical guides to mobile agencies, ad networks, top mobile markets, interviews and analysis, showcase sites and case studies, industry events and awards, a comprehensive list of links to mobile resources and a compendium of mobile statistics, which can be found under the "Global Marketing Tools" tab, Global mobile statistics 2011

Introducing Oxford Bibliographies Online: Communication

2011-04-11T07:58:00.000-07:00

"GPS for scholars," as it likes to refer to itself, Oxford Bibliographies Online offers literature guides prepared by subject experts in a variety of fields including Communication. Additional subject modules Penn subscribes to are Atlantic History, Biblical Studies, Buddhism, Classics, Criminology, Hinduism, International Relations, Islamic Studies, Medieval Studies, Philosophy, Public Health, Renaissance and Reformation, Social Work, and Victorian Literature. Other modules are due out later in the year, including Cinema Studies and Anthropology.

OBO sees itself as a remedy for information overload which is everywhere, including academia.

Traditional bibliographies and the online abstracting & indexing services that emerged out of them are no help here. These tools suited research needs when we were in information scarcity culture, but in information overload culture these unfiltered lists of everything published lose their value—they’ve simply become too large to be meaningful. Users do not know exactly why a citation showed up in their search results, they do not know how it fits in the history of scholarship, and they have no indication which resources are of high scholarly quality and which are less reliable. In the end, the white noise of information overload culture yields the same results as the lack of content in our previous information scarcity culture: research paralysis. We don’t need unfiltered lists of citations. Today’s challenge is to build a resource that guides scholarly research through the growing mass of unqualified academic output, offering selective annotated research paths that are insightful, increase productivity, and raise the level of quality in new scholarship. --Letter from the Publisher

OBO claims that each article included in their guides receives multiple peer reviews as well as editorial board vetting. What's very nice about this world of essential texts that OBO is carving out for students and researchers is that every cited item links to full-text. Also promised are frequent updates so that these modules represent where the field is currently at, at least in theory. The Communication module is edited by Patricia Moy (University of Washington). There are over 50 members on the editorial board, including three Annenberg grads, Yariv Tsfati (University of Haifa), Matthew Carlson (Saint Louis University), and Brian Southwell (University of Minnesota). Over 60 subject areas are covered in this edition and more (with additional Annenberg editorial representation) are slated to be added in Fall 2011 and Spring 2012. This product is so new I don't have a personal feel with it yet but I am looking forward to getting to know it. I certainly applaud the initiative because we are all drowning if we are not sifting and sifting takes time. OBO is not only doing the sifting but has assigned the task to proven experts.

April CommQuote

2011-04-08T10:26:00.000-07:00

Newspaper blackout poetry is a pretty cool idea. It's a bit of a gimmick, but nice things happen.
Invented by Austin Kleon, it works like this: Grab a newspaper. Grab a marker. Find an article. Cross out words, leaving behind the ones you like. Pretty soon you’ll have a poem.

Said The New Yorker: "[The poems] resurrect the newspaper when everyone else is declaring it dead...like a cross between magnetic refrigerator poetry and enigmatic ransom notes, funny and zen-like, collages of found art..." (The New Yorker)

So our April CommQuote is a one of these poems. More can be found in Kleon's book, Newspaper Blackout (Harper Perennial, 2010). Happy Poetry Month and long live newspapers!

Since you probably can't make most of it out from the copy-paste, here's the text of Time-Traveling: so/they look/as they did when I was 10/the Old King/and his queen/ my parents/ The size of/Egyptian/ sculptures, all/ Secrets/ that/ I didn't know

Latest issue of Media, War & Conflict on the CNN Effect

2011-04-08T08:53:00.000-07:00

The April 2011 (Volume 4, 1) issue of Media, War & Conflict is devoted to the CNN Effect. Interestingly, one of the pieces is on Japanese foreign disaster relief in the 1990s as related to the CNN effect (Van Belle and Potter).

Articles include:

The CNN effect reconsidered: mapping a research agenda for the future, by Piers Robinson

Time to move on: new media realities - new vulnerabilities of power, by Nik Gowing

The CNN effect reconsidered (again): problematizing ICT and global governance in the CNN effect research agenda, by Steven Livingston

Did the Global War on Terror end the CNN effect? by Babak Bahador

Media and foreign policy in central and eastern Europe post 9/11: in from the cold? by Ekaterina Balabanova

Japanese foreign disaster assistance: the ad hoc period in international politics and the illusion of a CNN effect, by Douglas A Van Belle and David M Potter

Historical Washington Post

2011-04-08T08:26:00.000-07:00

The latest big national national newspaper to be added to our digital historical newspaper offerings is The Washington Post, (1877-1993), Proquest Historical Newspapers. (Lexis Nexis and Newsbank carry the paper from 1977 to the present so no worries about access to the last couple decades). From the publisher:

Known for its comprehensive political reporting, first-rate photo essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writing, and unmatched investigative reporting, the historical Washington Post (1877-1993) is an unparalleled resource for today’s budding journalists, political historians, and students of government. The Post was the first newspaper in Washington to publish seven days a week. Early contributors included Joseph Pulitzer and a relatively unknown, un-bylined Theodore Roosevelt, who contributed stories about the West. Beginning in the 1940s, the newspaper featured editorial cartoonist Herbert L. Block (“Herblock”), who used his drawings to express indignation with political leaders and to “raise hell.” He coined the term “McCarthyism” in the 1950s and was unrelenting in his graphic characterization of Richard Nixon. This newspaper is perhaps most famous for a series of stories that began with a break-in at the Watergate office complex in 1972. When it was all over, reporters Woodward and Bernstein were household names, and President Nixon had resigned in disgrace.

As with all our Proquest Historical Newspapers (The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Defender, Chicago Tribune, Pittsburgh Courier, Philadelphia Tribune, New York Amsterdam News, Times of India, and Wall Street Journal) one can not only view news articles but also photos, advertisements, marriage announcements, obituaries, cartoons, and more, for added context.

Social Media Stats From Ragan's

2011-03-16T08:02:00.000-07:00

Ragan's RR Daily has rounded up a list of 18 resources for the best social media stats of 2011 (so far). You'll have to cherry pick through this data but you might find just the gem you're looking for.

Good Things From Pew

2011-03-15T13:21:00.000-07:00

The Pew Research Center's s Project for Excellence in Journalism has just released its eighth report, State of the News Media 2011

Among this year's e features is a report on how American newspapers fare relative to those in other countries, the status of community media, a survey on mobile and paid content in local news, and a report on African American media. Each year the Report identifies key trends. Six stand out entering 2011:

The news industry is turning to executives from outside. The trend has a scattered history. The complex revenue equation of news -- that it was better to serve the audience even to the irritation of advertisers that paid most of the bills -- tended to trip up outsiders. It spelled the end, for instance, of Mark Willes at Times Mirror when he let advertisers dictate content. With the old revenue model broken, more companies are again looking to outsiders for leadership. One reason is new owners. Seven of the top 25 newspapers in America are now owned by hedge funds, which had virtually no role a few years ago. The age of publicly traded newspaper companies is winding down. And some of the new executives are blunt in their assessments. John Paton, the new head of Journal Register newspapers told a trade group in December: "We have had nearly 15 years to figure out the web and, as an industry, we newspaper people are no good at it." A question is how much time these private equity owners will give struggling news operations to turn around. One of these publishers told PEJ privately that he believed he had two years.
Less progress has been made charging for news than predicted, but there are some signs of willingness to pay. The leading study on the subject finds that so far only about three dozen newspapers have moved to some kind of paid content on their websites. Of those, only 1% of users opted to pay. And some papers that moved large portions of content to subscription gave up the effort. A new survey released for this report suggests that under certain circumstances the prospects for charging for content could improve. If their local newspaper would otherwise perish, 23% of Americans said they would pay $5 a month for an online version. To date, however, even among early adopters, only 10% of those who have downloaded local news apps paid for them (this doesn't include apps for non-local news or other content). At the moment, the only news producers successfully charging for most of their content online are those selling financial information to elite audiences -- the Financial Times is one, the Wall Street Journal is another, Bloomberg is a third -- all operations aimed at professional audiences, which means they are not a model that will work for general interest news.
If anything, the metrics of online news have become more confused, not less. Many believe that the economics of the web, and particularly online news, cannot really progress until the industry settles on how to measure audience. There is no consensus on what is the most useful measure of online traffic. Different rating agencies do not even agree on how to define a "unique visitor." Does that denote different people or does the same person visiting a site from different computers get counted more than once? The numbers from one top rating agency, comScore, are in some cases double and even triple those of another, Nielsen. More audience research data exist about each user than ever before. Yet in addition to confusion about what it means, it is almost impossible get a full sense of consumer behavior -- across sites, platforms, and devices. That leaves potential advertisers at a loss about how to connect the dots. In March 2011, three advertising trade groups, supported by other media associations, announced an initiative to improve and standardize confusing digital media metrics called Making Measurement Make Sense, but the task will not be easy.
Local news remains the vast untapped territory. Most traditional American media -- and much of U.S. ad revenue -- are local. The dynamics of that market online are still largely undefined. The potential, though, is clear. Already 40% of all online ad spending is local, up from 30% just a year earlier. But the market at the local level is different than nationally and requires different strategies, both in content creation and economics. Unlike national, at the local level, display advertising -- the kind that news organizations rely on -- is bigger than search, market researchers estimate. And the greatest local growth area last year was in highly targeted display ads that many innovators see as key to the future. Even Google, the king of search, sees display as "our next big business," as Eric Schmidt, its CEO, told the New York Times in September.
The nature of local news content is also in many ways undefined. While local has been the area of greatest ferment for nonprofit startups, no one has yet cracked the code for how to produce local news effectively at a sustainable level. The first major concept in more traditional venues, the push toward so-called "hyperlocalism," proved ill-conceived, expensive and insufficiently supported by ads. Yahoo!'s four-year old local news and advertising consortium has shown some success for certain participants but less for others. There are some prominent local news aggregators such as Topix and Examiner.com, and now AOL has entered the field with local reporting through Patch. Whether national networks will overtake small local startups or local app networks will mix news with a variety of other local information, the terrain here remains in flux.
The new conventional wisdom is that the economic model for news will be made up of many smaller and more complex revenue sources than before. The old news economic model was fairly simple. Broadcast television depended on advertising. Newspapers depended on circulation revenue and a few basic advertising categories. Cable was split -- half from advertising and half from cable subscription fees. Online, most believe there will be many different kinds of revenue. This is because no one revenue source looks large enough and because money is divided among so many players. In the biggest new revenue experiment of 2010, the discount sales coupon business led by Groupon, revenue can be split three ways when newspapers are involved. On the iPad, Apple gets 30% of the subscription revenue and owns the audience data. On the Android system, Google takes 10%. News companies are trying to push back. One new effort involves online publishers starting their own ad exchanges, rather than having middlemen do it for them. NBC, CBS and Forbes are among those launching their own, tired of sharing revenue and having third parties take their audience data.
The bailout of the car industry helped with the media's modest recovery in 2010. One overlooked dimension in the year past: A key source of renewed revenue in news in 2010 was the recovery in the car industry, aided by the decision to lend federal money to save U.S. carmakers. Auto advertising jumped 77% in local television, 22% in radio and 17% in magazines. The other benefactor of the news industry, say experts, was the U.S. Supreme Court: Its Citizens United decision allowing corporations and unions to buy political ads for candidates helped boost political advertising spent on local television to an estimated $2.2 billion, a new high for a midterm campaign year.

Make sure you check out Who Owns the Media (a section of this year's State of the Media), an interactive database of companies that own news properties in the United States. You can use this site to compare companies, explore each media sector, or read profiles of individual companies.

Aanother new report of note from Pew is: How mobile devices are changing community information environments by Kristen Purcell, Lee Rainie, Tom Rosenstiel, Amy Mitchell.

March CommQuote

2011-03-10T13:05:00.000-08:00

Freeman Dyson reviews James' Gleick's The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood in the March 10 2011 issue of THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. In this passage he introduces us to Claude Shannon, founding father of information theory.

For a hundred years after the electric telegraph, other communication systems such as the telephone, radio, and television were invented and developed by engineers without any need for higher mathematics. Then Shannon supplied the theory to understand all of these systems together, defining information as an abstract quantity inherent in a telephone message or a television picture. Shannon brought higher mathematics into the game.

When Shannon was a boy growing up on a farm in Michigan, he built a homemade telegraph system using Morse Code. Messages were transmitted to friends on neighboring farms, using the barbed wire of their fences to conduct electric signals. When World War II began, Shannon became one of the pioneers of scientific cryptography, working on the high-level cryptographic telephone system that allowed Roosevelt and Churchill to talk to each other over a secure channel. Shannon’s friend Alan Turing was also working as a cryptographer at the same time, in the famous British Enigma project that successfully deciphered German military codes. The two pioneers met frequently when Turing visited New York in 1943, but they belonged to separate secret worlds and could not exchange ideas about cryptography.

In 1945 Shannon wrote a paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography,” which was stamped SECRET and never saw the light of day. He published in 1948 an expurgated version of the 1945 paper with the title “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” The 1948 version appeared in the Bell System Technical Journal, the house journal of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and became an instant classic. It is the founding document for the modern science of information. After Shannon, the technology of information raced ahead, with electronic computers, digital cameras, the Internet, and the World Wide Web.

According to Gleick, the impact of information on human affairs came in three installments: first the history, the thousands of years during which people created and exchanged information without the concept of measuring it; second the theory, first formulated by Shannon; third the flood, in which we now live. The flood began quietly. The event that made the flood plainly visible occurred in 1965, when Gordon Moore stated Moore’s Law. Moore was an electrical engineer, founder of the Intel Corporation, a company that manufactured components for computers and other electronic gadgets. His law said that the price of electronic components would decrease and their numbers would increase by a factor of two every eighteen months. This implied that the price would decrease and the numbers would increase by a factor of a hundred every decade. Moore’s prediction of continued growth has turned out to be astonishingly accurate during the forty-five years since he announced it. In these four and a half decades, the price has decreased and the numbers have increased by a factor of a billion, nine powers of ten. Nine powers of ten are enough to turn a trickle into a flood.
In 1949, one year after Shannon published the rules of information theory, he drew up a table of the various stores of memory that then existed. The biggest memory in his table was the US Library of Congress, which he estimated to contain one hundred trillion bits of information. That was at the time a fair guess at the sum total of recorded human knowledge. Today a memory disc drive storing that amount of information weighs a few pounds and can be bought for about a thousand dollars.

Fame, Fortune, and Fitness at the Academy Awards

2011-02-28T07:28:00.000-08:00

Here's a different take on the Oscars, some 2007 research that looks at the Academy Awards competition through the lens of evolutionary fitness (need I say Natalie Portman?). From the Journal of Ethology, Volume 25, No. 2.

Fame, fortune, and fitness at the Academy Awards
by Mark E. Hauber

Abstract
People across many societies routinely participate in physical or intellectual competitions in the absence of immediate substantial monetary or other apparent material rewards. But increased fame and social status associated with awards, such as the "Oscars", need not be necessarily and solely a cultural construct unrelated to natural selection. Rather, prizes might be badges of honor if they are also honest indicators of evolutionary fitness. Analyses of reported reproductive success data, from a survey of well-known female and male actors, followed previously reported patterns of biological fitness in this sample of a human population. In addition, the numbers of Academy Awards received for acting were positively associated with reported numbers of biological children for both genders. The association of increased fitness with more awards received was statistically consistent even when considering that this subset of the population conformed to the Bateman effect in human reproduction: male actors had a more positive correlation than females between cumulative numbers of married partners and overall numbers of children. Honest signals of reproductive quality that are displayed by both sexes are expected to occur in humans and other species with costly biparental care and mutual mate choice.

International Media and Communication Statistics from NORDICOM

2011-02-25T12:08:00.000-08:00

Even the most qualitative researcher from time to time asks me for media use stats and I'm not always able to deliver. "There is a lack of comparative statistics on media communication," NORDICOM editors point out in the Foreword of their compilation of world media stats. A copy of A Sampler of International Media and Communication Statistics 2010, compiled by Sara Leckner and Ulrika Facht, is available on the web. (We also have a copy in print here in the ASC Library.) The volume provides access, distribution, revenue, and usage numbers the internet, radio, television, and newspapers for countries throughout the world.

CyberOrient

2011-02-23T08:04:00.000-08:00

It's a good time to be reading CyberOrient, a open access, peer-reviewed online journal of the virtual Middle East. Started in 2006, the journal is sponsored by the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association and based at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague. In the words of journal Editor-in-Chief, Daniel Martin Varisco:

The main purpose of this electronic journal is to provide a forum to explore cyberspace both as an imaginary forum in which only representation exists and as a technology that is fundamentally altering human interaction and communication. The next generation will take e-mail, websites and instant availability via cell-phones as basic human rights. Internet cafes may someday rival fast-food restaurants and no doubt will profitably merge together in due time. Yet, despite the advances in communication technology real people in the part of the world once called an “Orient” are still the victims of stereotypes and prejudicial reporting. Their world is getting more and more wired, so cyberspace becomes the latest battleground for the hearts and minds of people everywhere.

The current issue features: The Islam-Online Crisis: A Battle of Wasatiyya vs. Salafi Ideologies?; Overcoming the Digital Divide: The Internet and Political Mobilization in Egypt and Tunisia; Beyond the Traditional-Modern Binary: Faith and Identity in Muslim Women’s Online Matchmaking Profiles; New Media and Social-political Change in Iran; e-Islam: the Spanish Public Virtual Sphere, and a book review of Vit Sissler's Islam Dot Com: Contemporary Discourses in Cyberspace.

Introducing NewspaperCat

2011-02-14T12:42:00.000-08:00

Nice news from a colleague at the University of Florida, announcing a new resource called NewspaperCat.

NewspaperCat is an online database providing links to over 1000 full-text digital newspapers in the United States and Caribbean. The project’s current coverage, which began with the Southeastern United States, is growing rapidly and will soon cover all fifty states. The purpose of NewspaperCat is to improve access to historical newspapers digitized by libraries, archives, historical societies and other non-profit organizations that remain buried within search engine returns such as Google PageRank. These newspapers represent a rich source of primary research material for researchers, students, and the general public. The project to build NewspaperCat was funded by the George A. Smathers Libraries and developed with the cooperation of the Digital Library Center of the University of Florida.

Adam Gopnik on New Books About the Internet

2011-02-14T07:02:00.000-08:00

Feature-writer Adam Gopnik proffers an insightful roundup of recent book chatter about the Internet in the February 14 issue of The New Yorker. The piece, How the Internet Gets Inside Us, Gopnik corals the current book-buzz of Internet fretters and speculators into three categories:

"...the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment."

Books mentioned, grouped in the above categories respectively, are:

Cognitive Surplus, by Clay Shirky
Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?, edited by John Brockman
The Book in the Renaissance, by Andrew Pettegree
The Sixth Language, edited by Robert K. Logan

The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr
Hamlet’s BlackBerry, by William Powers
Alone Together, by Sherry Turkle

Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age, by Ann Blair

February Commquote

2011-02-09T13:31:00.000-08:00

This month's feature is a poem that appeared in The South Carolina Review a few years ago (Volume 40, Number 1, Fall 2007). The poet is Michael Cadnum.

Foreign Tongue

Pay too much for the great pink
naked hares I carried through
the flies and the lottery ticket sellers
those weeks before the gunfire.
We wanted to be alone in the world, but we settled

for being bad at it, taping past tenses
to the kitchen shelf. One day
you didn't have to peek into the book,
and began flirting with the accountant
upstairs, and the owner of the broom shop,

dustpans and pirated DVDs. This was before we
burned the early footage, me jockeying
the delete button, you getting
it all with your ultimate megapixels,
and before we stayed awake all night,

shots--those silvery automatics every cop sported in white
leather holsters--pricking up and down
the mud river. What lasted and what didn't--
the aqueduct, the pagan temples, contrasted
with your patience in watching me sweat

the local dialect, mayors and grandees
disappearing every night, carved into the outgoing
wakes ebbing down the whitebait-
angry moon.

--Michael Cadnum

2011 Winter/Spring Booknotes

2011-02-03T10:18:00.000-08:00

African Americans in Television: Behind the Scenes, by Gregory Adamo (Peter Lang, 2010). Much has been written about African Americans on the little screen, but this book takes a look at their roles as producers, directors, writers, and executives.

Art for the Middle Classes: America's Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s, edited by Cynthia Lee Patterson (University Press of Mississippi). Traces the history of a group of mass-circulation magazines known as the Philadelphia pictorials, which brought fine-art reproductions to the attention of the middle class.

Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences, by Philip M. Napoli (Columbia University Press; 248 pages; $82.50 hardcover, $27.50 paperback). Topics include new technologies for evaluating audience demographics and response beyond traditional metrics.

Audience Evolution: New Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audiences, by Philip Napoli (Columbia, 2010). “Offers a rich and original synthesis of the many factors that help construct the audience, as well as the social, economic, and legal consequences of that process, and he has a real talent for creating a cohesive, interesting, and important story. Expansive and important, Audience Evolution is grounded in the relevant bodies of theory and ultimately enlightening.”-- James G. Webster, Northwestern University

The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting Over New Media, by Ilana Gershon (Cornell, 2010). “A fascinating and thoroughly researched anthropological account of how Facebook, instant messaging, and texting reformat the media ecologies within which todays friendships and romantic relationships function and fracture. There is nothing virtual, Ilana Gershon shows, about these online arenas. Across a wide range of human relations, the form of interaction turns out to be just as crucial as its content. --Stefan Helmreich, MIT

The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, by Susie Linfield (University of Chicago, 2010). “A profoundly thoughtful account of the role of photojournalism in an irremediably violent world, Linfield’s book is as much about conscience and empathy as it is about photography. Examining images from the Spanish Civil War to Rwanda, she accepts no easy, sweeping answers. Rather, with vivid common sense and with painstaking, often abashed humanity, she guides us through the moral minefield where horror meets art, and helps us to see.”—Claudia Roth Pierpont

Entertaining Politics: Satiric Television and Political Engagement, 2nd edition, by Jeffrey P. Jones (Roman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010). This is a second edition but it’s completely revised and updated, including eight new chapters.

History of the Internet and the Digital Future, by Johnny Ryan (University of Chicago, 2010). “Tells the story of the development of the Internet from the 1950s to the present, and examines how the balance of power has shifted between the individual and the state in the areas of censorship, copyright infringement, intellectual freedom and terrorism and warfare.” –Publisher’s website

Images of Black Modernism: Verbal and Visual Strategies of the Harlem Renaissance, by Miriam Thaggert (University of Massachusetts, 2010). Considers how visual elements were used in poems, novels, and photography to undermine stereotypes; focuses on the years 1922 to 1938.

Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture, edited by David Serlin (University of Minnesota, 2010). Contributors examine historical and contemporary visual practices—Chinese health fairs, documentary films produced by the World Health Organization, illness maps, fashions for nurses, and live surgery on the Internet—in order to delve into the political and epidemiological contexts underlying their creation and dissemination.

Insect Media: An Anthology of Animals and Technology, by Jussi Parikka (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). "Offers a theory of media that challenges our traditional views of the natural and the artificial. Parikka not only understands insects through the lens of media and mediation, he also unearths an insect logic at the heart of our contemporary fascination with networks, swarming, and intelligent agents. Such a project requires the ability to interweave cultural theory with a deep understanding of the sciences—something for which Parikka is well-suited. Most importantly, Insect Media reminds us of the non-human aspect of media, communication, intelligence. Insect Media is a book that is sure to create a buzz." —Eugene Thacker

Invasion of the Mind Snatchers: Television’s Conquest of American in the Fifties, by Eric Burns (Temple, 2010). Charts the rise of television in the Fifties and its cultural context.

Mass Appeal: The Formative Age of Movies, Radio, and TV, by Edward D. Berkowitz (Cambridge, 2010). This book takes a biographical approach to understanding the development of the American mass media with a series of profiles/vignettes of influential players.

Media Events in a Global Age, edited by Nick Couldry, Andreas Hepp, and Frederich Krotz (Routledge, 2010). "In this extremely useful and deeply thoughtful collection of essays, the ‘media events’ model developed by Katz and Dayan in the early 1990s is recovered, critically rethought and then thoroughly recontextualised for a new media environment: one that is post-broadcast, increasingly digital, both global and fragmented, and shaped by entertainment and celebrity cultures as much as by news and information. This is an excellent collection, that will enable new kinds of argument about, and hopefully research into, the spectacular functions of the contemporary media." - Graeme Turner, University of Queensland, Australia

Media, Power, and Politics in the Digital Age: The 2009 Presidential Election Uprising in Iran, edited by Yahya R. Kamalipour (Rowman & Littlefield, 2010). Writings on internal and external media coverage of the election and the mass demonstrations that followed; topics include Iranian dissidents' use of Twitter and other media and how U.S. sanctions are harming the online opposition to the Islamic regime.

Militainment, Inc: War, Media, and Popular Culture, by Roger Stahl (Routledge, 2010). “Examines a wide range of historical and contemporary media examples to demonstrate the ways that war now invites audiences to enter the spectacle as an interactive participant through a variety of channels—from news coverage to online video games to reality television. Simply put, rather than presenting war as something to be watched, the new interactive militainment presents war as something to be played and experienced vicariously. Stahl examines the challenges that this new mode of militarized entertainment poses for democracy, and explores the controversies and resistant practices that it has inspired.”—Publisher’s website

News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance, by Pablo J. Boczkowski (University of Chicago Press, 2010). Considers how new organizations' ability to keep close tabs on competition via constantly updated Websites is contributing to a sameness in coverage; focuses on the Argentine newspapers Clarin and La Nacion with discussion of similar developments in the United States.

Newsgames: Journalism at Play, by Ian Bogost, Simon Ferrari, and Bobby Schweizer (MIT, 2010). "Posits an essential upgrade to the historical relationship between games and news—far beyond digitization of your morning crossword puzzle. This book is critical reading for those interested in emerging journalistic forms wherein the power of playful systems is harnessed to explicate the events of the day."—Tracy Fullerton, University of Southern California

Old and New Media After Katrina, edited by Diane Negra (Palgrave Macmillan,2010). Essays on the experience and public memory of the 2005 disaster, including representations in television, documentary film, and National Public Radio.

Reel Power: Hollywood Cinema and American Supremacy, by Matthew Alford (Pluto Press, 2010). Examines links between Hollywood and the Defense Department, CIA, and weapons contractors; finds that most films have an uncritical view of U.S. power.

Selling War in a Media Age: The Presidency and Public Opinion in the American Century, edited by Kenneth Osgood and Andrew K. Frank (University Press of Florida, 2010). “From the Spanish-American War to the War on Terror, each chapter in Selling War in a Media Age explains how modern presidents have influenced, coerced, directed, and led public opinion over matters of war and peace since 1898. While some essays highlight the systematic efforts by American presidents to gain public support for war and international conflict, many more reveal that there were limits to what presidential persuasion could accomplish.”—Publisher’s website

Starring Mandela and Cosby, by Ron Krabill (University of Chicago, 2010) “Ron Krabill has provided students of race, television, and cultural exchange with a new landmark that we all must read--and will all enjoy. In an era when we are told that race should not matter, TV is finished, and cultural exchange has been eased through YouTube, he brings us back to reality. Bravo!”—Toby Miller, University of California, Riverside.

Television and Presidential Power in Putin's Russia, by Tina Burrett (Routledge, 2010). Describes how increased control of the media figured in Putin's expansion of presidential and state power.

Trauma and Media: Theories, Histories, and Images, by Allen Meek (Routledge , 2010). “Provides the first comprehensive account of trauma as a critical concept in the study of modern visual media, from Freud to the present day, explaining how contemporary trauma studies emerged from research on Holocaust representation in which the audiovisual testimony of survivors was posed as an authentic alternative to popular television and film dramatizations. It argues that the media coverage of 9/11 and the subsequent 'war on terror,' however, has revealed how the formation of communities of witness and commemoration around 'traumatic events' can perpetuate violence and inequality.” –Publisher’s website

The Tube Has Spoken: Reality TV & History, edited by Julie Anne Taddeo and Ken Dvorak (The University Press of Kentucky, 2010). “Offers a wide range of essays from the top names in the field…A must-read for students, professionals, and the general public;it is the single best volume available on the topic to date." --Wheeler Winston Dixon, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

VOICE: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media, edited by Norie Neumark, Ross Gibson, and Theo Van Leeuwen (MIT, 2010). “Voice has returned to both theoretical and artistic agendas. In the digital era, techniques and technologies of voice have provoked insistent questioning of the distinction between the human voice and the voice of the machine, between genuine and synthetic affect, between the uniqueness of an individual voice and the social and cultural forces that shape it. This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on these topics from history, philosophy, cultural theory, film, dance, poetry, media arts, and computer games. Many chapters demonstrate Lewis Mumford's idea of the "cultural preparation" that precedes technological innovation—that socially important new technologies are foreshadowed in philosophy, the arts, and everyday pastimes.”—Publisher’s website

Watching TV is Not Required: Thinking About Media and Thinking About Thinking, by Bernard McGrane and John Gunderson (Routledge, 2010). "McGrane and Gunderson have put together an extraordinarily provocative stream of sociologically inspired responses to television [and] give new life to sociological thinking."—Jack Katz, University of California

Climate Change and the Media

2011-01-24T09:49:00.000-08:00

The November 2010 issue of Public Understanding of Science has several articles on climate change and the media. The journal is available from the Penn Libraries e-journals.

Climates of risk: A field analysis of global climate change in US media discourse, 1997-2004, by John Sonnett.

Emotional anchoring and objectification in the media reporting on climate change, by Birgitta Höijer.

To frame is to explain: A deductive frame-analysis of Dutch and French climate change coverage during the annual UN Conferences of the Parties, by Astrid Dirikx and Dave Gelders.
Evaluating the effects of ideology on public understanding of climate change science: How to improve communication across ideological divides? by Asim Zia and Anne Marie Todd.

News Frontier Database

2011-01-12T13:06:00.000-08:00

Columbia Journalism Review has just launched a new initiative called The News Frontier Database which it boasts on its homepage as:

...a searchable, living, and ongoing documentation of digital news outlets across the country. Featuring originally reported profiles and extensive data sets on each outlet, the NFDB is a tool for those who study or pursue online journalism, a window into that world for the uninitiated, and, like any journalistic product, a means by which to shed light on an important topic. We plan to build the NFDB into the most comprehensive resource of its kind.

Right now the site is more potential than anything else, a promising shell that will build up quickly. So far, for instance, under Arts and Culture there are only five outlets listed; under Education there are none. Once populated however, one can envision the usefulness of being able to search online news outlets by location, affiliation, staff and volunteer sizes, subject categories and business models.

Criteria for news organization inclusion are stated as follows:(1) Digital news sites included in the NFDB should be primarily devoted to original reporting and content production. (2) With rare exceptions, the outlet should have at least one full-time employee. (3) The digital news site should be something other than the web arm of a legacy media entity. (There’s no doubt that some of the most important online journalism is being produced by the websites of newspapers and other legacy media, but this database is devoted to a new kind of publication.) (4) The digital news site should be making a serious effort to sustain its work financially, whether that be through advertising, grants, or other revenue sources. (The language and spirit of this last criterion borrow from the work of Michele McLellan.)

Themed Journal Issue on Crisis Communication

2011-01-10T12:57:00.000-08:00

Media International Australia (No. 137, November 2010) is titled The Victorian Bushfires and Other Extreme Weather Events: Case Studies in Crisis, Culture and Communications. Edited by Louise North and Jason Bainbridge, its focus is on media coverage of the 2009 Australian bushfires (Black Saturday) that killed 173 people and displace some 7,500 others. In addition to articles on the bushfires the issue includes a content analysis of local news representations of women in Hurricane Katrina and a piece on the role of social media and public information management during the 2009 tsunami threat to New Zealand. The issue takes on a rather prescient tinge in light of the recent Biblical-proportion-flooding in Queensland. Hopefully the scholarship in this area, as the editors hope, has some influence on practice though it's hard to imagine on the local front with Mother Nature delivering her latest blow just a month after the issue's publication.

Media International Australia is available in the ASC Library.

January CommQuote

2011-01-07T12:40:00.000-08:00

Our quote this first month in the New Year is from Zadie Smith's meditation on Facebook via The Social Network and Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto in The New York Review of Books (November 25, 2010).

Why? Why Facebook? Why this format? Why do it like that? Why not do it another way? The striking thing about the real Zuckerberg, in video and in print, is the relative banality of his ideas concerning the “Why” of Facebook. He uses the word “connect” as believers use the word “Jesus,” as if it were sacred in and of itself: “So the idea is really that, um, the site helps everyone connect with people and share information with the people they want to stay connected with….” Connection is the goal. The quality of that connection, the quality of the information that passes through it, the quality of the relationship that connection permits—none of this is important. That a lot of social networking software explicitly encourages people to make weak, superficial connections with each other (as Malcolm Gladwell has recently argued¹), and that this might not be an entirely positive thing, seem to never have occurred to him.

Master programmer and virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier (b. 1960) is not of my generation, but he knows and understands us well, and has written a short and frightening book, You Are Not a Gadget...Lanier is interested in the ways in which people “reduce themselves” in order to make a computer’s description of them appear more accurate. “Information systems,” he writes, “need to have information in order to run, but information underrepresents reality” (my italics). In Lanier’s view, there is no perfect computer analogue for what we call a “person.” In life, we all profess to know this, but when we get online it becomes easy to forget. In Facebook, as it is with other online social networks, life is turned into a database, and this is a degradation...We know the consequences of this instinctively; we feel them. We know that having two thousand Facebook friends is not what it looks like. We know that we are using the software to behave in a certain, superficial way toward others. We know what we are doing “in” the software. But do we know, are we alert to, what the software is doing to us? Is it possible that what is communicated between people online “eventually becomes their truth”? What Lanier, a software expert, reveals to me, a software idiot, is what must be obvious (to software experts): software is not neutral. Different software embeds different philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible...
Lanier wants us to be attentive to the software into which we are “locked in.” Is it really fulfilling our needs? Or are we reducing the needs we feel in order to convince ourselves that the software isn’t limited?
...Software may reduce humans, but there are degrees. Fiction reduces humans, too, but bad fiction does it more than good fiction, and we have the option to read good fiction. Jaron Lanier’s point is that Web 2.0 “lock-in” happens soon; is happening; has to some degree already happened. And what has been “locked in”? It feels important to remind ourselves, at this point, that Facebook, our new beloved interface with reality, was designed by a Harvard sophomore with a Harvard sophomore’s preoccupations. What is your relationship status? (Choose one. There can be only one answer. People need to know.) Do you have a “life”? (Prove it. Post pictures.) Do you like the right sort of things? (Make a list. Things to like will include: movies, music, books and television, but not architecture, ideas, or plants.)

Pew Report on Generational Differences in Online Activity

2010-12-17T07:33:00.000-08:00

Just released, Generations Online in 2009, from Pew Intenet & American Life Project. This report tracks internet use across generations.

From the Report's Overview:

"...the biggest online trend is that, while the very youngest and oldest cohorts may differ, certain key internet uses are becoming more uniformly popular across all age groups. These online activities include seeking health information, purchasing products, making travel reservations, and downloading podcasts.
Even in areas that are still dominated by Millennials, older generations are making notable gains. While the youngest generations are still significantly more likely to use social network sites, the fastest growth has come from internet users 74 and older: social network site usage for this oldest cohort has quadrupled since 2008, from 4% to 16%.

The primary adult data in this report is based on the findings of a daily tracking survey on Americans' use of the Internet. The results in this report are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International between April 29 and May 30, 2010, among a sample of 2,252 adults ages 18 and older, including 744 reached on a cell phone. Interviews were conducted in English."

Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers

2010-12-17T06:31:00.000-08:00

Remember, however meagerly we go about our daily lives, the Library of Congress is relentlessly building its digital tower of historical newspapers. Just this past week it uploaded a new batch of titles into Chronicling America, bringing its current total number of pages to 3.1 million, 414 newspapers from 23 states between 1899-1922. Chronicling America newspapers can be searched with words or phrases; or, for a broader, more regional approach, once can search by one or more states. Of course, this being the Library of Congress, this database is an open web resource, available to all, no UPenn status required.

Chronicling America is sponsored jointly by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Library of Congress as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).

Two New Reference Books on Social Movement Media, Political Communication

2010-12-15T12:37:00.000-08:00

Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media, edited by John D. H. Downing (Sage, 2010). A one-volume encyclopedia featuring over 250 essays on the role of media in social movements in the 20th and 21st centuries. "Thematic essays address selected issues such as human rights media, indigenous peoples' media, and environmentalist media, and on key concepts widely used in the field such as alternative media, citizens' media, and community media. The encyclopedia engages with all communication media: broadcasting, print, cinema, the Internet, popular song, street theater, graffiti, and dance" (publisher's website).

Key themes include: Cinema, Television, and Video; Cultural Contestations; Feminist Media; Gay and Lesbian Media; Human Rights Media; Independence Movement Media; Indigenous Peoples' Media; Information Policy Activism; Internet;Labor Media; News; Performance Art Media; Popular Song; Press; Radio; and Regions.

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Sourcebook for Political Communication Research:Methods, Measures, and Analytical Techniques, by Erik P. Bucy, R. Lance Holbert (Routledge, 2010).

"...covers the major analytical techniques used in political communication research, including surveys, experiments, content analysis, discourse analysis (focus groups and textual analysis), network and deliberation analysis, comparative study designs, statistical analysis, and measurement issues. It also includes such innovations as the use of advanced statistical techniques, and addresses digital media as a means through which to disseminate as well as study political communication. It considers the use of methods adapted from other disciplines, such as psychology, sociology, and neuroscience." --Publisher's website

Look for the chapter co-authored by Kathleen Hall Jamieson with Kate Kenski (ASC alum '06) and Jeffrey Gottfried (ASC PhD candidate) titled: The Rolling Cross-Section: Design and Utility for Political Research.

Both these title can be found at in ASC Reference.

Searching Pictures in Lexis-Nexis?

2010-12-10T11:22:00.000-08:00

Doesn't seem possible does it? Since there are hardly any images in Lexis-Nexis Academic documents. All true, but when an image is included in an article it is tagged with metadata that is maintained and can be searched on. As Jennifer Matheny explains in a Lexis-Nexis Wiki post a couple months back:

Are you curious to see how many newspapers re-ran an Annie Liebovitz photo on a particular day? Do you want to know how many Getty Images are used by newspapers this month? Use the GRAPHIC section in your search!

On the Power Search form, select a publication or a group file. Then, the Add Section search should pop up. Select "GRAPHIC" from the drop-down box. Type in your term and click the blue Add to Search button.

Of course you still can't view the pictures but sometimes all you want are counts, pictures of Palin versus pictures of Biden, for instance, or such search results provide an interim step for locating pictures elsewhere--on microfilm or electronic files that offer page facsimiles.

Special issue of Topia

2010-12-10T06:44:00.000-08:00

"Cultures of Militarization" is the topic of a special double issue of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies (23-24, 2010).

This special double issue adds perspective to the rampant militarization of everyday civilian culture. Edited by Jody Berland (York University) and Blake Fitzpatrick (Ryerson University), "Cultures of Militarization" features contributions from twenty-two international scholars and artists whose work investigates the processes through which military presence is normalized or critiqued in private, public and national narratives.

Articles

Introduction: Cultures of Militarization and the Military-Cultural Complex (the editors)

A.L. McCready Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round Public Discourse, National Identity and the War: Neoliberal Militarization and the Yellow Ribbon Campaign in Canada

Howard Fremeth Searching for the Militarization of Canadian Culture: The Rise of a Military-Cultural Memory Network

Carole R. McKenna Canadian and American Cultures of Militarism: Coping Mechanisms in a Military-Industrial-Service-Complex

Uli Linke Fortress Europe: Globalization, Militarization and the Policing of the Interior Borderland

Markus Kienscherf Plugging Cultural Knowledge into the U.S. Military Machine: The Neo-Orientalist Logic of Counterinsurgency

Neil Balan Corrective for Cultural Studies: Beyond the Militarization Thesis to the New Military Intelligence

Erin Riley Operation Nunalivut - Photo Essay

Susan Cahill Conflict(ing) Narratives: Representations of War in "The Battleground Project" and the Performative Potential of its Audience

Marc Lafleur Tracing the Absent-Present of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in America as Sensuous Encounter: Notes on (Nuclear) Ruins

Mary Alemany-Galway Peter Jackson's use of Hollywood Film Genres in The Lord of the Rings and New Zealand's Anti-nuclear Stance

Stuart Allan and Kari Anden-Papadopoulos Come on, let us shoot! : Wikileaks, Militarization and Journalism

Bill Burns Extraterritorial prison plans and a play list in the style of IKEA - Art Work

David Clearwater Living in a Militarized Culture: War, Games and the Experience of U.S. Empire

Ian Roderick Mil-bot Fetishism: The Pataphysics of Military Robots

Mary Sterpa King Preparing the Instantaneous Battlespace: a Cultural Examination of Network Centric Warfare

Gary Genosko The Terrorist Entrepreneur

James R. Compton Fear and Spectacle on the Planet of Slums

Christopher Dornan Unknown Soldiers: On the Comparative Absence of the Military from Canadian Entertainment Film and Television

Jim Daems "i wish war wud fuck off:" bill bissett's Critique of the Military-Cultural Complex"

Darin Barney Miserable Priests and Ordinary Cowards: On Being a Professor

This issue is available in print at the ASC Library.

December CommQuote

2010-12-01T12:17:00.000-08:00

Our quote this month features a profoundly hilarious take on interpersonal communication. Leave it to The New Yorker (December 6, 2010). The cartoonist is Bruce Eric Kaplan.

"Did you remember to do everything I asked, even the small things I said in passing that didn't sound like real requests?"

The Rothenberg Political Report

2010-11-18T10:45:00.000-08:00

For all you political junkies out there, Penn Libraries now subscribes to THE ROTHENBERG POLITICAL REPORT, a non-partisan newsletter covering U.S. House, Senate, and gubernatorial campaigns, Presidential politics, and political developments. Some of the pieces that appear in the Report are reprinted from Roll Call, where the Report's editor and publisher, Stuart Rothenberg, is a twice-a-week columnist. Rothenberg is an academic (holds a Ph.D. in political science, has taught) but these days is one of the most respected political analysts/observers on the Washington scene. From his bio: "A frequent soundbite, Mr. Rothenberg has appeared on Meet the Press, This Week, Face the Nation, The NewsHour, Nightline and many other television programs. He is often quoted in the nation’s major media, and his op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers." The Rothenberg Report's archive on the site goes back to 2005.

Harvard to Digitize 80,000 Hours Israel Broadcasting Authority Content

2010-11-04T13:25:00.000-07:00

The Jerusalem Post (10/27/2020) reports:

The Israel Broadcasting Authority and Harvard University signed an agreement Tuesday to digitize 80,000 hours of recordings dating back to the pre-state period.
...History conscious people at the IBA were aware that the technology of yesteryear was fast becoming obsolete and unless the archives were transferred to a system compatible with today’s technology, they would continue to deteriorate and a great deal of valuable information about the development of the state, issues that transfixed or galvanized the nation, and, most important perhaps, the voices and images of national icons would disappear.

The problem, as always, was the cost factor. With its huge deficit, the IBA simply could not enter into a multi-million dollar arrangement.

But what may have spurred the IBA to risk at least part of the cost, was the damage done by water leaks and building faults to precious books, manuscripts and other documents stored in the archives of the National Library....
After long months of negotiations [three years] with Harvard, an agreement was reached whereby the IBA would transfer copies of some of its archives to Harvard, which would digitize them, keep one copy for the library of the university’s Judaica Department and send another copy to the IBA.

The process is due to begin next week, and Harvard, as under the previous agreement, will keep a copy for itself.

Top books on the First Amendment

2010-11-03T07:35:00.001-07:00

In the latest American Journalism (Winter, 2010), David W. Bulla reviews his choices for the best books on the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. You can read his annotations for each book in the article itself which can be found in Communications & Mass Media Complete (enter from Library webpage) or in paper in the Annenberg Library.

Titles that make his list of twelve:

The Idea of a Free Press: The Enlightenment and Its Unruly Legacy by David Copeland

Living the Bill of Rights: How to Be an Authentic American by Nat Hentoff

The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War by Frank L. Klement Emergence of Free Press by Leonard W. Levy

The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties by Mark E. Neely, Jr.

Freedom's Champion: Elijah Lovejoy by Paul Simon

War and Press Freedom: The Problem of Prerogative Power by Jeffrey A. Smith

Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism by Geoffrey R. Stone

Free Speech, the People's Darling Privilege: Struggles for Freedom of Expression in American History by Michael Kent Curtis

The Free and Open Press: The Founding of American Democratic Press Liberty, 1640-1800 by Robert W. T. Martin

Free Speech in Its Forgotten Years by David M. Rabbin

Freedom of the Press in England 1476-1776: The Rise and Decline of Government Control by Fredrick S. Siebert.