shouting loudly

Justin Elliott has an interesting post up at Salon today.  It concerns “The Freedom Community,” a secret e-mail list made up of conservative journalists and policy-types.  I can’t say much more about the list itself, because it’s secret.  Its very existence has been scrubbed from Google-Groups since he contacted one of its participants with questions. [...]

Eli Pariser, the former Executive Director of MoveOn, has a new book out on the social impacts of the internet.  It’s quite good – reminiscent of Cass Sunstein’s Republic.com and Infotopia, in that it is utterly readable, carefully constructed, and critical in tenor.  The important difference between Pariser’s book and Sunstein’s books is temporal in [...]

I was dismayed to learn that AT&T is trying to buy T-Mobile for a whopping $39 billion. AT&T can use the extra towers to improve reception in very crowded metropolitan areas, but the decrease in competition and likely resulting increase in price is a big problem. People who sell a product charge what the market [...]

Note: I’ll be spending the next few months writing a book about the new generation of internet-mediated political groups.  This post will be my first “book blog,” in which I try out new ideas that I’m planning to include in the manuscript.  Book blog pieces will be less tied to the politics-of-the-day, and will be [...]

[Update: read Jay Rosen's account and analysis of how this all turned out.  I agree entirely.] There’s a post I meant to write after the Shirley Sherrod incident this summer.  Instead it became a lecture that I give to my students in my Media, Government, and Politics seminar at Rutgers.  Given ABC’s announcement last night [...]

The latest news on the Tea Party is, unsurprisingly, pretty bad.  The National Tea Party Federation expelled Mark Williams, the head of Tea Party Express, on Saturday after the racist screed he’d “satirically” published to his website.  I won’t reward his site with any additional google-juice, so instead I’ll recommend this article by Eugene Robinson [...]

As two recent stories point out, our actual telescreens cost hundreds of dollars and have designer labels.

Our virtual interfaces are more real and recognizable to us than the physical interfaces through which we access them

Professor Lessig is presenting on Institutional Corruption today at the Kennedy School as his first public appearance at Harvard since his return a few months ago. Professor Lessig likes to introduce three ideas to frame his talk today: 1) influence, 2) independence and 3) responsibility. Relying on his framework of the four modalities of control [...]

Over at Public Knowledge, Robb Topolski has written an inspirational post, ISPs Behaving Badly, which criticizes Time Warner’s trial runs at tiered pricing. I’m not opposed to tiered pricing in principle, though TW appears to have handled it rather badly, and it still fails to solve the root problem of weak competition in the wireline [...]