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Learning and Resources -- Articles, organizations, mailing lists, web sites, etc.
Doing something about it
a little bit on Privacy
Censorship -- A little detail about the Communications Decency Act and selected surrounding events
Marty Rimm and the irresponsible, inflammatory 'cyberporn' study
One way that I define media is as everything
that goes on among us (human beings). This includes everything
from art to language, conversation to war, drumming to the Net,
and of course much much more.
One of the realizations that has most stunned me about the Net
is that it is not just one new medium but many. For example, the
web is as different from e-mail as the television is from the
telephone, or film is from music. I don't believe that the Net
is inevitably the messiah, here to save us. I also don't believe
that it is evil incarnate, and we're doomed to big-brotherhood.
I'm tired of the hype. What the Net is and will be depends on
what we, the human beings using (and those not using) it do with
it. Sure, each medium (on and off the Net) has inherent characteristics.
That's why it's important to realize that the Net has been and
will be the birthing grounds of many new media, and we can experiment
to find/create media that serve us well.
My preference is to focus on how we can pro-actively organize
all media, including the new media of the Net to help humans be
healthy, and learn. See my:
Short list of positive media possiblities -- Building
a better media
As time goes by, this will get longer. Please feel free to submit
comments/additions to me at johnca@ourpla.net.
Unfortunately, it often feels a lot easier and more urgent to
find out about threats to healthy media.
We won't even get the chance to see the Net grow in good ways
without a legal environment that allows it. Radio and television
were each hyped as inevitable paths for the people to communicate
with each other, cutting out the imposing of power from above.
But the powers-that-be (by conspiracy and/or natural systems-reaction,
according to your preference) responded so as to maintain their
power through both media. Radio and TV were (and still are, except
see the free radio movement) limited almost exclusively to large
broadcasters requiring large dollar-inputs. And the same kind
of response is already at work on the Net. Then of course there's
straightforward censorship. Not to mention privacy, encryption,
signatures, workplace issues, international issues and technical
issues. See my:
Long list of media hazards -- Working
for minimal media rights
This is of course radically incomplete, and in part an expression of my political views. Please let me know at johnca@ourpla.net of other Net and non-Net efforts that are grass-roots in nature, or in any case truly interested in the human good, meaning *all* the 5.7+ billion of us humans, and by extension, the whole ecosphere/solar system, and if they're ever out there, interstellar society. And of course this sub-culture of the Net. What makes for a healthy media? I want it on this list. Annotation and extension as I get around to it.
Political Participation Project
The Taxpayer Assets Project -- working to make sure that public documents are easily available on-line
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility -- If you're a computer professional (or even if you're not :), join!
Community Nets: Online Resource Guide
Coalition for Networked Information
Computer Mediated Communication
The Information Society Journal
Virtual Societies: Their Prospects and Dilemmas
Brainstorms (Howard Rheingold's page)
Project Xanadu
Computer Literacy Bookshops
CyberLaw
Netizens
League for Programming Freedom (LPF)
OpenMtg Sched [AZConnect]
US ACM Home Page
order Unauthorized Access
9DEC95_02128
Awakening Technology -- When Peter + Trudy Johnson-Lenz coined the term 'groupware' they intended to include some values and a lot about process. Only a few software developers are beginning to get it. Peter + Trudy's work continues.Of course this thread of using technology to integrate a group's communication process traces back through Douglas Engelbart and Vanevar Bush.
Also of interest is Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning, There Was the Command Line"
Berkeley Internet Online
Free Radio Berkeley -- and other Free Radio links
Paper Tiger -- excellent catalog of video documentaries
FAIR -- Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting -- pointing out corporate and right-leaning biases in the mass media
Good media requires attention to process--that is, attention
to the dynamics that are going on *among* whatever the elements
are of the particular medium. The processes I am most familiar
with are in small groups of people. So here's a web site I manage:
The Center for Group Learning
(CGL)
CGL's Other
Links
This is not a test. This is only part of an emergency that will
go on until we find a better way (including all of us) to decide
how
has dealt with the Net as it will deal with it. It will be
more difficult to make changes later, and the broad outlines are
being drawn now. How they solidify will affect the future development
of the Net and of people for the next decades and beyond.
My biggest concern now is that all the censorship stuff is just
a (very tangible) smokescreen to keep us from looking at the other
unpleasant aspects of the telecommunications deregulation. Three
major mergers are already underway -- SBC and Pacific Telesis,
NYNEX and Bell Atlantic (all baby bells), and US West has enacted
a US $5.8B merger with Continental Cablevision, a major US cable
company. It's not impossible that within a few years there will
be just a handful of companies controlling telecommunications
in the USA. This is not a good thing.
Those mergers are ancient history, now we have AT&T buying up most of the cable industry, Verizon gobbling a significant chunk of ILECs and long-distance/wireless businesses, and of course AOL/TimeWarner.
Here's just a few telecommunications
deregulation effects.
There are some potentially positive opportunities from the '96
Telecommunications act as well. Check out the Benton
Foundation.
CPSR - The Telecom
Post -- regular posting about the latest in legislation battles
etc.
Net
Politics news on Pathfinder -- many articles on the CDA and
other net politics
Talk with people about it. Continue to educate yourself about it. Contribute to organizations working in a way that seems helpful to you. Give your time and energy when you can to organize things. Following is largely a list of work guaranteeing minimums or working *against* the bad things. Up above on this page is a list of things about media to work for, build, or do pro-actively.
In one of several lawsuits to block the CDA, over 56,000 individuals,
and many organizations, have joined the Citizens Internet Empowerment
Coalition (CIEC) challenging the CDA in court. You can join
CIEC too!
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Action Alerts
Excellent, though somewhat out of date, activism page if you want
to work with others concerned about censorship
on the Net
Congressional
Votes & Contact List -- provided by Computer
Currents magazine
MicroTimes
Freedom & Privacy Page
Huge issue--To big for me to cover. Starting points:
EPIC -- a privacy organization
The U.S. Congress passed the Communications Decency Act (CDA),
an amendment to the Telecommunications Reform bill in January;
the President signed it on February 8, 1996. The CDA bans "indecent"
material on the Internet (up to 2 years in prison, up to $250,000
in fines for violating the law). Legally, "indecent"
is a community-based standard (what does that mean on the world-spanning
Net?), and could include Shakespeare, song lyrics, parts of the
bible, and AIDS information, as well as the smut that is all the
amendment's proponents talk about.
See
the Communications "Decency" Act -- look for S 652
(from the 95-96 session)
Read the letters
Yahoo! received in response to turning their pages black as
part of the 48-hour protest after the bill was signed.
Free
Speech Online
24
hours of Democracy is an essay project -- See over 1000 (and
growing) amazingly diverse people's essays explaining why they
support free speech on the Net. Add yours! Here's
my very short essay, and a few quotes.
The Platform for
Internet Content Selection (PICS) is a much less damaging
way** for adults to restrict minors from material they don't want
them to see. It allows multiple rating systems for parents/teachers/others
to choose from, and has been developed by a lot of technical folks,
including many of the big computer companies.
**Update! Unfortunately, the 'multiple rating systems' is turning
into three that aren't very complex, and the ACLU
is worried about the centrally-controlled bland system becoming
legally or de facto widespread. Apparently Netscape and Microsoft
have already signed onto PICS. See SethF
writing on the Censorware Project.
San
Francisco Examiner article on Net censorship
The
Indecency Page -- Pointers to the sites that are offensive
to some.
Freedom
of Expression Censor-bait
Losing Our
Liberties...
The white right had black
pages
Christian Coalition
Action Alert - 11/30/95 (a no-longer-there call to their members
to support the Communications "Decency" Act -- did anyone
archive this?)
Check out the links to much of the Rimm story collected by Declan McCullagh.
Here's the highlights:
7/3/95
COVER: Cyberporn
Background: A lot of attention was stirred up by this Time
cover story; a 'mainstream' article blowing sex on the Net way
out of proportion. It's based on undergraduate Marty Rimm's irresponsible
article/study (published in the Georgetown Law Review),
which he explicitly offers as evidence for legislation. Academically
it has been critiqued essentially to death (see Hoffman
& Novak critique Rimm). There's been a flurry of criticism
trashing his statistics *and* questioning the secrecy around the
whole affair.
Hoffman and Novak also wrote a critique of Time's Cyberporn story. Here's a bit:
p. 42, third column, last graf
TIME suggests that Rimm's study will be a "gold mine for psychologists, social scientists, computer marketers and anybody with an interest in human sexual behavior." Yet TIME fails to note that it is highly unlikely (at least without a cover story by Time) that an unsophisticated, poorly executed, weakly documented study conducted by an undergraduate in electrical engineering that was not published in a rigorously peer-reviewed scholarly behavioral science journal would ever be perceived as a "gold mine" by experts in these areas.
Curiously, Rimm has been surprisingly uninterested in making the study available to such experts. The study was embargoed for at least six months prior to publication in the Georgetown Law Journal. Scholarly researchers who requested a copy of the manuscript from Rimm were refused access to the manuscript prior to publication.
[emphasis mine --JCA]
7/24/95
Time's brief follow-up non-retraction in which they say:
"...serious questions have been raised regarding the study's
methodology, the ethics by which its data were gathered and even
its true authorship."
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