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alfredo.bremont on "The writing on the wall: media wars in Latin America "

alfredo.bremont — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:34:55 +0000

what is taking place in south America is not quite as easy to describe,there are just voices of disenchantment with the colonialist democracy of the Americas. those that have being under the jug of oppression by the democratic dictatorship could no longer take it, they eventually shifted east and disengage themselves from what once was the North American economical exploitation rules. more clearly the South export and the north create gadgets that they call progress. " the Chinese have adopted the same motto" however they send those gadgets to those that created them on the first place. we can call this an economical meltdown and the rise of the east.

the media servants of the South such as cisneros and the lot, depended on the masters up-there, those northern minds that have giving them golden book's of exploitation. however they are finding that they themselves were exploited and will be dispose when they will be no longer needed. this Orwellian realm could have being plan by the illuminates or the followers of the night trampler. however the fact is that those illuminates are as well lost on a sea of bit's, and INTERNET conundrums, not understanding why the serpent is bitting his tail and not knowing how to reason what they fail to understand. at this point in time the ancient nobles once again will bring order to the chaos these Orwellian lovers have created. and a return to the dark ages were you happen to be now will remain until honor, honesty, and nobility will be reestablished on the land of the free and the brave.

bigC on "The writing on the wall: media wars in Latin America "

bigC — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:41:53 +0000

"Where is the mention of Hugo Chavez shutting down the Venezuelan media? By this glaring omission you reveal your bias."

...and you reveal your stupidity. Refusing to renew the licence of TV station which took part in a coup is not "shutting down" the media. It is the very least that any government of any stamp or colour would do.

Aaron Ortiz on "The writing on the wall: media wars in Latin America "

Aaron Ortiz — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:46:04 +0000

Where is the mention of Hugo Chavez shutting down the Venezuelan media? By this glaring omission you reveal your bias.

aspacia on "The jihadist style-journey: Germany’s election and after "

aspacia — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:27:51 +0000

Just look at the 9/11 hijackers who donned the same apparel.

sunajaga on "State 2.0: a new front end?"

sunajaga — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 16:02:22 +0000

i believe the era of democracy is over, and i think like most of the people believe that democracy has never been practical. the new approach i insist is the statistics-driven ruling over the governmental issues which can make more people satisfied with the upcoming laws whatever they are. and the only way to summon for the decision is the internet,

Charlie Beckett on "State 2.0: a new front end?"

Charlie Beckett — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 07:02:33 +0000

Charlie Beckett POLIS, LSE www.charliebeckett.org

Hi Tony,

Good point and I do say in the piece that 'democracy is about politics..not media'. However, I think that it is not just an analogy. The same forces that are driving people to a more personalised communications and away from traditional journalism are often the same forces that take people away from old-fashioned political organisation. Likewise, ideas about sharing and facilitating that work in new forms of communications networking around news will also work, I think, for politics. Of course, the outcomes of producing journalism and political policy are of a different order. But there are both connected and - to a large degree - analogous in a networked world. If I have stretched it too far that is because I have never been someone who isn't prepared to work a metaphor to death.

cheers

Charlie

Robin Wilson on "State 2.0: a new front end?"

Robin Wilson — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 07:01:07 +0000

There is important merit in this argument in two ways. First, the personalisation of politics which has been part of the detachment of a political caste from the public(s) which politics is meant to represent has itself been in large measure a product of the conventional televisual media over recent decades. The internet provides a capacity for that democratic connection to be remade, and so to end what Peter Mair has called the 'hollowing out' of politics. Obama's campaign provided a signal example.

The second dimension is that governance in itself has increasingly been conceived as 'networked' or 'citizen-centred' by thinkers like John Benington. That is to say, the 'New Public Management' so beloved by 'new' Labour and which sought market-based public-service 'reform' of traditional public administration only provided service users, under the banner of 'choice', with rights of exit, not rights of voice. The potential for 'co-production' of public services by users, through patient co-management of chronic ailments for example, can only be realised in more networked arrangements. als

I found Supermedia very helpful in avoiding the counterposition of 'professional' and 'citizen' media and Charlie is right to extend this point to politics. My only concern is how he got to be such a senior journalist while thinking that the word 'media' was singular and that 'disinterest' meant uninterest!

Tony Curzon Price on "State 2.0: a new front end?"

Tony Curzon Price — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:04:39 +0000

I wonder if the analogy between politics and media gets stretched too much. Yes, there are imagined communities (though the web makes us members of many more than we ever were -- this is the "reader promiscuity" that the Murdoch camp hates so much), and yes, to a small extent reading and writing are actions. But the screen is much more like the printed page than it is like the set of political institutions that amount to our collective decision-making. Same goes for social networking: socialising was always about people, friends, chit-chat ... and so it is online. But politics is altogether more and different. The power exercised through political action is of a different order from that exercised in the salon or on the page.

So the argument that says: "Media is being fluidised and social-networked, so will politics be..." seems to make too little of the difference between the two. Where is the power of the net in shaping new financial regulation? Nowhere, and that is no great surprise. I wonder how much political hierarchies are really being changed. Anyone remember the expenses scandal, still? Before the summer, a long time ago ...

tony

adamtrider on "Mutuality 2.0: open sourcing the financial crisis"

adamtrider — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 02:52:53 +0000

I fully agree theres no reason to reinvent the wheel

Detroit Dan on "Mutuality 2.0: open sourcing the financial crisis"

Detroit Dan — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:36:44 +0000

Ay, these critics! Cathy -- Wikipedia is wonderful -- It's accurate and everyone uses it -- and it's free. You act as if it's a disaster. That's where you totally lost me..

Lawrence Efana on "Mutuality 2.0: open sourcing the financial crisis"

Lawrence Efana — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 17:51:55 +0000

oD is a website that promotes knowledge. Such knowledge might be seen in various ways: abstract, interdisciplinary or outright artistically entertaining. A matter of degree though, in each of these, one can always tease-out the 'political' and the 'economic' and no-less, the 'artistic 'coined within the frame of the "social" hence of enormous learning value through the site. There are in above sense many of its articles teasing readers beyond the "social" to the "technical", and that is good for a sense of balancing multiple nature of what add-up in different proportions to advance how the distantly and immediately related problems of its key term "democracy" directly and indirectly interplay with notions of the statements about the scope of problems and open fields of ideas suggesting one or the other forms of solutions. This, very many people including the highly informed, I guess agree with.

Decending from this rather general appraisal to significance of Tony Bryant's article, even if one differs on certain grounds with sourcing "web technology" at the center, as a model for solution to national or world economic system management problems, it has to be stated that the paper itself is just good! A technical and professional cum very rich analysis implicitly cutting across to bridge the technical with social. There is definite awareness about complexities in both - a starting point for what seems a general base of reactions, stated in many ways so far by commentators.

In above spur, it is not only a problem limited to arguing to adapt the distilled finneses of a rather 'new' technical field to fluctuating problems of relatively long "established" fields, involving particularly: "politics" and "economics" - a bunch of the social], but also that of not forgetting many larger theoretical problems, for example, the way they in no small measure can tame enthusiasm and application chances. Take for instance, that "Astro-physics" helped by Computer Science as a technical field makes us to understand or appreciate observed realities of "chaos theory". That such a theory opens-up a lot, is definitely neither consolling nor limited to above, but extends to all human systems. This is partly the crux of the matter, when having to think 'adapting' distilled knowledge across systems, and of-course, with all of one's freedom - also criticising.

In this paper the author has been very constructive with criticism of the global financial and economic meltdowns, especially at "British-level" of economic and political history reflections. Account for "mutuality" credentials hence movement onwards as 'new-way-out', is interesting but not from point of view of "internet bubble" history. Outstanding inputs from Linux, Microsoft, Google and rests of them notwithstanding, their practices and methods as a sector in the real and larger economy leave a lot to take "Cathy Fitzpartrick; bigC.......; and Dr S. Jones said" relatively rather seriously. If care: stricter regulations and monitoring is not soon in place the internet itself may turn more diabolical - ruinous for economic systems sustainability. What appears to constitute the chaos in its system at this time are not what should not help us understand the national and global economic systems. Whether we can call a replica, I do not know, but sounds close! There is therefore something rather pretentious with the idea of "Global finance: bazaar not catherdral" - a subheading in the article. In many situations today if one closely looks at the internet or e-economic sector, it seems frustrating. It would sound to me that the author realises that - a point for criticising own sector: if it is right to cite ".... the bazaar model lends itself equally to a contrasting position that stresses its collaborative aspects over any competitive or individualistic one" - to me false! The morass is as chaotic as ever.

There will always be system travails as far as humans are managers: a point to engineer tolerance, continuous honest search in the "balancing act", but the truth to claim in the process must lead to sustainability - a reliable increamental step at each turn - 'leap and frog progress' more or less 'cyclic' in economic terms. These advise not underestimating the magnitude of what 'post-modernism', 'post-fordism' and post-structuralism', etc., as 'discursive' theoretical frames in our evolutionary processes, as they speak about the travails of our system and progress.The new "lots" for systems now include working to create trust - a function of long overdue lessons, for which all is afloat and more or less loose at the moment. Call it a new sense of openness thanks to definitions of change taking shape and place both in politics and economics - the lifewires compelled to care more for the environment. Sourcing as a model will confuse the zenith reached in this trial and error lesson.

Cathy Fitzpatrick on "Mutuality 2.0: open sourcing the financial crisis"

Cathy Fitzpatrick — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 02:24:33 +0000

Cathy Fitzpatrick

This is all pretty goofy stuff. There's a horribly persistent meme among opensourceniks that their model for making software -- which isn't really so terribly demonstrably viable even for *that* purpose -- should be replicated to every other setting of human activity.

It shouldn't.

Open source groups are often closed socieities because despite their much-advertised "openness," they often rely on one or a few very strong and tyrannical personalities to persist in working for free and seeing through some idea. Others who disagree don't resolve differences through democratic deliberation or goverance, but fork off, or leave, in the usual brittle process of these very chaotic and yet very rigidly ideological collectives.

And that's just it -- "opensource" is really just a code word for inserting collectivist ideologies, so that the baggage of Marxism and the proper label of some notion as "Leninist" can be avoided, so that the enterprise isn't judged due to "McArthyism" and "anti-Communism" and "the Red Scare" and all the rest.

But it amounts to the same thing. "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."

Where opensource really becomes a racket, however, is in the invocation of free labour and the general culture of Free, and the production of free content and free software, but then the selling of desperately-needed geek consulting services on top of that. Who here would dare to run a "free" Drupal site without having a $50/hour geek to hold your hand through all the zanyness and patches and weirdnesses?

The other fake thing about the very flawed opensource model is the concept that it is "transparent" and that if you have loads of goofs of wildly uneven ability and motivations coming up to a project that this constitutes these millions of eyeballs before which bugs become visible.

They don't.

I've seen time and again how bugs simply are dismissed if they don't fit the ideological prescription of the opensourceniks. They are airily labelled "features". Or they are "triaged" out of the to-do list. Or it is pretended that they are fixed, when they aren't. There's nothing worse than a mob when it comes to dropping a meme like "this isn't a bug" or "this isn't important because we say so" when you have a few strong personalities running the show -- and gaining their street cred by dining out under the word "open," when in fact they are anything but. Anyone who has actually had to deal with these projects knows this culture, and rejects this model for what it is: a model that doesn't even work so hot for software, whatever it's occasional useful productions (which generally involve reverse-engineering others' creativity in proprietary code) and a model whose chief features are anaethema to any genuinely open and democratic human enterprise involving transparency and collaboration and good governance.

One of the biggest hoaxes out there is that Wikipedia is some massively multiuser democratic and open project.

It isn't.

A tiny cabal of in-group users who fiercely eject critics make the decisions on critical and controversial pieces. A relative handful of several thousand produce the lion's share of content. They've evolved an incredibly arcane code of behaviour and ethics and editing practices that will make any good-hearted soul wishing to produce an entry or correct a mistake simply week in frustration.

I've often answered this invocation of the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" memes with the comment that the real story isn't about Cathedrals preserving and protecting dogma and catechism, but about Bazaars, where social relationships, hierarchies, and haggling over undisclosed prices with multiple channels of social capital, are sharply contrasted with Marketplaces, where a price is stuck on an object which the buyer can purchase without having to drink tea for hours with the carpet dealer or promise to marry his daughter. Open markets really are good things and whatever their excesses and crashes, repeatedly return because humans repeatedly freely put them in place whereever they are not oppressed by coerced collectivism and the imposition of collectivist ideas.

A key reason for the banking crisis is that financial transactions moved online, so that accountability became harder and harder to ensure, and it became laughably easy to move huge amounts of money around without ever having to identify or explain yourself. The Internet was supposed to remove the tyranny of class and place and other atomic world constraints. It did. But it destroyed value along the way and mechanisms for accountability and identity. That is leading now to a backlash and a cry for coddling, collectivist, protective philosophies where people without a will can take cover in a group, where a few strong personalities will do all the thinking for them.

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/un_tethered

http://3dblogger.typepad.com/ngo_accountability

bigC on "Mutuality 2.0: open sourcing the financial crisis"

bigC — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:10:09 +0000

I all seems a bit like re-inventing the wheel to me. Finance is basically a utility; it is part of the admin of enterprise (private or public). Our current travails arise from Big Bang and the repeal of Glass Steagall allowing it to go freelance and become an enterprise in it's own right. Far from increasing efficiency and effectiveness, an under regulated free market has made it top-heavy and unwieldy and it has become more of an impediment than a facilitator of enterprise.

I fear that an open source aproach at this stage would exacerbate this: Financiers would rebuild a finance sector which would serve their interests rather than society at large. We have to return to a situation where finance is seen as an enabler of enterprise rather than an enterprise in itself and properly controlled and regulated in order to achieve that end. The bureaucracy necessary to do that should be transparent and accessible but I doubt if an open source approach could achieve this.

Dr S Jones on "Mutuality 2.0: open sourcing the financial crisis"

Dr S Jones — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 19:05:39 +0000

Quote:

The bazaar model shouldn't work; but it does: Raymond calls it `miraculous'.

A Professor of Informatics who insists that the bazaar model has been a "success" has clearly spent too long in academia, and away from industry.

Raymond was writing 12 years ago, analysing a tool for computer technicians. The bazaar model has succeeded in producing complex tools for technicians, but has failed to produce anything popular (or even usable) other than by the same people who created it.

The Cathedral won, leaving Mr Bryant with little or nothing by way of a remedy or solution.

bigC on "Don't end "no win, no fee" libel cases"

bigC — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:25:58 +0000

The current libel arrangements make it impossible for the less well off to get protection while affording the rich virtual immunity from fair critcism. CFA's may be one way to make protection from defamation available to the less well off. But wouldn't it be better for there to be a criminal libel/slander offence.

A public untruth can have the effect of making a person unable to get employment or operate socially so surely such damage should be treated in the same way as any other kind of assault.

Sanctions for newspapers could include suspension of publication for a given number of days. As with any other kind of assault the sanctions for individuals should rise to a custodial sentence if the damage is deemed to justify it.

This would simultaneously afford protection to the rest of us while getting rid of injunctions which silence fair comment and gold-digging damages claims.