media & the net

The tide of news swill from the US presidential race becomes weirder and more pervasive as falsehoods and media stunts are passed off as truth and gain a life of their own

Piracy is typically portrayed as the vice of only those who wish to steal media for the sake of self-indulgent entertainment. But 'file sharing' is also, for some, the only means of gaining access to educational material or information censored by oppressive governments, let alone revolutionary inspiration

The successful New York-set crime series Law & Order has generated numerous spin-offs, remakes and reworkings. A coincidental showing of the same episode in its US and UK versions offers David Elstein, a devotee of the original, the chance to make a scene-by-scene comparison. Such an analysis, he says, confirms the superior quality of Dick Wolf's show and suggests that this is symptomatic of a wide gap in the creative cultures of US and UK drama.

Palikot’s symbolic gesture played into the hands of a media that is eager to demonize the decriminalization campaign. The symbol however overshadowed a more complex debate around the decriminalization of cannabis and other illicit drugs in Poland.

The worst disaster in Japan since the second world war hit the country's north-east coastal region on 11 March 2011. The combination of tsunami and nuclear crisis presented the media with great practical problems and ethical concerns. Wataru Sawamura, an experienced journalist with the leading newspaper the Asahi Shimbun, reflects on how he and his colleagues sought to fulfil their professional responsibilities as the tragedy unfolded.

In this podcast, Tony Curzon Price talks to Albert Wenger, partner at Union Square Ventures, the venture capital fund behind a lot of the most innovative and visible web companies of today, to try to understand: is anti-SOPA activism more about principle or about the competing interests of big Tech vs. big Entertainment

Evgeny Morozov, an engaging thinker whom we have enjoyed publishing on openDemocracy, produced an intemperate review of a peer's book. Here, that peer responds in an exemplary way. An attempt to shut down conversation has, in the best sort of Streisand effect, back-fired and opened it up.

Do new social media create new forms of citizen action? Jenny Morgan reports on a knowledge exchange conference in the Hague

The public debate in Norway following the massacre of 22 July 2011 is taking shape. A key focus is the obsessional and hate-filled language that pervades and dominates online discussion, says Thomas Hylland Eriksen.

The stramash over abuse of power and standards at Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp should reinvigorate the idea of journalists’ self-regulation, says Neal Ascherson.

A voice of wry observation and quiet authority that made humane sense of distant events to a domestic public helped James Cameron become the most respected international journalist in post-1945 Britain. But is there room for his world-reporting craft in a very different media age, asks David Hayes.

The doctrinal commitment to new cyber and social technologies as a means of solving political problems needs to learn from the past and take a more realistic view, says Armine Ishkanian.

The tools that help Arab democracy protesters also extend the reach of three United States corporations. The power of Facebook, Google, and Twitter represents an appropriation of the hacker-utopian ideals of the early internet, says Becky Hogge. The challenge to those who still uphold these ideals is to recover a true freedom path.

Is this the moment to halt the expansion of Richard Murdoch's media empire in the UK? An OurKingdom post, which presents the media mogul's bid for full ownership of the country's most powerful commercial broadcaster as a threat to our democracy, has sparked an urgent debate between the author, Oliver Huitson, and David Elstein, an influential figure in the British media industry.

The Egyptian blogosphere has gained real influence in the political process

Given continued strikes in Iran and the freeing of Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, neither the Burmese nor Iranian struggle for democracy is a story that should be characterized as an example of a failed movement and successful repression. But it is up to us - the global audience - to understand our responsibility in this dynamic.

The eternal campus of the global middle class; the solution to the injunction to love ones fellow; a riskless replacement to reality. You could not have designed Facebook better to opiate 21st Century occidentals

The work of a Bangladeshi journalist offers a different perspective on some of the professional and ethical dilemmas raised by the WikiLeaks project, say Timothy Sowula & David Hayes.

The death of a powerful media patriarch is also the end of an era in Austrian politics. After Hans Dichand, the spell of his flagship newspaper may no longer work, says Anton Pelinka.