Bill Thompson

Bill Thompson, new media pioneer, has been working in, on and around the Internet since 1984. Formerly head of new media at the Guardian newspapers, he writes a weekly column, the BillBlog, for BBC News online.

The final brick in the wall of the security state?

Why the digital commentator and technology adviser this week decided to call on Obama, Cameron, Clegg and the other 'architects of oppression' to dismantle the security state, using a quote the full irony of which he is well aware.

By Bill Thompson

/ 25 Aug 2013

OurBeeb forum session 4: creativity, culture and digital public space

The final session of OurBeeb’s day-forum invited Brian Eno, Tony Ageh, Kamila Shamsie and Bill Thompson to outline their perspectives on the current and future position of the BBC in the UK’s artistic ecosystem.

By Bill Thompson, Tony Ageh, Brian Eno and Kamila Shamsie

/ 4 Dec 2012

Bill Thompson

The change, when it came, was small enough, modifying Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to add to the right to freedom of opinion and expression, the

By Bill Thompson

/ 4 May 2011

Take Two Steps Back: A Society Gets the Journalism it Deserves

We should not mourn the passing of the newspaper or the decline of public service broadcasting, but ask instead what function they performed and look to see whether we are in need of a similar system in the new world. If there is no niche to fill then we should pause before we try to create one in

By Bill Thompson

/ 2 Dec 2010

Through a wifi-enabled crystal ball

In the last days of 2005, leading thinkers and scholars from around the world share their fears, hopes and expectations of 2006. Forty-nine of openDemocracy’s distinguished contributors, from Mariano Aguirre to Slavoj Zizek, Neal Ascherson to Jonathan Zittrain – offer their predictions for the com

By Bill Thompson

/ 22 Dec 2005

The net's future after Tunis

It would be easy to dismiss the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) held in Tunis on 16-18 November 2005 as just another United Nations-sponsored

By Bill Thompson

/ 21 Nov 2005

The Democratic Republic of Cyberspace?

The internet we know today traces its lineage back to 1968 and the ARPANET research network that linked together computers at four US universities. Although it is often presented as

By Bill Thompson

/ 13 Sep 2005

Dump the World Wide Web!

The World Wide Web is dead. Like a cartoon character running off a cliff but making it some way out into space before awareness brings gravity back into operation, it

By Bill Thompson

/ 23 Dec 2004

Random

If you work for Microsoft and many people are happy to do so then one of the things you fear is a critical email from Bill Gates, company founder and

By Bill Thompson

/ 20 Oct 2004

Indymedias silencing: a warning to us all?

On 7 October the hosting company Rackspace removed two web servers from their London office and handed them over to unnamed United States authorities. They did so in response to

By Bill Thompson

/ 13 Oct 2004

Bikinis in Saudi Arabia: info-anarchy as cultural imperialism

Follow the debate on p2p: the new information war from the start Siva makes a reasonable response to some of my arguments, though Id say we are still a

By Bill Thompson

/ 29 Jul 2003

The challenge is not P2P but democracy and accountability

In his essay Siva Vaidhyanathan works hard to establish the cultural and political significance of the growing number of peer-to-peer (P2P) networking tools that have come into general use on

By Bill Thompson

/ 1 Jul 2003