Yearly Archives 2005

We're asking people to host "Couch Parties" this weekend. Watch TV, write to Congress, and help keep cable TV free of the creepy scrutiny of the prude police. Speaking of whom, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R.-Wisc.) may be hip enough to warn people (rather wordily) about downloadable PDFs on his web site, but he's still stuck in a Hawthorne novel when it comes to regulating television. Yesterday he basically recommended putting people in the stocks for violating decency rules - okay, he actually recommended a cannon: "People who are in flagrant disregard should face a criminal process rather than a regulator process. That is the way to go. Aim the cannon specifically at the people committing the offenses, rather than the blunderbuss approach." (NY Post article) Don't we have better things to prosecute our celebrities for? More about this.

I am in Austin at the South By Southwest Festival, to speak on a panel about dialogue, democracy and technology. Austin ... where I've been once before ... flat, dry, mellow, a little bit a-locational, but I guess most American cities are like that. I don't mean Austin isn't a location. It's cool, happening, and, today at least, bathed in sunlight and an early spring breeze. But to this son of Rockefeller Center, Union Square, Columbus Circle, Bethesda Fountain and the Empire State Building, these flat U.S. cities with low rows of indistinguishable stores are hard to navigate - hard for the brain and hard for the imagination. Or maybe I'm just lost without 200 numbered streets at right angles. South By Southwest ... scrowly music boys with untucked shirts - just like Williamsburg, but with more head-hair, less facial hair and, I betcha, fewer bar mitzvahs in their past.…

If the Internet does promote the "refindability" of information, it could also help ground and extend public memory. Maybe if we could find facts faster, news would not, in Jack's words "grow old before its time," and public curiosity and the public interest would persist longer on the stories that matter. Public memory is something my fellow panelist Jerry Michalski first got me thinking about last summer. How can we enlist the tools of archive, aggregation and collective commentary to bolster not only knowledge, but conscience? ... as for the question of the dangers of aggregation "across everything," when I asked the panel about it, Trumbull said "There's no groundswell to ask for that anonymity," and he may be right. On many privacy matters, people have voted with their feet, to quote an old colleague from my early new media days. Panel moderator Jeffrey Veen added that soon we may…

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