Nicolas Beudon reports that last night there were cyberattacks against numerous French library websites, evidently by Islamist groups. They hacked into these sites using vulnerabilities in Drupal, WordPress, and ISS, as well as by cracking simple passwords. The messages they left on homepages objected to the identification of Islam with the terrorists, referring to it … Read more Cyberattacks against numerous French library websites
The instructors for the Library Juice Academy Certificate in User Experience organized an Unconference on UX at the University of Arizona recently, as a follow-up to the first round of classes in the certificate program. On December 6th, they each gave presentations on their areas of expertise and participated in a panel discussion. The presentations … Read more UX Unconference
An illuminating article in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week: “The ‘Undue Weight’ of Truth on Wikipedia,” by historian Timothy Messer-Kruse. It illustrates a problem with the protocol in place on Wikipedia that operate to attempt to ensure objectivity. This problem is one that academics who work on Wikipedia articles are likely to run … Read more On the “undue weight” rule in Wikipedia
You will probably be hearing more about Weibo, a Chinese social networking site that combines aspects of Twitter and Facebook and presently has, at a minimum, 140 million users, which is nearly three times the user base of Twitter. The interesting news at present is that the Chinese government, which shut down access to Twitter … Read more Tension over Weibo, the Chinese Twitter
We have just posted Ron Day’s introduction to Philippe Breton’s book, The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult: Social Fears and Religious Fantasies to the Litwin Books website. We posted translator David Bade’s introduction to the author’s work here back in April. I have come to realize what an important author on … Read more Ron Day’s introduction to The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult
I was in Cambridge, MA last weekend for MiT7: unstable platforms: the promise and peril of transition. This conference is put on every two years jointly by MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program and the MIT Communication Forum. The conference is concerned with new media and new communication technologies and their broad implications. Presenters came to … Read more Thoughts on MiT7
MiT7 was a great conference – intimate, warm, stimulating, interdisciplinary, and cutting-edge. There were some brilliant minds at work. I plan to post a few comments on the conference later. For now, here are links to podcasts from the three topical plenary sessions: Media in Transition 7: Unstable Platforms Archives and Cultural Memory Power and … Read more MiT7 podcasts
Media in Transition 7 (MiT 7), a small conference at MIT, is starting Friday and running ’till Sunday. I will be there; if you will be there too please say hello. Anyone wanting to follow the Twitter hash tag can look for #mit7.
Philippe Breton: a brief introduction …by David Bade, the translator of Breton’s book Le culte de l’Internet: Une menace pour le lien social?, which Litwin Books has published under the English title: The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult: Social Fears and Religious Fantasies… I discovered the work of Philippe Breton when … Read more Philippe Breton
The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult: Social Fears and Religious Fantasies Author: Philippe Breton Translator: David Bade Price: $22.00 Published: March 2011 ISBN: 978-1-936117-41-3 Printed on acid-free paper French author Philippe Breton examines the Internet and the culture surrounding it through the lens of its philosophical and cultural background. Central in … Read more New book: The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult: Social Fears and Religious Fantasies
Litwin Books will soon be publishing an English translation of Philippe Breton’s 2000 book, Le culte de l’Internet: Une menace pour le lien social?, under the English title: The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult: Social Fears and Religious Fantasies. Here is a bit from Chapter Four that comes to mind for … Read more Selection from Philippe Breton, relating to Wikileaks
MiT7 unstable platforms: the promise and peril of transition CALL FOR PAPERS Submissions accepted on a rolling basis until Friday, March 4, 2011. Conference dates: May 13-15, 2011 at MIT. Conference website: web.mit.edu/comm-forum/mit7/ Has the digital age confirmed and exponentially increased the cultural instability and creative destruction that are often said to define advanced capitalism? … Read more Call for Papers: MiT7 – unstable platforms: the promise and peril of transition
From Philippe Breton’s The Culture of the Internet and the Internet as Cult: Social Fears and Religious Fantasies, forthcoming from Litwin Books: One may distinguish three positions grosso modo: first the “Internet-for-everything” militants, proselytes (sometimes unknowingly) of a new cult. Then there are the technophobes, hostile to all technology. Finally, there are those who think … Read more Three attitudes toward the Internet
Library Juice Press and Litwin Books now have “publisher pages” on LibraryThing (the links go there). There are links to the books, tags, reviews, and (soon) links to LibraryThing users who own our books. Check it out if you are a LibraryThing user…
Introduction [Book information] June 10, 2009: James von Brunn logged off his Packard Bell computer, grabbed his keys and strode out the door of his son’s Annapolis apartment. He had moved in with his son and future daughter-in-law two years ago where he paid $400 a month in rent and spent most of his … Read more A Space for Hate: The White Power Movement’s Adaptation into Cyberspace
Chapter one of Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age, by Michael Bugeja and Daniela V. Dimitrova, is now online: Extinct Citations, Missing Links and Other Bibliographical Wonders A decade ago, most research was done in the library rather than through its Web site, and scholars, editors, … Read more Extinct Citations, Missing Links and Other Bibliographical Wonders
I blog about tech stuff only very rarely, but this is something I really want to share. If you’re at all concerned about online privacy, you will want to know about the Network Advertising Initiative’s “Behavioral Advertising Opt Out Tool.” Go to it, and it will show you which advertising networks have installed tracking cookies … Read more Tracking Cookie Opt-Out (Behavioral Advertising)
From The Onion Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text. … “Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text
Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age Authors: Michael Bugeja and Daniela Dimitrova Price: $18.00 Published: Summer 2010 ISBN: 978-1-936117-14-7 Printed on acid-free paper A decade ago, most research was done in the library rather than through its Web site, and scholars, editors, graduate directors and librarians … Read more New Book: Vanishing Act: The Erosion of Online Footnotes and Implications for Scholarship in the Digital Age