Tag: <span>Internet</span>

Ethan Zuckerman Talks at TED

Please watch Berkman Fellow Ethan Zuckerman‘s awsome talk puncturing the information cocoon. He introduces Yeeyan (译言), a website translating English articles into Chinese, and asks a very sharp question: who is translating the Chinese daily stories into English? And an even sharper question: if such culture bridges are constructed, who and how many ppl will cross them? Furthermore, (I say it in my words and I believe it should be what Ethan want to say) how to make people being used to crossing them?

Enjoy the vedio:

 

Radio Berkman: A Non-Unifed Theory of the Internet

Radio Berkman is a series of online radio program produced by Berkman Center at Harvard University. The latest session is an interview to me by Danial Jones on the topic of Cyber-pluralism. Please click the title of this post to read more and listen it.

Caution: the radio program may be played automatically if you are not using IE, please prepare an earphone when you are staying at somewhere requiring silence.

Who Controls the Internet?

In their new book "Who Controls the Internet", Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu make a compelling case that the optimistic hope that the internet would erase national boundaries has been replaced by a reality of local control leveraged through governmental pressure on intermediaries, at least in the case of large multinational companies. (Cited from PingSwept)

Are we really in "the beginning of a technological version of the cold war?" (p. 184) I don’t think it is absolutely correct since the conception of cold war is under some objective  threatens which may be illustrated superficially with the term of "nuclear terrors". The only analogy may be the seperated world by censorships of governments and/or giant multinational enterprises. Talking the issues of freedom of expression and freedom of religion, the gap may be huge, however, I think, only if the Matrix of Internet really be crushed down by the different domain systems, those censorships may never really filter all since the intellgences and ideas are not merely emerged from the western/eastern world. Further, while we are talking about the protection of private rights, say, copyright, personal privacy and commercial secret, the cold war may be substituted by the hot love scene between west and east … not only because the hegemony of someone, but also because the inherent needs of developing their own cultures.

So, as Ethan Leib said, the book may be a "popular" and "entertaining" one, though I still need to evaluate the same after reading it through.

Besides, Milton Mueller (The author of the wellknown Ruling the Root) think it is a "manifesto for counterrevolution", and John Mathiason suggested it is an "Episode II".