There are 25 Senators on the committee that confirms FCC commissioners. So, Britt Blaser had the idea that we all together could come up with the 25 questions we want asked, and then provide one question per Senator, with backing material, etc.

There’s a “starter kit” of 13 questions up on a survey, with space for you to add your own. There’s also a “Fast Internet for All” Facebook app that can connect Senators to questions.

I very much like the idea of shaping the hearings this way. Personally, I find many of the 13 starter questions currently in the survey to be “gotcha questions,” and I hope the project ends up with questions that are more useful for discussion. But that’s up to you and me.

[Tags: fcc policy ]

1 Comment »

Lokman Tsui is giving a Berkman talk called “Beyond Objectivity: Global Voices and the future of Journalism.” This is based on research he’s been doing for his doctoral dissertation.

Lokman has been long interested in the Chinese Internet. He was born and raised in Amsterdam, and says that the Dutch often don’t like difference and diversity; they’re struggling with the idea of cultural complexity. After wrestling with what to study, he talked with Andrew Lih and came away wanting to study something that works but that we don’t understand well. Lokman chose Global Voices.

He’s interested in “how the world comes to know itself.” Lokman thinks journalism is crucial to this. James Carrey [sp?]: The public is what forms when people get together to talk about the news. Now, with the Internet, we have strangers everywhere. “What does that mean for the kind of journalism we want?” Lokman cites Habermas. We need to re-think journalism. “My purpose here is not to celebrate the Internet” or to dismiss the dangers, but to see it as an historic opportunity. By thinking about the global nature of communication, we can design better institutions.

His research begins with a study of GV as a a “newsroom.” What are the journalists’ routines? How do they socialize? How do they get news? E.g., it used to be easy and convenient to get info from gov’t sources, leading to a bias towards those sources. But the GV newsroom is different. Multicultural, global. And the newsroom is online, which leads to different interactions and shapes the news. We need a new conceptual toolkit to understand it.

Is GV journalism at all? GV is the trickster of journalism, in Lewis Hyde’s sense: it provokes us to respond and develop. GV and journalism are both ways of seeing. There are three ideals of journalism, intertwined with ideals of democracy. (1) Professional J, with liberal democracy, aimed at providing information. (2) Alternative media, with participatory democracy, aimed at representation. (3) Public journalism along with deliberative democracy, aimed at conversation.For a long time, we’ve taken objectivity as the “gold standard” of journalism. But this doesn’t make sense for public journalism; it makes no sense to ask whether a conversation is objectivity. How do we judge conversations? GV gives some hints. GV supports “communicative” democracy (a la Iris Young) , aiming at conversation, and replacing objectivity with hospitality. Habermas was thinking of coffee houses where people have to bracket differences to enable conversation. Hospitality enables conversations even when there’s a disparity of power. Differences can be very useful in having a good conversation. E.g., the powerful host serves the guest, subverting the power relationship. That’s hospitality. It’s a way of judging journalism as well, seeking to include difference and diversity.

Hospitality goes back to Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” His third law suggests that hospitality is a right based on the fact that we share a world. Kant says we cannot refuse a visitor if it will lead to his/her destruction. Hospitality is about access, recognition, and appropriate response. Arendt wrote about intersubjectivity as a way toward truth. We now have an abundance of stories on line. The constraints have changed, so the way we judge journalism should change. The challenge is that, while the cost of speech as gone down, our attention is still scarce.At RottenTomatoes.com, the objectivity is in the dry summary. But the subjective reviews are more interesting and useful. The professionals should aggregate and amplify all these voices. You need to put them all together. What would an aggregation site look like for the news? It’d look a bit like GV. You get curated news and posts and tweets, and then comments and conversation.

Q: [me] Why has the term “hospitality” become less used precisely when we are most in contact with different cultures?
A: It may be partially due to the paradox of choice, and a fear of the unknown that’s come about in recent years. We’re very happy to send our products, our TV programs, and our money everywhere. But the flow of people is restricted. And it’s a matter of being able to listen, which some places are better at than others. I’m playing with the hospitality ratio: how much you listen vs. how much you speak. E.g., how many films you import vs. expert. A few years ago I looked at how many links link back to you and how many links to others. I compared a-list blogs and newspapers. Newspapers didn’t link out much at all.

Q: How do we train people for journalism?
A: J is a craft as well as a profession. The Internet is making us think about J as a craft: pursuing excellence for its own sake in something you care about. Most GV people think of themselves as craftspeople. Q: Where’s the hook in what you’re saying? And, btw, journalist didn’t come out of people seeking the truth but hard-drinking people who were getting paid to present a point of view. Also, you might look at Erik Erikson.

Q: Hospitality is reciprocal. How might the concept of respect apply to journalism?
A: Reciprocity is a huge part of hospitality. It means journalist need to include more views.Q: There are many public spheres, even within GV.
A: Yes.

Q: Does GV connect to other kinds of civic spaces, other than journalism?
A: GV isn’t just a bunch of people trying to do journalism. It’s an infrastructure for other sorts of projects, such as translation, herdict.org… There are tons of other civic practices there. Q: [ethanz] I want to temper some of your optimism. I think it’s great that you’re offering a new criterion — hospitality — for evaluating journalism. I think these ideas get stronger in combination. My main criticism of your work is that you’re not critical enough of GV [which Ethan co-founded]. GV is at best partially successful.

[I missed the last few questions. Sorry.] [Tags: journalism diversity objectivity hospitality global_voices everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Be the first to comment »

E Ink has sold itself to Prime View International, a large Taiwanese display manufacturer, and I don’t understand why.

Now, it’s not surprising I don’t understand why. I have no info about E Ink’s financial state other than this article by Robert Weisman in the Boston Globe, and in any case I’m not a great financial guy (and I have the bank statements to prove it). So, my surprise may well be due to nothing but ignorance. Nevertheless, here’s why I was taken aback by the announcement.
E Ink is on a roll in a market that is about to explode (in the good sense). After ten years of work developing a low-power, highly legible display, it’s got something that works. Thanks to Kindle, it’s proven itself in the mass market and it’s in lots of people’s hands. And the market is about to take off now that we have digital delivery systems, a new generation of hardware, and a huge disruption in the traditional publishing market. So, why would E Ink sell itself?

The price — $215M — seems relatively low for such a hot product. If they need the money to fund R&D or to build manufacturing facilities, surely (= it’s not at all sure) there were other possibilities. Apparently the market crisis made an IPO implausible, although, to tell the truth, I — with my weak financial grasp — am not convinced. Investors are looking for places to invest, and E Ink looks like it’s exactly the sort of company they’d love to back: a proven leader in a market that’s obviously on the verge of explosive growth. It’d be like getting in on the early stage of iPods, only potentially bigger, since everyone who reads eventually will have an e-reader. But, if an IPO was out, why wouldn’t E Ink have preferred other forms of investment, including giving a partnership and equity stake to Prime View?

The most likely explanation by far is that I don’t understand what I’m talking about. Another explanation is that the company and its investors simply wanted to cash in by cashing out; the Globe article suggests this. But, that again raises the question of why they’d want to exit a company with a product in a market that’s about to take off. Perhaps they have reason to think the market is not going to take off , but that seems wrong; note that Google yesterday announced it’s going to enter the online book sales business. Or maybe they have doubts about E Ink technology. Maybe they worry the cost won’t drop fast enough for a commoditized market. Maybe color isn’t on its way fast enough. Maybe they’re worried about the inability (or so I’m presuming) of their tech ever to handle video, since the winning e-reader will eventually be multimedia. Maybe they know about ebooks on the way — Apple iPad or whatever the presumed product will be called — that will make static, black-on-gray pages seem obsolete.

So, I don’t know. But it smells fishy to me…although, as I may have mentioned, my financial sniffer has never been very reliable, and I’ll be happy to be set straight about this.

[Tags: e_ink kindle displays ebooks e-books everything_is_miscellaneous ]

12 Comments »

A press release from the Department of Unwanted Efficiencies:

Huntsville, AL – June 1, 2009 – Cabinet NG (CNG), provider of document management and workflow software, today announced that Limestone County, Alabama is using CNG’s document management software to enable a unique Video Hearing application. By processing new jail inmates through CNG’s Secure Access Filing Environment (CNG-SAFE), all the necessary legal forms and other court paperwork is instantly available during the video hearing process. Limestone County can now get the most out of local government resources in a time of fiscal restraint and challenging economic conditions by streamlining the preliminary hearing process while protecting a defendant’s constitutional right to participate in the legal process.

David Seibert, Limestone County’s Commission Chairman, said, “We are committed to putting into place technology that allows us to better serve Limestone County citizens. Enabling electronic preliminary hearings by integrating document management with videophones eliminates the manpower, transportation and time needed for trips between the Limestone County Jail and the courthouse.”

Added Mike Blakely, Limestone County Sheriff, “There are public safety benefits to conducting preliminary hearings without transporting inmates, and we can process more inmates through the system this way, saving the county time and money.”

…[T]his Video Hearing solution is a unique integration of electronic document management and Videophone technologies that can be applied in a number of environments. For example, any face to face process requiring the processing of documents can be liberated from the physical constraints of appearing in person.

If you want face time, don’t do the crime.

[Tags: document_management jails justice video_hearings ]

Be the first to comment »

The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review is going open access:

…we’ve refined our author agreement (already very liberal) to explicitly ensure that authors retain their copyrights, and we’re making our agreement public on our website. At the same time, we’re also embracing open publication, formally putting our articles under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial No-Derivatives license, and allowing our authors to distribute themselves under even more liberal licenses if they so choose.

Yay!

[Tags: open_access journals law_journals everything_is_miscellaneous ]

1 Comment »