Internet Radio

I am a lazy activist. Often, people think that talking about an issue or blogging about an issue is tantamount to taking action on an issue. After seeing all the pleas on LJ, Pandora, BAGel Radio and Wired’s Listening Post this morning I finally went to SaveInternetRadio.org and used their tools to call my congresspeople. Since I live in New York, one of my Senators is Hillary Clinton, whose office seemed super busy since they left me on hold for 10 minutes, hung up on me, and then put me on hold for 8 minutes. I finally got through. Anyway, the person who answered the phone for my rep, Nydia Velazquez, was super informed and knowledgeable about the entire internet radio debacle and said that Rep. Velazquez had gotten so many calls about it that she has cosponsored H.R.
3015, which would “delay the applicability to webcasters of rates and terms determined by the Copyright Royalty Judges”. Her (intern?) explained it to me as a way for Congress to spend more time thinking about the issue.

My concern with all of this is that the RIAA and SoundExchange will temporarily not enforce rates, wait until everyone forgets about the issue, and then go after them with a vengeance. We need legal protection to allow internet radio to continue broadcasting, fair royalty rates that take into account the profit of the radio station (that’s what H.R.
2060, in essence, does). Velazquez’s bill, while well-intentioned, has only 2 co-sponsors rather than HR2060/S1353’s 135 in the House and, ugh, only 6 in the Senate (that doesn’t bode well).

Anyway, call your congresspeople! And can someone please tell me how to prevent Firefox from being such a memory hog (It’s currently the only application running and is using 99 percent of CPU). Kthxbye.

Technorati Tags: internet radio, HR 3015, HR 2060

John Edwards, Bloggers, and Democracy

The recent skuffle over John Edwards’ decision to hire the bloggers behind Pandagon and Shakespeare’s Sister illuminates the differences between the political blogosphere and the conventional mores of US politics. Bloggers, particularly young, leftist bloggers, tend to be irreverant, personal, and opinionated. US presidential politics tends to the bland and milquetoast - witness Gore distancing himself from Clinton, Kerry distancing himself from the anti-war movement and Bush distancing himself from reality-based thinking- and the kinds of strong opinions found in people’s blog archives aren’t considered appropriate for public consumption. One of the reasons Dean was so popular with the blogosphere was that his blowsy, aggressive rhetoric was in concordance with the way most liberal bloggers viewed Bush at the time.

I’m glad Edwards didn’t bow to extremist pressure and fire Amanda and Shakes, but the fact that both women had to back-pedal and apologize for their previous remarks demonstrates a certain lack of, shall we say, balls on the part of the Edwards campaign.

At some point, people need to call out so-called “Christians” on their involvement in politics while still happily claiming 501(c) status as non-profit, non-political organizations. I fully support your right to worship in any way you want. But legislating religious morality on others, such as the display of the Ten Commandments, outlawing gay marriage, promoting abstinence-only education and campaigning against the HPV vaccine, goes far beyond personal spirituality. My mother is a committed Christian and I was raised Christian; I am not anti-Christian. But I am against strategic promotion of particular political viewpoints under the guise of Christianity.

Bill Donohue may be Catholic, but his group sure doesn’t represent most Catholics, and he’s very selective about which anti-Catholic comments bother him. It’s also clear that “taking offense” is a political strategy. Extremist right-wingers will jump all over any suggestion of leftist bias against Christians, but will ignore Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter’s horribly racist remarks about Muslims, calls for the death of liberals, etc., and will make apologies for charming anti-semites like Mel Gibson.

Here’s a remark from Donahue himself:

“The gay community has yet to apologize to straight people for all the damage that they have done.” - MSNBC, Scarborough Country, 4/11/05

Lovely! What a religious man.

Anyway, getting back to the blogosphere: I finished Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks a few weeks ago and I’ve been musing over his claims that participatory culture will improve democracy. I loved the book and I like all of Benkler’s enthusiasm and positive thinking, but I really don’t think that the blogsophere, especially when he’s mostly talking about Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo, is really having an enormous effect on democracy per se.

What’s “democracy”? We don’t live in a direct democracy, we live in a republic. By “democracy”, most people mean “increased participation”. Does the blogosphere actually increase political participation in meaningful ways, or does it just increase the number of people who can talk about politics in the public arena? Sure, I know all the Habermasian theory about the public sphere. But I’m not convinced that political blogging is having an effect that goes deeper than that.

I do think that political blogging is great for investigative journalism of certain topics– although it still requires legitimacy from the mass media in order to have a significant effect. Trent Lott’s pro-segregation remarks, for example, were ignored by the mass media, then harped on by the blogsophere, then picked up by the mass media, then actually impacted him. And now, several years later, he’s in the exact position he was previously in. I also think that political blogging is good for fund-raising and coordinating targeted activist efforts. Although, again, the anti-war movement has been one of the most organized leftist movements of the last two decades and has drawn enormous crowds to huge, record-breaking rallies, and has basically been ignored by the mass media until conventional media polls showed that the majority of Americans agreed with it (and I’m never convinced that pollsters are really getting representative samples; I think they skew too suburban/rural and leave out everyone without landlines, which is all my peer group).

The blogosphere operates in its own rarified atmosphere. Amanda and Shakes’ comments were par for the course for leftist political bloggers. The fact that Edwards was shocked– shocked!– to see such filth coming out of the mouths of nice young women (and let’s face it, the fact that they are women had a lot to do with this supposed offense and shock) just shows how out of touch mainstream politics and “blog politics” are.

Let’s not forget what the real problems in the political system over all the online hype.

Technorati Tags: john edwards, political blogging, bill donahue

Counterpoint: Newsweek on Marriage

With all the talk in the blogosphere today about the reprehensible Forbes article, I thought I’d accentuate the positive for once and send kudos to Newsweek for its balanced and sensible revisiting of the famous 1986 article that contained the choice quote “women over 40 are more likely to be killed by a terrorist than get married”. That piece inspired Susan Faludi to write Backlash and became a symbol of how frequently mainstream press misconstrue academic studies (it also, unfortunately, became canon of the 80s: if you’re not married by 40, the conventional wisdom went, you’re SOL).

So great to see Newsweek revisiting that by examining the original study, looking at new studies, and re-interviewing the participants in the 1986 article. Their conclusions?

- Men and women are more likely to marry after 40 than they ever have been before
- College educated women actually have greater chances of getting married than non-college educated women (they do nicely identify that if marriage becomes a class privilege, it contributes to the rich-poor gap as marriage has many financial, child-rearing, etc. advantages, as all those denied that right by virtue of their sexual orientation would agree)
- Trying to predict future behavior based on past demography when you’re looking at rapidly changing social mores is difficult (before 1980, women really didn’t marry much past 40)
- There are plenty of fulfilling life paths for both men and women that don’t include obsessing over marriage

And finally, Newsweek admits to participating in the “trend-spotting and fearmongering that are too often the stock in trade of both journalists and academics”.

But I have to take umbrage with this:

Statistically, people who marry at much higher-than-average ages don’t have lower odds for divorce. But intuitively, some experts are starting to think that later-in-life marriages may have better chances of survival. “It makes sense—if you’re getting married at a later age … you’ll have gone through a lot of relationships, and you’ll know what you want [and] what you don’t,” says Elizabeth Gregory, director of the women’s studies program at the University of Houston and the author of “The New Later Motherhood,” to be published in 2007.

This is a common technique in mass media using social science: Statistically, this is not true. But we think it is, so we’re going to repeat it anyway. This is just a lazy way of repeating conventional wisdom rather than to bother exploring why it might be incorrect.

But otherwise a nice and balanced look at a social construct that we spend way too much time obsessing over to begin with. A great book on this is Stephanie Coontz’s “Marriage, a History”– she’s excellent at locating difference historically. Before one gets all up in arms about marrying career women, not marrying career women, working outside the home, not working outside the home, housework, day care, “soul mates”, marrying past 40, marrying before 40, domestic partnerships, gay marriage(*), and any other type of problem that can be analyzed, overanalyzed, and polemicized, let’s keep in mind that marriage is a constantly-changing institution that has meant an enormous array of things over the years. (Marrying for love is about a 200 year old concept, for one thing. And engagement rings were invented by the N.W. Ayer advertising agency working for DeBeers in the 1940s).

* Not to de-emphasize the importance of attaining equal marriage rights in the U.S.

Technorati Tags: marriage, Newsweek, feminism, Forbes

NPR

Yesterday, the Center for Media Research released a report on radio ratings. NPR is now the fourth most listened to radio format. That’s more popular than rock, dance, R&B/Urban or talk. The most popular format is News/Talk, with an audience of 19.4 million adult Americans, which is like, nothing. Second is country, and third is CHR, which is “Current Hit Radio” or Top 40. (See radio station format guide).

Since NPR isn’t advertiser supported, it is generally ignored by the general mechanisms to measure audience share. What’s interesting is that NPR is very high in the “most listened to” statistics, and it has a very high conversion rate– once you start listening to NPR, you generally continue.

The age of Big Media has not been kind to radio, mostly due to media consolidation. Media conglomerates have gobbled up locally owned stations, replacing their local DJs/morning shows/program directors with cheap syndicated content. The lack of actual people programming actual radio has caused problems during emergencies, as automated programming can’t provide local information (something radio’s very good at, traditionally). The rise in payola can be directly tied to media consolidation as radio station group owners (like Clear Channel) strike deals with independent “promoters” to provide radio time in exchange for kickbacks. And “vertical integration” means that many of the same companies who own radio stations own stadiums, billboards, and promotional companies, meaning they have a vested interest to cross-promote artists and festivals.

(Clear Channel is obviously the most egregious offender, from organizing and paying for pro-war rallies in 2003 to banning the Dixie Chicks from all their stations and stadiums due to their anti-Bush sentiments. More controversy in the Clear Channel Wikipedia entry.)

Result? A lack of diversity on radio: the same few songs hour after hour, entire formats basically absent from the airwaves, little local content and little of interest to most people. (And of course Clear Channel stalwartly pushing the Republican agenda). Satellite radio (XFM, Sirius) has built an entire business model around providing superior radio content in terms of musical diversity and genre formats.

NPR stations generally play little music, but they do fill the need for superior local content. Our local NYC affiliate covers NYC news in great depth, and consistently interviews New York writers, artists, musicians, politicians, pundits, and citizens. Although NPR is no threat to the advertising revenue of traditional radio, they are all competing for audiences. Best case scenario is that local commercial radio starts providing local content again.

It’s also interesting that in all the hubbub over Air America (which hasn’t been super successful, although my mom and the guy who sells me jewelry in Union Square both love it), people forget that we have a liberal radio network already.

More at Mediageek, a nice blog on the media landscape.

Technorati Tags: npr, media consolidation, radio

Liveblogging the Privacy & Ethics of Surveillance Workshop

I am in Austin at David Phillips’ Ethical Surveillance Workshop at UT. This is a great, very cross-disciplinary mini-conference that brings people doing surveillance studies together from across the academy, including legal scholars, information school professors, geographers, artists, sociologists, cultural studies scholars and two other graduate students. We’ve been teasing out common threads on a huge variety of subjects: implants, identity presentation, consent to surveillance, techniques of surveillance, subjectivity, vehicle identification systems, CCTV, wiretapping and activism.

I’m going to selectively blog some of the sessions, since I didn’t bother to get anyone’s permission for this. Would this count as micro-surveillance? I wonder.

Notes from subject area sessions:
Surveillance, Technologies and Things
Politics and Activism

Read the rest of this entry »

e-Waste

My genius friend Caitlin turned me on to the problem of e-waste, which I literally know nothing about.

Read this: Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia[PDF - use a free document reader if you hate Adobe or find that Reader 7.1 doesn't work with Firefox.]

Electronic waste or E-waste is the most rapidly growing waste problem in the world. It is a crisis not only of quantity but also a crisis born from toxic ingredients – such as the lead, beryllium, mercury, cadmium, and brominated flame retardants that pose both an occupational and environmental health threat. But to date, industry, government and consumers have only taken small steps to deal with this looming problem. This report reveals one of the primary reasons why action to date in the United States has been woefully inadequate. Rather than having to face the problem squarely, the United States and other rich economies that use most of the world’s electronic products and generate most of the E-Waste, have made use of a convenient, and until now, hidden escape valve – exporting the E-waste crisis to the developing countries of Asia.

Basically, we dump our computers, televisions, cellphones and gadgets when we get new ones. (I will point out that we often do this because the computers end up not working for one reason or another that is not hardware-related; I had to junk a roommate’s computer because of an extremely gnarly Windows 2000 bug that had me and a Microsoft tech support guy simultaneously googling for more than six hours on the phone.) And even when people try to be ethical about it and recycle their components, this waste often (50-80%) gets shipped out to Asia, where environmental protection regulations are weaker, labor is cheaper, and Western citizens no longer have to deal with the problem.

Please note that I am morally opposed to describing people as “consumers”, and I am going to try really hard not to do it anymore.

Due to the extreme rates of obsolescence, E-waste produces much higher volumes of waste in comparison to other consumer goods. Where once consumers purchased a stereo console or television set with the expectation that it would last for a decade or more, the increasingly rapid evolution of technology combined with rapid product
obsolescence has effectively rendered everything disposable. Consumers now rarely take broken electronics to a repair shop as replacement is now often easier and cheaper than repair. The average lifespan of a computer has shrunk from four or five years to two years.Part of this rapid obsolescence is the result of a rapidly evolving technology. But it is also clear that such obsolescence and the throw away ethic results in a massive increase in corporate profits, particularly when the electronics industry does not have to bear the financial burden of downstream costs.

Europe and Japan are working on kick-ass legislation which would make manufacturers responsible for the entire life cycle of the product. Does this mean no more 1 year warranties, tech support which is for all intents and purposes geared towards having the support-seeker throw up her hands in frustration and buy a new product, and the creation of flimsy products which are supposed to fail after a year or two? My BFF Matt just talked to a guy at Electronics Boutique who told him that the lifecycle on an Xbox DVD drive is, like, 2 years, and that very few people can play DVDs or even games on an Xbox if they’ve had it longer than that (my Xbox is broken; Matt’s still works, which really impressed the EB guy). And Cory Doctorow is convinced that the shiny white iPod design was meant to attract scratches and fingerprints in order to create motivations for people to buy new ones. (I’m still rocking my 3G iPod, which is considered the freak monstrosity of the iPod world, because I love it and it still works. Plus it’s a 40GB and was fucking $500 when I bought it. Not going to junk that.)

This is a super freaky problem and something I’ve never heard anyone in the industry address. The government is unlikely to do jack shit about it as the US has steadfastly refused to sign the Basel convention treaty which would regulate hazardous waste disposal, and as we all know, Mr. Bush is not too into anything that would impose any sort of burden on big business. The thing is that it has got to be possible to make profitable and environmentally friendly products. Maybe a sort of organic computing brand where you pay more but you get a frisson of self-righteousness upon purchase? Suggestions?

Notes from Phil Howard from World Information Access Report

A former professor of mine, Dr. Phil Howard at University of Washington, gave a lecture at Columbia today on ICT (information communication technologies) and the digital divide. Phil works with the World Information Access Project, whose site has lots of summary reports that add to these brief notes. He’s working on a very wide-scale project about information technology adoption world-wide, which means he’s done lots of really interesting research about international and transnational new media use.

One anecdote I liked: Phil said that when he was in Tajikistan last summer, the cybercafes were full of off-duty Russian soldiers playing Counter-Strike, teaching the Tajik youth how to shoot better.

(Despite the folk wisdom that developing countries are chock-full of gamers, a larger percentage of youth are gamers in rich countries than in poor countries, which makes sense w/r/t cost of connectivity).

Another thing Phil had seen was groups of coders working on re-writing not only software, but code itself to remove English or French expressions (even IF, THEN, FOR, so forth). This became a very important symbolic act of resistance, as well as practical: building open-source code that doesn’t require a knowledge of English or French means that development teams don’t need to rely on Western coders.
Read the rest of this entry »

Torture, Guantánamo, and Presidential Power

There’s a fantastic article in this week’s New Yorker about the US government’s use of torture in the War on Terror. The article indicts the government for clearly and knowingly violating the Geneva Convention, for using techniques at Guantanamo that, if not outright torture, certainly count as cruelty:

Qahtani had been subjected to a hundred and sixty days of isolation in a pen perpetually flooded with artificial light. He was interrogated on forty-eight of fifty-four days, for eighteen to twenty hours at a stretch. He had been stripped naked; straddled by taunting female guards, in an exercise called “invasion of space by a female”; forced to wear women’s underwear on his head, and to put on a bra; threatened by dogs; placed on a leash; and told that his mother was a whore. By December, Qahtani had been subjected to a phony kidnapping, deprived of heat, given large quantities of intravenous liquids without access to a toilet, and deprived of sleep for three days. Ten days before Brant and Mora met, Qahtani’s heart rate had dropped so precipitately, to thirty-five beats a minute, that he required cardiac monitoring.

These are not techniques that were previously deemed acceptable, signalling a significant change in US policy. Whatever your thoughts on the US military, it’s fairly clear that international human rights law, like the Geneva Convention, has historically been taken quite seriously. Of course there are exceptions, and there are certainly plenty of instances of egregious military violations of human rights. But in 2002 President Bush specifically made the decision to circumvent the boundaries of the Geneva Convention, refusing to outlaw cruelty towards suspects.

Of course, the Pentagon now says that this has been taken care of, that post-Abu Ghraib the list of “approved interrogation techniques” has been significantly limited. But there is still no evidence that the military is taking the Geneva Convention as a framework in which to limit these actions, and there is no clear deliniation between acceptable and unacceptable techniques in terms of cruelty or torture.

But even more significant than this–and this is very significant– is the overall Bush Administration movement toward greatly increased and consolidated presidential power.

Lawrence Wilkerson, whom Powell assigned to monitor this unorthodox policymaking process… said, “I saw what was discussed. I saw it in spades. From Addington to the other lawyers at the White House. They said the President of the United States can do what he damn well pleases. People were arguing for a new interpretation of the Constitution. It negates Article One, Section Eight, that lays out all of the powers of Congress, including the right to declare war, raise militias, make laws, and oversee the common defense of the nation.” Cheney’s view, Wilkerson suggested, was fuelled by his desire to achieve a state of “perfect security.” He said, “I can’t fault the man for wanting to keep America safe, but he’ll corrupt the whole country to save it.” (Wilkerson left the State Department with Powell, in January, 2005.)

The President should NOT have the right to do whatever he wants. In fact, the idea that the President CAN do whatever he wants is in direct violation of the Constitution, the general philosophy of checks and balances in government, and is the first step towards a far less democratic and far more despotic type of government.

I’d urge you to read the whole article: coming about a week after the new photos from Abu Ghraib and the UN urging the US to shut down Guantánamo, it really shows how incidents of torture of “terror suspects” are NOT, by ANY means, isolated incidents of a few people acting inappropriately. Rather, they are systemic, condoned from the top-down, and part of a larger discourse of expanded presidential power that should concern all Americans, no matter what their political leanings. In case you can’t tell, I’m really, really bothered by this, and I’m trying to figure out if there is anything that the citizenry can do about it.