Žižek on the ongoing commercialization, that is, destruction, of the Open Web, where “Everything thus becomes accessible, but only as mediated through a company which owns it all.” Via @evgenymorozov. Some, such as Dave Winer, call this the creation of a silo or walled garden.

I notice that the Guardian’s editorial this week celebrating 190 years of the paper’s existence manages to stay calm about what to call these people who participate in new ways in the work of informing others. In the last paragraph, the writer acknowledges that in this time of industry revolution, the names change, necessarily, as…

In “What I Think I Know About Journalism,” Jay Rosen’s 25th anniversary reflection on what he’s learned about his field, the fourth point keeps calling me back. I notice the tightly worded section title, where similar phrases represent very different meanings. That means we can’t think our way through the problems of journalism today, which…

The sixty second video version of parts two and three of last year’s public lecture on literacy and active citizenship, or to put it another way, how citizens make their words matter in a Facebook/Twitter world. _______________________________ Photo credits. Freisler saluting (German National Archive). Otto Hampel (Gestapo file). Postcard (Appendix, Every Man Dies Alone). Guillotine…

At my earlier blog, Elizabeth Edwards joined a 2003 conversation about the quality of political discourse, making a distinction between political speech that is essentially marketing and speech that creates “a community of thought, analysis, and exchange.” Here is her entry: As someone who has participated in online dialogues for years (previously in newsgroups, now…

Concerning the Wikileaks work of Julian Assange, Misha Glenny writes about the traditional imbalance between a government’s access to information and the access of the rest of us: [K]nowledge translates into power and influence. For most of history, government has enjoyed an easy superiority in adjusting the ebb and flow of information. Now the rules…

In the NY Times Diagnosis feature this week a key element of the story is a husband who tells a doctor that she has to reconsider the diagnosis and treatment being given his wife because it is not working. “We can’t go on this way,” he tells her. For whatever reason, Dr. Lisa Sanders is…

Imagine that you owned the digital data produced by your own life, Indhira Rojas asks with the help of NY Times writer Rob Walker. You know, the data produced whenever you do business with a credit card, operate your smart phone, visit a website. Other people are gathering this information and using it. A quick…

Votes are little messages that matter, but what exactly do votes say? According to Elizabeth Drew, our politicians routinely claim to know exactly what voters were saying with their votes: After an election, there’s inevitably a variety of pronouncements of politicians on what they “heard the voters say.” They and the various pundits largely “hear”…

I’ve been meaning to look back at “Recipe Redux: The Community Cookbook,” Amanda Hesser’s 10/6/10 account of working with New York Times readers to find the best recipes from the history of the paper to gather into a new cookbook. When I first read the piece in the food issue of the Sunday magazine I…