The BBC reports that using the Internets is now a human right, just as Voltaire and Rousseau intended. This global study of 27,000 adults in 26 countries found universal support for the idea that access to the Internet was a human right of vital significance to human enlightenment:
Most of those questioned also said that they believed the web had a positive impact, with nearly four in five saying it had brought them greater freedom.
However, many web users also expressed concerns. The dangers of fraud, the ease of access to violent and explicit content and worries over privacy were the most concerning aspects for those questioned.
I’m all for the expansion of human rights and pro-Internet, but it seems strange that as a cooperative, social species, we’d leap to the inclusion of access to the Internet when many other rights seem contentious: free speech, the right to marry, medicine. If all this enlightenment is taking place, shouldn’t we see some action on these other rights?
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (nicknamed “Aunty,” which is pretty creepy in and of itself) sounds the alarm about the far reach of Google in this charming and pointed critique. The video is well researched and cheeky, but more importantly, it makes the point that the retention and aggregation of data are unique, separate threats to privacy above and beyond the ostensible uses of the data in the first place :
In The New York Review of Books, Jason Epstein, one of the founding partners of the company that makes the Espresso Book Machine, argues that the future of book is the Espresso Book Machine. Still, it’s full of great observations about the publishing industry and the future of books:
Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author. In this world the traditional filters will have melted into air and only the ultimate filter—the human inability to read what is unreadable—will remain to winnow what is worth keeping in a virtual marketplace where Keats’s nightingale shares electronic space with Aunt Mary’s haikus. That the contents of the world’s libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse is not an unmixed blessing. Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age.
Day of Action at UCLA was peaceful and small. After some speeches at Bruin Walk (especially a very energetic short speech by a maintenance worker who expressed her fear that her own children would be unable to attend the public university she cleans for a living), we went to Murphy Hall for a spontaneous dance party. Those hippies: we see a picket line, they see a drum circle.
It’s a poor substitute for your old-timey neighborhood gay bookshoppe, but Lambda Literary (as in Lamdba Literary Awards) has launched a new site that features readers advisory, contests, and book reviews. It looks promising. It’s hard not to miss those great, slightly creepy gay book stores that sold beefcake greeting cards, gay-positive health books, tacky calendars, porno, and literature, but I guess it’s just the ticket price of living in the current era. Remember how much better stuff used to be at other, unspecified times in the past?
A great dissection of pictographic regimes at the various Olympiads from designer Steven Heller appears as an interactive feature at the New York Times.
The Economist states the obvious brilliantly with an expose on the tremendous, nearly unimaginable flood of information humans generate through their various activities (although by this metric, your requests for help in Farmville count as information):
This makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done: spot business trends, prevent diseases, combat crime and so on. Managed well, the data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into science and hold governments to account.
But they are also creating a host of new problems. Despite the abundance of tools to capture, process and share all this information—sensors, computers, mobile phones and the like—it already exceeds the available storage space. Moreover, ensuring data security and protecting privacy is becoming harder as the information multiplies and is shared ever more widely around the world.
I guess the bummer that people are finally starting to recognize is that more information does not automatically mean more knowledge.
The BBC reports that using the Internets is now a human right, just as Voltaire and Rousseau intended. This global study of 27,000 adults in 26 countries found universal support for the idea that access to the Internet was a human right of vital significance to human enlightenment:
