Berkman Buzz: Week of June 21, 2010

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
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What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.

* Ethan Zuckerman blogs Nancy Baym's talk on social exchange and music.
* danah boyd highlights a new paper that addresses "sexting."
* Harry Lewis comments on "Cyberspace as a National Asset."
* OpenNet Initiative on Lebanese activists delaying parliamentary voting.
* Dan Gillmor begins migrating from Mac to Linux.
* Doc Searls meta-blogs from a street in France.
* David Weinberger thinks again through "blogging and public thinking."
* CMLP considers "crowdsourced retaliation."
* Weekly Global Voices: "Taiwan: 'When the Excavators Came to the Rice Fields'"

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The full buzz.

"Baym tells us that the principles beyond social exchange are very similar to those behind gift economies, but unfortunately the literatures rarely overlap. She characterizes social exchange as being based having unspecified obligations, unspecified exchange rates, and an unspecified time frame – try to firm these up and you’ll violate social taboos. These relationships are based on trust and obligation, they are inherently interpersonal, and the value tied to the provider."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post Nancy Baym: Pop music and social exchange

"Dena Sacco and her team have put together a fantastic document that maps out the legal and socio-legal issues surrounding sexting: "Sexting: Youth Practices and Legal Implications." This is for the Berkman Center Youth and Media Policy Working Group that I’m coordinating with John Palfrey and Urs Gasser (funded by the MacArthur Foundation). ... 'This document addresses legal and practical issues related to the practice colloquially known as sexting. ... This document is intended to provide background for discussion of interventions related to sexting. It begins with a definition of sexting, and continues with overviews of research and media stories related to sexting. It then discusses the statutory and constitutional framework for child pornography and obscenity. It concludes with a description of current and pending legislation meant to address sexting.'"
From danah boyd’s blog post Sexting: Youth Practices and Legal Implications

"The Lieberman-Collins proposal allows the President to declare a “national cyber emergency” (the term is defined, but based on the examples in Clarke’s book and McConnell’s debate remarks, the NSA would probably argue that we have been in one several times, perhaps continuously). A new bureaucracy, the National Center for Cybersecurity and Communications, would reside within Homeland Security and would be charged with developing plans for responding to emergencies and seeing that they are implemented. CNET’s Declan McCullagh described the legislation as creating an Internet “kill switch,” separating problematic servers from the Net by government edict. Lieberman’s spokespeople were offended, saying that the legislation actually restricted authority the president already had under the 1934 Telecommunications Act."
From Harry Lewis' blog post Cyberspace as a National Asset

(The OpenNet Initiative blog also has a post about the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010.)

"Global Voices Online and the Social Media Exchange (SMEX) report that Lebanese activists organizing under the slogan Stop The Vote have managed to postpone parliamentary voting for one month (starting June 15) on what they see as a disturbing e-Transactions law. This law, which they see as "[threatening] to create a more restrictive or at least more monitored online environment in Lebanon" has a few troubling articles. The biggest issue at stake is the creation of the ESSA (the Electronic Signatures & Services Authority) and the disproportional power provided it to moniter and discipline ISPs, as well as giving the ESSA the right to access any type of electronic information transmitted through licensed ISP networks - all without judicial oversight."
From Sarah Hamdi's blog post for ONI, Stop This Law - Internet Regulation, Surveillance, and VOIP in Lebanon

"I'm not religious about technology. My strategy is to use what works best, period. This is why, for more than a decade, I've been using a Mac as my primary computer (and had been using Macs for some of my work long before that). Apple's personal computers continue to be the best combination of hardware and software on the market today. So why am I about to migrate to Linux (aka GNU/Linux)? Because Apple is pushing me away, and because I value some principles, perhaps almost religiously, that affect other decisions."
From Dan Gillmor's post in Salon, This Mac devotee is moving to Linux

(In a related vein, this week Andrew McAfee continues his defense of the "iCosystem.")

"So here I am on a street in Saverne, France, getting on the Net over a rare open wi-fi hot spot. I was going to tweet something about it, but Twitter is down. So here we are."
From Doc Searls' blog post Reliable old blogging

"The idea that public media alter our inner narratives is hardly new. (Stephen Goldblatt’s book on Renaissance self-fashioning is a great work on this topic.) It seems to me to be a coherent history (resorting to coherence in the absence of evidence) to say we are moving from a time in which media structurally gave rise to celebrity (because the media were mass and one-way) to a new medium that gives rise to some Hegelian synthesis of celebrity and actual sociality."
From David Weinberger's blog post More on internal posting

"Critics have always run the risk of retaliation. They have not, however, always run the risk of having their personal phone number micro-blogged to over 115,000 people in a split second. For a long time, retaliating against a journalist meant grumbling to your friends or writing a phone number on a bathroom wall. Several recent news stories have cast new light on the practice, and suggest that people are increasingly taking their anger online and using social media tools to expedite their revenge."
From Marshall Hogan's blog post for CMLP, Logging In and Lashing Out: 'Crowdsourced retaliation' presents new challenges to journalists

"Now occupying only 1.8% of total GDP in Taiwan, no one can deny that local agriculture has lost its once highly-respected status and is almost dying under many political decisions that are not in favor of agriculture. Or we can say that farming is no longer regarded as important and valuable in the minds of politicians, one of which is Liu Cheng-Hung. As magistrate of Miaoli County, on June 9 he sent 20 excavators into the rice fields right on the verge of harvesting, ordering the heavy machines to run amok in a rampage of destruction and annihilating the richly-laden rice fields in the blink of an eye."
From Portnoy Zheng's blog post for Global Voices, Taiwan: "When the Excavators Came to the Rice Fields"

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The Berkman Buzz is selected weekly from the posts of Berkman Center people and projects: http://cyber.harvard.edu/planet/current/

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