Mozilla Firefox add-on MafiaaFire Redirector

Wired’s Threat Level Blog is carrying a story about the Department of Homeland Security demanding that Mozilla take down an add-on that lets users easily redirect to sites that have been given a take-down notice due to copyright infringement. Maybe censorship is too strong a word, but it certainly appears as such. Mozilla agrees and is requesting a reason for the takedown. The government has yet to respond.

Via WIRED.

The Facebook “like” button is only one year old, but has already become ubiquitous across the web, and the globe [via Facebook]. Theorizing the effect of this is becoming an important new project.


Answer: They wield enormous (and terrifying) power, yet  they are ill-adapted to function in a changing environment.

In most corners of society, it’s a become a trope to say that the Internet has changed everything; but online communication is still far from integrated into the norms and practices of the academy, whose pace of change and adaptation is nothing less than glacial.  Anyone familiar with academic careers knows that conventional (read print) journal publications are the be-all end-all criterion in evaluating potential hires—the meaning behind the well-worn cliché: “publish or perish.”

The practice of using journal articles as the sole criterion in evaluating an academic’s productivity is an artifact of an epoch long-passed.  In the age of the printing press, journals were, by far, the most efficient and enduring form of communication.  They enabled disciplines to have thoughtful conversations spanning decades and continents.  They also facilitated the transmission of the knowledge produced through these conversations to younger generations.  In fact, it is nearly impossible to imagine the emergence of Modern science without existence of this medium. Thus, in the beginning, journals become symbolically and ritually important because they were functionally necessary. (While journals were medium du jour during Durkheim’s productive years, he surely would have recognized the reason behind their status in the cult of the academic.) more...

Zizek writes this week in Inside Higher Ed about how cloud computing is a space dominated by two or three companies (read: Apple and Google). He states,

“cloud computing offers individual users an unprecedented wealth of choice — but is this freedom of choice not sustained by the initial choice of a provider, in respect to which we have less and less freedom? Partisans of openness like to criticize China for its attempt to control internet access — but are we not all becoming involved in something comparable, insofar as our “cloud” functions in a way not dissimilar to the Chinese state?”

Is a computing market dominated by a few private companies really similar to the “Great Firewall” (officially, the “Golden Shield”) of China?

During his plenary address a Theorizing the Web 2011, entitled “Why the Web Needs Post-Modern Theory,” George Ritzer was deeply critical of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s (2011), The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry), a book which has received a great deal of media attention in recent months, for it’s lack of theoretical foundations.  The editors of the Cyborgology obtained the following excerpt from Ritzer’s paper:

The nature of, and problems with, a modernist approach are clear in Siva Vaidhyanathan’s (2011), The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry). We were drawn to this book because the title is similar to, if not an outright rip off of, two similarly modernist books written by one of the authors of this paper- The McDonaldization of Society (Ritzer, 1993/2011) and the Globalization of Nothing (Ritzer, 2003/2007). Thus we know from whence we speak in seeing Googlization as a modernist work and as such in understanding its liabilities (and strengths). In addition, while Ritzer’s works (mentioned above) use modern theories and ideas (e.g. rationalization) to deal with such clearly modern phenomena as the fast food restaurant and, more generally, the world of consumption, Vaidhyanathan employs modern ideas (not full-fledged theories) to deal with the arguably postmodern world of the Internet, Web 2.0 and especially Google. more...

The New York Times has a great article on how we are increasingly “Turning to Social Networks for News.” The important contrast is between traditional top-down reporting and the way information spreads virally from the bottom on social media.

Mashable found that more than half of its readers first learned of Bin Laden's death from Facebook or Twitter
Twitter announced unprecedented sustained usage levels on Sunday

The Cyborgology editors were on the radio (WYPR, Baltimore’s NPR affiliate) talking about the Theorizing the Web 2011 conference. We discuss the Twitter backchannel and the notion of an augmented conference, and how Facebook is similarly a backchannel to our Face-to-face interactions. Also, conference attendee Bonnie Stewart is mentioned!

Listen to the full audio here.

WordPress › Error

There has been a critical error on this website.

Learn more about troubleshooting WordPress.