Going International

When it comes to pop culture, it's unavoidable when you are immersed in the culture itself. So sometimes it can get overbearing, and I like to explore the entertainment world beyond the borders of the United States, which is made possible thanks to the internet.

Since I was little I've always watched Hong Kong drama series (somewhere between TV shows and soap operas), then the computer came along and I had access to all kinds of media that highlights the pop cultures from different countries. From my own experience I've come across Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Mainland China, Korean, and Japanese pop cultures. Some I've delved into more than others, but it's interesting to see the contrasts between the pop cultures between these countries.

My favorite resource for english subtitled dramas is Mysoju. Within the Asian drama community, there is a lot of cross cultural influence and remediation. For example, there is a manga that originated from Japan called "Hana Yori Dango," which was made into a live drama in Taiwan (Meteor Garden). The series was then remade in Japan, and then Korea, and then Mainland China (Let's Go Watch Meteor Shower). The story is still the same, but each country takes the story and adapts it to their local culture and to match their ideals. The music industry is also highly subjected to this adaption, where popular songs would be covered or translated into other languages and be a hit single as well. It really brings into the question of what intellectual property laws are like, since there are so many

This is just an example of one of many cross cultural and media convergence. My examining this phenomenon itself is a convergence because of this cross-cultural exposure that I would other-wise not be able to experience if not for the internet.

Cisco & the Human Network

What is Cisco:
Cisco Systems Inc. manufactures network hardware used in computer networks; specializing in network connectors--routers, bridges and switches. They also design technologies and services for Internet communication.

What is The Human Network:
This is a current Cisco project to use internet connection as a way to connect everyone to everyone else.



Within the classroom:
Human Networking within the classroom has the potential of being very powerful.
- The possibility of “outside” classroom experiences like we’ve never seen before
- The ability to “take” the classroom straight to the topic being taught

~ Tisha

Native American Censoring {For Last Week's Post}

I was researching censoring in general and I found this interesting article (Click HERE to read it) about censoring in one of the places you would really expect it. The author talks about her experience working as a journalist in Native American communities and how eventually she was “blackballed” out of her job because of things she was writing about (Iran war, Bush administration, Russell Means, and Leonard Peltier.

Go HERE for Information on Leonard Peltier****

Go HERE for information of Russell Means****

~ Tisha

UM Employee fired for Innocent Statement

After reviewing the "Chilling Effects of Anti-Terrorism", I came across some irrational actions that were taking by institutions and the government related to the newly enforced patriot act. One action that really stood out to me was the report of a University of Miami Employee who was fired. It was his 22nd birthday on September 11th and he said out loud "Some birthday gift from Osama bin Laden!" Due to this statement, he was fired from his job. I guess it does relate directly to the Patriot Act, but it does illustrate the sensitivity of people had after the 9/11 attack. The government took advantage of this public sensitivity and they were able to enforce laws that allowed unauthorized viewing and searching of personal files.

Censorship

Looking through the list of websites and content that have been shut down by the US Government and other large scale entities, I notice that some have good reason to be shut down, but it is arguable that these censorship activities may have ulterior motives and selfish interests.

The 2 examples of content that were censored after 9/11 includes (but is not limited to) the following: (source)

A. Michael Moore's publisher insisted that he revise his book to be less critical of Bush. Discouraging a citizen from criticizing the government is basically going against what this nation was built upon. As long as it is not entirely slander, then it should be a valid comment by a concerned citizen on the state of the nation. Shutting out that dissenting voice only allows the government to continue down a path that may not be beneficial to the nation.

B. Baraboo News Republic cans Todd Persch - being fired for expressing one's viewpoints, the company may have its own interests to protect, but it is ideally wrong when comparing to the right to freedom of expression that we are endowed by the Bill of Rights.

Those are just two examples, but it is apparent that there were and probably are numerous instances where dissenting voices are muffled by higher powers. Not only does it violate the 1st amendment, but it also shows that citizens must not be passive and let these voices be muffled by the government or selfish interests that may damage the public good.

A (hopefully) Shorter, Lighter, and thus probably more Read Post

So, previous post of mine was my rather long and rather obsessively documented post on Free speech as it relates to government, companies, countries and people. I've just closed the >20 tabs I had opened to research the topic. But along the way, I found some really interesting posts including Henry Jenkins'  Blog , the The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund which, according to their website,  "was founded in 1986 as a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of First Amendment rights for members of the comics community."

And a totally unrelated link about a man who paints himself to blend in with the environment. (I wonder what his motivation for doing this could be....?)

Filtering in Austria

After discussing Internet censorship in class and what different countries filter, I was curious to see what the European states filter, opposed to China or Iran. It was a little surprising to find out that Great Britain filters Internet content that has to do with images of child abuse. This was in 2007, and it was voluntary for search engines to block. The online surveillance expanded to filter out child pornography. According to the webisite some 19 European countries assisted in helping identify illegal online content. In Austria, authorities uncovered a child-pornography ring which involved some seventy-seven countries. This was all based on a report by a man working for a Vienna-based Internet file-hosting service.

Future of Technology

This post does not have much to do with the government regulation of technology, but rather the exceeding speed of development of technology. Technology is ever changing and growing. By the time we are all older, there will be thousands of new products and technologies we will have no idea how to work. It is incredible how fast it is developed. I watched this video in one of my other courses, and believe it fits with our course as well. Some of the statistics are astonishing, but to connect it back to last weeks discussion, as much as governments are trying to control the Internet, with technology changing so often, how will they be able to keep up?

The internet and democracy

Good evening everyone! I found this video on ted.com (my new favorite website, by the way) in it has to do with the internet's role in democracy. It starts by explaining a common assumption that we hold of : more technology = greater connectivity = democracy. The speaker then quickly tries to negate that assumption by trying to prove that the internet can actually enable tryanny. The speaker brings in many examples of blocking, censoring, and spinning that government/ regimes use to promote their agendas.

Strikethrough '07: A Lesson In the Careful Handling of Free Speech Issues

Background


LiveJournal is one of the top 5 blogging sites, with nearly 3 million active blogs and at least 2,000 communities (people sharing a blog on a particular interest or focus, from rape survivor networks to fanfiction communities to small groups of localized friends)  updated in the last month alone. Finding a complete list of communities is impossible.

Due to the set up of the communities, which is as far as I know, unique amongst online blogging sites,  the 100x100 user pictures(avatars, icons whatever you want to call it), 15 offered to free users and the maximum of 199 user pictures for paid users,  and many other features, LiveJournal (aka LJ) is the most popular site for fandom communities as well as publishing fanfiction and other fandom-related activities (fanfiction.net is disparagingly referred to as The Pit within LJ) 


Strikethrough is what happens to a LiveJournal user's name when their account has been deleted. Their comments remain, but all posts in communities are removed, and their jounral no longer exists. A user can delete their own journal, or the LiveJournal employee may delete it for various resons.  Boldthrough is when an account is suspeded

Ex: myDeletedUser indicates that journal no longer exists.
      mySuspendedUser indicates that the journal is suspended
      myRegularUser is the way the username should show up


Events

A group (Warriors of Innocence) pressured LiveJounrnal to remove journals that were, according to them pedophillic or otherwise morally and legally reprehensible, by informing SixApart (the company that owns LiveJournal) that they must either delete those communities and journals, or else the would inform the paid avertisers that their advertisments were being displayed next to sexually explicit material.

While the concept of attempting to prevent the spread of rapists, child molesters and other human scum from propagating via the internet is a rather righteous cause, the matter of handling such actions is difficult.

LiveJournal reacted by deleting 500 journals which had anything that came up within their rather wide search terms related to such topics.

As the article published in the online news archive CNet states

"As a queer, feminist writer who explores the darker aspects of human nature, many of my stories deal with incest, rape and child molestation," a LiveJournal member named "bitterfig" wrote. "As such, I belonged to and contributed to several of the communities which have been suspended and frankly I'm pretty offended. I don't like being lumped in with rapists and pedophiles and other 'monsters on the Web.'"

Practically any attempt to sort works of fiction into tidy piles of acceptable and unacceptable material, of course, is likely to invite controversy. Works by noted authors such as James Joyce, Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs have been lauded as masterpieces--and at other times prosecuted as obscene.

What has outraged the LiveJournal protesters is that the purging of discussions and accounts went far beyond what they say was necessary to target pedophilia. One post noted that two journals were deleted on the grounds that "they in some way encouraged illegal behavior" even though the accounts belonged to clearly labeled fictional characters in a role-playing game. Another deleted community was reportedly home to Spanish-language discussions of Vladimir Nabokov's famous novel Lolita.

As a large (and maybe disproportionate) amount of the journals were fandom-related, the fandom community saw this as a direct strike against their free speech and their community.

Protests, including support-posts, support-memes, and a community fandom_counts were started. fandom_counts entire purpose was to get a tally of the unique users in the fandom. To this day, there are nearly 4,000 users who have joined the community (although this is no where near the total users involved in fandom, this community alone is larger than the number of users who are from the Netherlands) On LiveJournal at least, the users who identify with fandom are equivalent to a small, but very very active country. 

The main issues within the community were that fandom-focused topics were persecuted, while topics of  racial discrimination and many of the more real-life oriented explicit content slipped through the LJ staff members collective strikethrough-net. In addition, no warning was given, and LJ's public handling of the case equated fan-works with endorsement of said situation in reality.

 As RandomSome1 posted in her analytical essay on the events and the reactions:

Most recently, on September 3rd, users’ multiple complaints to the BBB were addressed. Chris Vail (representing himself as General Counsel for Six Apart) defended the company’s actions by saying absolutely everything that was deleted without warning was “related to child pornography, pedophilia,” and so on. This blatantly libels the RP journals, the incest and rape survivors, and the Lolita community, clearly shows Lj’s lack of differentiation between fanworks and child pornography, and makes it exceptionally plain that Lj’s staff did not take any users seriously when they complained about being repeatedly called pedophiles and child molesters. Vail also did not address complaints of news not being directed to the userbase at news, did not address Lj’s warnings of vikingcarrot or of cluegirl, and did not address complaints about burr86’s statements in efw.

It seems this wreck is far from over.

Most of us understand that Six Apart is (at least theoretically) trying to take responsibility for its content and keep itself safe from lawsuits. Should someone take them to court, no matter how frivolous the reason, they automatically lose—not the case, but thousands of dollars in legal expenses. No matter the number of users that’ve joined fandom_counts, the court costs from one lawsuit to a major company (the average was $30,000, as quoted to me by a Cedar Point rep. a few years ago) could still outweigh the gains from keeping this vocal, somewhat feral segment of its customer base.

One wonders if this wave of bad press has factored into their calculations. One wonders if Six Apart expected people to find links to and pick apart their promises, contradictions, and commentary; if they expected a full dissection of the Miller test; if they expected people to find how the charities they were promoting were really closely tied to the company itself. One wonders if they clearly grasped the nature of what they were dealing with.


Overall, there has been much discontent with the shifting policies, outright lies and hypocrisy, lack of communication, and accusations of child pornography and pedophilia. A number of users have left for other journaling sites, such as Insanejournal, Greatestjournal, or Journalfen. A number of other users have declared themselves sick of the entire mess and have repeatedly told the dissenters to STFU. In these cases, it appears that the point has been missed: Had Livejournal been clear and upfront about what it would and would not allow to begin with rather than hedging about with loophole-ridden legalese (“No underage sexuality in artistic works, period. If you have a question about a particular thing's status then ask,” versus “It’s probably okay, but only if it’s not obscene, and this says what’s obscene by undefined community standards as not set in this site which also says that art does not apply”) all of this mess would have been averted. Had they not tried to stifle all naysayers with the label of “child pornographers,” then things wouldn’t have gotten nearly as ugly within fandom. And had they responded to frantic fen within a reasonable period of time, then things wouldn’t have escalated to the point that entire communities and movements were formed to oppose them.

The Strikethrough '07 was not an isolated incident, and resulted in many mirror-journals being created at GreatestJournal, InsaneJournal, and other sites. Some people left LJ permanently, while others left it temporarily. Nearly all possibly-controversial material requires either joining limited groups, or being friended by indidual users, which does not really limit the viewing of such sites, but irritatingly enough, opens up your own journal to viewing by those users. 

Further Information & Documentation may be found at:

RandomSome1's Personal Blog: (hoping for) a fistful of change
FanHistory.com: LiveJournal Article, Strikethrough Section
And, as always
Wikipedia. org: LiveJournal (Relevent section: Controversies)

(some discretion may be advised when clicking on FanHistory, as it is a bit more explicit as to the nature of the content deleted, including quotes from emails sent between LJ users and LJ administrators)

Conclusions
1) Actions taken against even a miniscule faction of a group on the internet will be reacted to as if the entire group was threatend
2)Fandom regards its rights very seriously and is not passive
3) Everything will be documented; Nothing is forgetten. Multiple communities are dedicated to remembering histories only relevant to small sections of the population.
4) the Internet, and fandom is a very, very difficult medium to police and to monitor.

The differences between art, porn and things which require legal action may be very indefinte. Because someone reads fiction on a topic, do they suport it? Because someone discusses a topic, do they support it? Someone writes fiction on a topic, do they support it?  How should one regulate a media.

Homosexuality may be legal in one area. Someone in that area writes a relevant story and posts it on the web. Another area may have banned homosexuality, and someone from that area reads said story. Is that person acting illegally? Is the site displaying that story acting illegally?  What if the topic was incest between  cousins? Underage sex? Or any other number of topics which are morally & legally grey- or even flat out illegal?


What is the responsibility and liabilities of each party in these situations? What, if any, limits should exist on the web in regards to such content?


-Lia

Trouble With Amazon

After looking through the patriot act website I decided to pursue the case study about a book sold on Amazon's British website. The story is posted on nytimes.com so one would assume this article would be somewhat legitimate, the story is also linked to a government site making it appear to be authentic. At first the article was an interesting read but I eventually discovered some problems. They did not seem to have any information on the book that caused problems, and yet there was a big enough deal for the cover to be taken off line. The article provided vague details with little actual facts. And it goes on to repeat the entire story in the same article, as if some one copy and pasted it once.
I did want to point this article out though as an example of a website being wise and not wanting to get in trouble with the government by removing an offensive image. It seems like in today's world, most people try to stay out of the way of the government as if it is some goliath. I would like to see more power in the PEOPLE'S hands.

Case Study: Nepal

I decided to to research a bit and see what the government filtering levels were like in Nepal. Nepal has a history of unstable political conditions which has lead to much censorship especially of traditional medias. I found that in 2005 there was a week long national media and internet black out because the political conditions became so unstable. However, surprisingly Nepal does not filter the internet on an "ongoing basis." 1.41% of the population is actually an internet user so that is probably one of the main factors in the reasoning as to why there are little to no filters. Nepal's internet use is growing as is their interest in free media. Still the unstable political conditions threaten the independent media in Nepal.

Public School and Library filtering

I know most of us have probably used a public computer at a library or public school at some point in our lives, but it wasn't until 2000 that Congress enacted the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act.
The act provides funding for public schools and libraries that participate and can certify that they are using filtering programs to "prevent the on-screen depiction of obscenity, child pornography or material that is harmful to minors." The filtering can be disabled by the library for adult users, and 21 states have adopted internet filter laws. Some states have only adopted the filtering towards school and some, like Colorado, have filtering in both public schools and libraries.
In 2003 the Supreme Court held up the CIPA act, stating that it did not violate 1st Amendment because the libraries can disable the filter for adult users, and overturned the earlier court ruling that did not allow the act to take effect in libraries.
The National Conference of State Legislatures website has an overview of the Filtering act and a table of the states and their individual filtering laws.

Iran's filtering System

I wanted to look up one of the most suppressed countries that Western Societies feel liberties are not allowed, so i looked up Iran. It used to be a free internet in Iran but with the allowance of free speech made the government look bad and passed laws to hinder this concept of free speech. Now one of the major items that are censored through the internet in Iran is religion. It is illegal to speak out against the Islamic religion and nothing about atheism is allowed.  Iran government understands that the internet should be a tool of growth in their society but  Iran has censored ten million Web sites thus far and about 1,000 sites are blocked every month.

all of this falls under the Bill of Cyber Crimes’ Sanctions on October 12, 2006. This bill umbrellas all forms of electronic writings and graphics and anything that has to do with cyberspace. But before this law was the 2000 Press Law, which meant that anyone with a website or even blog had to register for the sight and get a license to continue it. Violation of such laws or braking any of the rules the government has provided one can be charged with the death penalty, imprisonment up to five years, or or seventy-four lashes (especially if it has to do with "propaganda" against the religion and government)

the first case in Iran to fall under these strict rules after 2006, was  Baztab.com. "According to a government official, Baztab not only failed to apply for a license, but it also violated the regulations by disclosing state secrets and other confidential military information, insulting government officials, and publishing false news. (internet filtering)" however, for some reason the courts did not press charges and is lucky to be a running site still. But now any networking sites that have anything to do with pornography, relieving clothing, against government or government officials, arsi-language news sites, opposition political sites, and many more. Even sites like MySpace and Photo sharing websites are band.

Communities against the Patriot Act

While looking through Electronic Frontier Foundation I saw a link that brought me to the American Civil Liberties Union website that gave me a list of communities that are against the Patriot Act and have passed resolutions against it. Since the Patriot Act was passed there have been forty-three states that have had 401 communities to make up a total of 62 million people that have challenged the Patriot Act. The last community on the site to pass a resolution was Bristol, Rhode Island that was in 2005 which makes you wonder how many more communities have passed resolutions since. Here are a few segments from the Bristol's resolution:

WHEREAS, the residents of Bristol cherish their political and civil rights and liberties based upon the Constitution and Bill of Rights; and

WHEREAS, full recognition is taken of the serious nature of the current threats to the United States and its citizens which prompt dynamic actions to defend ourselves and our way of life; and

WHEREAS, the citizens of Bristol, thus, wish to insure that the PATRIOT ACT and related executive orders do not significantly erode our fundamental constitutional protections, including but not limited to due process, the right of privacy, the right to counsel, protection against unreasonable search and seizure and all basic freedoms of the Bill of Rights.

Makes me think about a quote of Benjamin Franklin, "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety"

Federal Reserve Violating the Patriot Act??

I ran across an interesting site while doing some research on the Patriot Act and its violators. This little blurb from Campaign for Liberty flips around the Patriot Act on the government and its Federal Reserve. Essentially what is seen here is a gas station owner, who follows the rules and regulations of the Patriot Act, role reversing and calling out the Federal Reserve for not following their own rules. The Patriot Act was created to protect the United States against any type of terrorism and allows for the government to pry into the personal business of anyone. Part of the protection is background checks on people who transfer, spend, and use larger amounts of money than usual. In this article, through the quotes of Bernanke(Chairman of the Federal Reserve), the author explains how the Federal Reserve does not file what happens with the money that they lend to other countries. This is the violation of the Act itself. When will we start to see other government Acts not carried out by themselves but forced to carry out by us??