A lengthy article in The Atlantic explains just why China’s “Great Firewall” is so effective. As Boing Boing summarises, “The kicker is the social and political impact… simply by making it inconvenient to read certain sites, the Chinese government can keep politically charged issues from surfacing in the national discourse.”
Marc Andreessen on Barack Obama
Netscape founder Marc Andreessen spent 90 minutes with Barack Obama in early 2007. His report on that conversation is fascinating: “He said — and I’m going to paraphrase a little here: think about who I am — my father was Kenyan; I have close relatives in a small rural village in Kenya to this day; and I spent several years of my childhood living in Jakarta, Indonesia. Think about what it’s going to mean in many parts of the world — parts of the world that we really care about — when I show up as the President of the United States. I’ll be fundamentally changing the world’s perception of what the United States is all about.”
Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0
First Monday is a peer-reviewed journal about the Internet. Almost always good reading — but this month’s special feature Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0 is double-plus good.
The Preface gives the flavour:
Web 2.0 represents a blurring of the boundaries between Web users and producers, consumption and participation, authority and amateurism, play and work, data and the network, reality and virtuality. The rhetoric surrounding Web 2.0 infrastructures presents certain cultural claims about media, identity, and technology. It suggests that everyone can and should use new Internet technologies to organize and share information, to interact within communities, and to express oneself. It promises to empower creativity, to democratize media production, and to celebrate the individual while also relishing the power of collaboration and social networks.
But Web 2.0 also embodies a set of unintended consequences, including the increased flow of personal information across networks, the diffusion of one’s identity across fractured spaces, the emergence of powerful tools for peer surveillance, the exploitation of free labor for commercial gain, and the fear of increased corporatization of online social and collaborative spaces and outputs…
Much, much food for thought in the essays. Expect to see it reflected — somehow — in my writing over the coming week.
Hat-tip to Professor Roger Clarke, who says, “I thought my paper was reasonably critical of the phenomenon, but these make me seem like a pussycat (or maybe a respectable academic?).”
Bronte Beach is better than my office
You can see why I much preferred to meet my client at Bronte Beach in Sydney’s eastern suburbs this morning, rather than an office somewhere. I’m slightly annoyed to be back at my desk now.
What happens after Australia 2020?
Chairman Rudd has already said he wants a bunch of good ideas to come out of the Australia 2020 Summit. In a wide-ranging interview for The Age he explained what’ll happen to those ideas.
Rudd: I think engaging the public service with something like the 2020 summit is a good thing because you have people who are mutually engaged, against not a completely free-ranging discussion, because we’ve set a policy objective for the nation which we intend to work towards. We’ve said here are the questions that we would like answers to but in terms of the menu of answers and recommendations we are completely open-minded about that. As I’ve said consistently, we’ll accept or reject what’s put forward. But the idea is to shake the tree both within government and beyond government to get people into a much more open engagement about the country’s future. I think that’s healthy.
Q: What’s the mechanism for accepting or rejecting ideas?
Rudd: We, the elected government, will do that. But what is put forward by the 2020 Summit will be their agreed recommendations, each of these ten working groups. And what we’ve indicated is by year’s end, that is within a six-month frame we will develop a formal response to what has been put forward by way of acceptance or rejection and the reasons why. I think that is a fair way to go.
In other words, the Summit is the start of a debate. After that one weekend in April it’s up to us — yeah, us Australians — to convince the government they’re worthwhile ideas (or not).
So who’s ready for the future? Who’s not?
Maxine McKew and I aren’t the only ones who think Australia is ready to start a new conversation about our identity. The Australia 2020 Summit secretariat received 7251 nominations for the 1000 spots. I wish them well with the winnowing — and wish myself good luck with my own application.
The real fun now is seeing who’s actually ready for the future, and who just wants to stifle discussion.
Human rights lobbyist Howard Glenn puts it well, and shows that he’s ready:
Why am I enthusiastic about a relatively small two-day conference in April? Because it is a big gesture which says clearly that we have permission to start thinking about the future again. The flow-on effects are already starting. Schools want to have their own future summits, difficult long term issues are emerging for community debate. And that’s before it’s all really started.
It’s only two days and 1,000 people. Who gets to go is not as important as the fact that it is occurring at all, and that there’s such media attention to the attendance. Some will see it as a revival of the mythical Keating elites; the start of European-style social planning; a talk fest. I see it as the start of a restoration of confidence in Australian culture, identity and ingenuity, and a faith that we can think about future challenges, and find what we need to face them.
So what about everyone else?
Continue reading “So who’s ready for the future? Who’s not?”