'Life is pain,' deadpans the swashbuckling hero of the movie The Princess Bride. "Anyone who says different is selling you something." I'm afraid that this was the quote that drifted across my consciousness on Thursday as the latest news of how the internet has changed everything - again - was unveiled. According to an Ofcom study, we are all spending more time online and on our mobiles than ever, with pensioners spending longer surfing the web than any other age group. And women - they're at it too, more than men in key demographics, with the general consensus seeming to be that this is a marvellous and life-enhancing thing.… Seguir leyendo »
La política ha entrado definitivamente en lo que podríamos llamar la youtubización. El debate organizado el lunes 23 por Youtube y la CNN entre los candidatos demócratas en Carolina del Sur puede que sea recordado dentro de unos años con la misma reverencia mediática que el famoso cara a cara de 1960 entre Kennedy y Nixon. Entonces, la televisión introdujo un nuevo lenguaje. Ahora, parece ser que serán las microfilmaciones colgadas de la red las que marcarán las líneas maestras del futuro. El visionario Marshall MacLuhan, mucho antes de que internet entrara en nuestras vidas, ya predijo que el medio es el mensaje.… Seguir leyendo »
El debate protagonizado por John F. Kennedy y Richard Nixon en las elecciones presidenciales norteamericanas de 1959 suele ser citado como ejemplo de la primera vez en que la televisión interviene de modo decisivo a la hora de determinar un resultado político. Lo cierto es que sólo unos meses antes, el 16 de julio, ese genio de la comunicación que es Fidel Castro había dado ya el aldabonazo de convertir la televisión en palanca de poder, nada menos que ejecutando un golpe de Estado desde la pantalla, con el efecto inmediato de provocar la deposición del presidente Urrutia. La alocución televisada de Fidel constituyó el núcleo de una maniobra iniciada en la mañana del mismo día jugando con otro medio, la prensa, al anunciar desde la primera plana de Revolución su dimisión como primer ministro -no como jefe de las Fuerzas Armadas, por si acaso-, para desencadenar la movilización de masas en torno al palacio presidencial, cuyos fundamentos serán proporcionados por el líder guerrillero en su intervención televisada, sin que por supuesto Urrutia tenga oportunidad de acceder al medio.… Seguir leyendo »
El periodista de Al Yazira Khaled Hroub explicaba hace un año en un encuentro intercultural en Granada que una de las cosas que más le fascinaron de El Cairo fue la importancia de los códigos corporales para poder cruzar las calles sin semáforos. Esta visión le acompañó los diez días que estuvo en Egipto entrevistando a todo tipo de personas: conductores, bailarinas del vientre, intelectuales, tenderos, políticos, académicos, artistas, estrellas del pop, gente politizada de izquierdas, islamistas moderados y fanáticos. El objetivo era saber "por qué los árabes odian a Occidente". La primera respuesta que recibía Hroub era una vehemente negación.… Seguir leyendo »
In May, Lucasfilm announced plans to enable fans of the "Star Wars" series to "remix" "Star Wars" video clips with their own creative work. Using an innovative Internet platform called Eyespot, these (re)creators can select video clips or other content and then add images or upload new content, whether images, video or music.
Eyespot is one of many new technologies inviting "users" to do more than use the creativity they are consuming. Likewise, Lucasfilm is one of many companies recognizing that the more "users" use their creativity, the thicker the bonds are between consumers and the work consumed. (Put differently, the more money Lucasfilm can make.)… Seguir leyendo »
Los consumidores españoles hemos pagado mucho más caro el acceso a la banda ancha, es decir al Internet rápido, que la media de los europeos y eso ha ayudado a que la alfabetización digital en España vaya también retrasada respecto a la europea. La Comisión, en Bruselas, asegura que la culpa es de Telefónica, que ha impedido la competencia en ese mercado y, en consecuencia, ha decidido imponerle una multa de casi 152 millones de euros. La multinacional española protesta, lo que es lógico. La Comisión del Mercado de las Telecomunicaciones (CMT), organismo español encargado de autorizar aquellos márgenes, protesta todavía más porque, dice, eso es asunto suyo y no de la Unión Europea.… Seguir leyendo »
En estos últimos días los medios de comunicación se han hecho amplio eco de los resultados de la investigación que hemos terminado en la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya después de seis años de trabajo.
Deseo afirmar que se trata de uno de los estudios más exhaustivos que se hayan hecho, tanto en ámbito catalán como en el panorama internacional, sobre los usos de internet en la sociedad, las empresas y las instituciones. Y, a través de este hilo conductor, sobre la emergencia de una nueva sociedad, la sociedad red, con características propias en Catalunya pero siguiendo en líneas generales el patrón de transformación detectado por la investigación académica en el conjunto del mundo.… Seguir leyendo »
SSo the Washington journalist who warned me 10 years ago that the internet was doomed, that it would collapse under the weight of all those pages, was wrong. The internet is here and changing everything, the way we work, shop, communicate, even fall in love. But what of society itself? The industrial revolution changed politics completely, leading to universal suffrage, as well as modern socialism, communism and fascism. What will the internet revolution do for the politics of our own age?
Last week the revolutionaries were in town, as Google's high command came to London for a major think-in, led by the CEO, Eric Schmidt.… Seguir leyendo »
Muchas veces se ha dicho -y se dejó escrito- que quienes viven en unos momentos de cambios profundos no se dan cuenta de la revolución que está aconteciendo bajo sus pies. Los franceses de 1789, o los rusos de 1917, no percibieron el protagonismo histórico que estaban asumiendo. Quizá nosotros nos hallamos en situación parecida y serán nuestros nietos los que, con la suficiente perspectiva, describan la transformación que en la política se experimentó en los años finales del siglo XX y primeros del XXI.
Porque ahora nos comportamos de un modo nuevo, distinto de la manera de ser y de convivir que predominaba hace no más de veinte o veinticinco años.… Seguir leyendo »
Electricity reached one-quarter of Americans 46 years after its introduction. Telephones took 35 years and televisions 26 years. Already, in just six years, broadband has reached 25 percent penetration, according to McKinsey & Co.
The exponential explosion of digital content on the Internet is striking. YouTube alone consumes as much bandwidth today as the entire Internet consumed in 2000. Users upload 65,000 new videos every day and download 100 million files daily, a 1,000 percent increase from just one year ago. The market research firm IDC predicts that this year the amount of information created will surpass, for the first time, the storage capacity available.… Seguir leyendo »
These days we want "transparency" in all institutions, even private ones. There's one massive exception -- the Internet. It is, we are told, a giant town hall. Indeed, it has millions of people speaking out in millions of online forums. But most of them are wearing the equivalent of paper bags over their heads. We know them only by their Internet "handles" -- gotalife, runningwithscissors, stoptheplanet and myriad other inventive names.
Imagine going to a meeting about school overcrowding in your community. Everybody at the meeting is wearing nametags. You approach a cluster of people where one man is loudly complaining about waste in school spending.… Seguir leyendo »
On April 12, an 18-year-old blogger with the handle ntcoolfool posted a brief, unexceptional tribute to the deceased American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, for which he received three equally unexceptional responses. On Monday, ntcoolfool’s blog became a scrolling newsreel, providing harrowing details, replete with photos and video footage, of a massacre unfolding below his window. The Virginia Tech university student, identified on his website as Bryce Carter, began reporting in real-time, portraying a quiet campus thrust into a mini war zone.
In a post entitled "Safe and rather scared?,” Mr Carter wrote:
“I walked with my friend to his dorm to get his stuff as an omniscient announcement echoed across campus: ‘This is an emergency.… Seguir leyendo »
A hundred visitors to an internet chatroom last month witnessed a Shropshire father of two hang himself in front of his webcam. Some of Kevin Whitrick's fellow chatters must have imagined he was play-acting, but others were happy to goad him into killing himself. As Whitrick's face turned purple and he began to die, one chatter punctured the heady atmosphere by wondering: "Is this real?"Whitrick's final moments tell us something important about what the internet has become. In this brave new world of the web, even suicide can be an interactive performance egged on by a crowd of eager spectators.
In the course of the last decade, many of us have quit watching the box in the corner of the room and turned to fiddling around with gadgets through which we can watch each other instead.… Seguir leyendo »
Tema: En este ARI se revisa el verdadero alcance de los controles de acceso a Internet en China, primer mercado mundial de las telecomunicaciones.
Resumen: Con el cada vez mayor protagonismo de China, que incluye la próxima celebración de los Juegos Olímpicos de Pekín de 2008, resurge el tema de la información virtual filtrada y denegada por un Estado interpuesto entre la ciudadanía y el exterior. Se utiliza a menudo la metáfora de la histórica Gran Muralla o simplemente se alude a un cortafuegos. Pero la República Popular China (RPC) es un sistema sociopolítico sui generis. Este análisis se propone revisar los contornos de la Muralla virtual realmente existente, mostrar los medios y algunos de los casos más representativos de represión, y explicar por qué esa muralla en realidad no es lo que parece a primera vista de acuerdo con los intereses actuales y en expansión de los usuarios y del propio Gobierno.… Seguir leyendo »
In the past year, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that "anyone can edit," has been cited four times as often as the Encyclopedia Britannica in judicial opinions, and the number is rapidly growing. In just two years, YouTube has become a household word and one of the world's most successful Web sites. Such astounding growth and success demonstrate society's unstoppable movement toward shared production of information, as diverse groups of people in multiple fields pool their knowledge and draw from each other's resources.
Developing one of the most important ideas of the 20th century, Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich Hayek attacked socialist planning on the grounds that no planner could possibly obtain the "dispersed bits" of information held by individual members of society.… Seguir leyendo »
One of the things that really disgusts me about users of child pornography is that we probably all know at least one. Internet sites featuring the abuse of children are practically two a penny: the laws of supply and demand suggest that people’s appetite for them is vast (I don’t buy the feeble Pete Townshend-style argument about “curiosity”. Most “curious” people don’t need to see what children look like while they’re being raped).
Recent history has shown that viewers of such material do not merely consist of shuffling weirdos with pee stains down their nylon trousers, but, uncomfortably enough, encompass the whole of society, from apparently devoted “family” men, to policemen, teachers and judges, up to and including pop stars and actors.… Seguir leyendo »
The Internet needs a makeover. Unfortunately, congressional initiatives aimed at preserving the best of the old Internet threaten to stifle the emergence of the new one.
The current Internet supports many popular and valuable services. But experts agree that an updated Internet could offer a wide range of new and improved services, including better security against viruses, worms, denial-of-service attacks and zombie computers; services that require high levels of reliability, such as medical monitoring; and those that cannot tolerate network delays, such as voice and streaming video. To provide these services, both the architecture of the Internet and the business models through which services are delivered will probably have to change.… Seguir leyendo »
Technology won the 2006 elections for the Democrats. No, not electronic voting machines, but the power of the Internet, fueled by innovative applications that let citizens create and publish their own content. The Internet not only changed the balance of power in the House and Senate, it also helped sack the secretary of defense. Welcome to viral democracy.
In 1994, the last time the House changed hands, the Internet was mainly a university and military application. AOL, with its first 1 million members, was an up-and-coming player in the emerging online world. Marc Andreessen was just leaving school to start Netscape.… Seguir leyendo »
The first person I knew who had a website of his own was a fellow Washington journalist. This was when many journalists were still just getting into email, but the URL for this site quickly circulated around town and around the world. Why? Well, we were all impressed by the technological savvy. But we were absolutely astounded by the solipsism. What on earth had gotten into Joe? This was a modest, soft-spoken and self-effacing fellow, yet his website portrayed him as an egotistical monster.
Or so it seemed at the time. All the elements that struck us as obnoxious eight years ago no longer seem that way.… Seguir leyendo »
LAST WEEK Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, told the Today programme on Radio 4 that he was concerned about the future of his creation. He feared that, if left to develop unchecked, “bad things” could happen to it. Monocles shattered and bow ties were rent asunder as the man who put the wow in hypermedia knowhow went on to reveal that bloggers may not be entirely trustworthy and fraudsters could erode the “usefulness” of his invention.
“Certain undemocratic things could emerge and misinformation will start spreading over the web,” he explained, possibly before running out of the studio, arms flapping wildly about his learned head while screaming something about being “attacked by spy flies”.… Seguir leyendo »
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