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Disparate reports on whether or not the junta’s blackout is working:

News reports abound on the process of gathering reports in Myanmar as much as the actual reports of the brutal crackdowns by the military junta. The Democratic Voice of Burma has been praised for its role at the helm of collecting, hosting, and distributing information from the myriad of reports electronically smuggled out of the country. Despite the internet crackdown which The New York Times The Lede is reporting on, information is still apears to be making its way through to blogs like Global Voices and the Cbox aggregator of on-the-ground reports.

IBM just (re) released Lotus Symphony. And now, Apple is rumored to be coming out with another Newton.

Nostalgia for the good ole’ days, I guess.

More ads:

A start-up called Ad-Air…said Monday that it had created what it called the “first global aerial advertising network” — giant, billboardlike ads that will be visible from the air as planes approach runways.

“What an incredible marketing opportunity — all these passengers with nothing else to do, staring down at the ground below,” said Paul Jenkins, managing director of Ad-Air.

Yes, incredible.

Today, Amazon opened its music service. The motto seems to be: “MP3s, but less expensive than Apple!” Not every music label has signed on, but taking a look at their top 25 or so albums, the list seems pretty good. Radiohead, Ryan Adams, Kanye West, and Feist — all nice stuff.

The real question is, will they move anyone off the convenience of iTunes, with a link to the music store in the same place as all their music? DRM-free music is important, but is it enough to sway the masses?

To follow on this recent post, two stories of note. First, paper airline tickets are finally a thing of the past, the medium of paper being replaced with bits and bytes. (Of course, Jet Blue has never had anything but e-tickets.) The paper ticket is gone, but “the ticket,” as a concept, moves to digital.

More interestingly, researchers are attempting to capture the world’s quickly-fading oral languages, which are becoming extinct at an astoundingly fast rate, something like one every two weeks:

The researchers, focusing on distinct oral languages, not dialects, interviewed and made recordings of the few remaining speakers of a language and collected basic word lists. The individual projects, some lasting three to four years, involve hundreds of hours of recording speech, developing grammars and preparing children’s readers in the obscure language. The research has concentrated on preserving entire language families.

Over at the National Geographic’s “Enduring Voices” site, there is much more about this effort. And while the Times article doesn’t mention it specifically, I think we can assume that digital technology is being used to record, catalog, and index these dying languages.

Oral cultures can continue to live on, digitally.

Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.
- Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

While networks may have always been with us, they are, as Geert Lovink points out in “The State Of Networking,” the “emerging form of organization of our time.” The implications are vast, and hopefully others will add their thoughts here on that. I, though, wanted to focus on a slightly different aspect: the fragility of a network.

Networks are fluid, built to be impervious to an outside threat. The Internet was designed, in fact, on the premise of surviving a large-scale attack. A network, then, is resilient: “A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines” (Deleuze, 9).

In the arborescent, top-down world, this would be dangerous — a break in the hierarchy, and the system fails. See: Katrina, U.S. Hurricanes in the 21st Century.

But this fragility is not only inherent to a rhizomatic structure, but also an important reason why it exists — fragility, in this sense, is a postitive attribute. As Lovink notes, networks are “inherently unstable and its temporality is key…[they] are dense, social structures on the brink of collapse.” Networks can swarm around the breaks — that’s how the packet-switched communication technology on which the Internet works, and that paradigm can be applied to any rhizomatic structure, whether it’s at the technical bits and bytes level of the net, or the socially viral world of Obama girl (3.7 million views, and still going).

It’s easy, then, to think of the rhizome as subversive, a way to provide a means for a kind of digital “civil disobedience,” as Lovink suggests. But, in terms of power, the network is no longer (if it ever was) a space for rebellion and counter-culture. As Deuluze and Guattari note, the smooth and the striated are constantly at play, and the smooth, flat, networked world of the digital counter-culture doesn’t stay that way for long.

An example — today, I attended the IBM/Lotus Collaboration Summit, an event that saw a number of new products and announcements from the company. IBM, just like Microsoft and most in the tech business, see “Web 2.0,” that is, the social networking world, as their next and best chance for future money-making. IBM today told a tale of collaboration, and knowledge, and connections, and the Millennials, and how, of course, they would provide the foundation for all this innovation.

MySpace, also today, has announced a new advertising strategy, providing custom ads, based on whatever you have in your space. Not to be left out:

MySpace’s rival, Facebook, also says it is experimenting with ad customization with the help of Microsoft, which signed with the up-and-coming social network last year to provide display ads on the service. To the consternation of privacy advocates, who say Internet users are unaware of such activity, the social networks regard these detail-stocked profile pages as a kind of “digital gold,” as one Fox executive put it last year.

Digital gold, indeed.

So, the smooth, networked world of Web 2.0 won’t stay that way for long, as the value of our thoughts, our relationships, or connections, our creative energies will soon be scooped up by the digital panhandlers of the capitalistic system.

Meet the new boss…?

Maybe not. As always, networks are susceptible to virus writers and hackers, who test for points of vulnerability and exploit holes in the system (and no system is without holes, no code is perfect…). If distributed networks have become hegemonic, as NYU Professor Alex Galloway suggests in his essay, “Protocol” (pdf), if they have become “the new citadel, the new army, the new power,” it may be that virus writers, hackers, and crackers become the best way to subvert the control, both overt and covert, the network has placed over us.

I’m not suggesting, though, you get rid of your anti-virus software just yet.

Henry Jenkins, in Convergence Culture, remarks that “old media never die.” Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media, has this to say on the matter:

A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress the older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them. Manuscript culture had sustained an oral procedure in education that was called “scholasticism” at its higher levels; but by putting the same text in front of any given number of students or readers print ended the scholastic regime of oral disputation very quickly. Print provided a vast new memory for past writings that made a personal memory inadequate.

Of course, McLuhan was speaking to medium theory’s zoomed out, larger perspective, the “break boundaries” in society that move us from media paradigm to media paradigm. Jenkins’s point is zoomed in: the move from 8-tracks to cassettes to CDs is much smaller in scale.

But perhaps the question today should be posed differently? In the age of participatory culture, it’s not that media is being replaced as it is media being confused: mashed up and remixed, to the point that we don’t know what to make of it. A recent example is “Quarterlife,” a new series debuting on MySpace:

Hollywood has been dipping its toe in original online content. Two seasoned producers are about to take a full plunge.

‘); } //–> Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick — who have made films like “Blood Diamond” and “The Last Samurai” and whose ABC series “Thirtysomething” helped to define television drama in the 1980s — have made a deal with MySpace, the online social network owned by the News Corporation, to produce an original Web series called “Quarterlife.”

Mr. Herskovitz described “Quarterlife” as a regular television series, made by network-caliber writers, directors and production crews…A day after their original MySpace posting, the episodes will be available on quarterlife.com. A week later, they will be generally available on the Web. And, if all goes as planned, they will eventually find their way onto conventional television screens.

What’s becoming apparent is that our need (is “desire” a better word?) to categorize media — this is television, this is Internet — is quickly becoming irrelevant. These boxed-in descriptions of media no longer work, no longer apply. Is Quarterlife television? Online? Both? Neither?

From our vantage point, the impact is not that clear. There’s certainly something happening, some sort of societal change is taking place; whether it’s of the same magnitude as print displacing our memory, as McLuhan notes, I’m not sure…

Spaces such as YouTube and MySpace are essential parts of our participatory culture, and yet Quarterlife is an overt attempt to co-opt some of new media’s democratizing potential. That’s why I’m not so sure — it seems like a power struggle at this point, and it’s not clear who will win.

Quarterlife is simply, “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”

I assume everyone googles their names, and the various forms of their names they use to identify themselves online. Well, at least, I do. And I just found my name on a web site I’d forgotten about, a place I registered with several years ago.

Now, I’m not all that interested in being associated with that site, but there’s no easy way to delete my account. Maybe it’s an obvious point, but it hit me today — on many sites, it’s actually not easy, or not possible, to remove your digital ID.

A quick search turns up: it’s easy to delete accounts on both google and yahoo, although for both, if you don’t cancel and delete things in the correct order, you can linger (even for some chargeable, premium services); on myspace, you can, but they don’t make it easy; for Facebook, apparently it’s not possible to delete your account.

In the blogosphere, it’s also not possible. The Daily Kos FAQ, for example, states that user accounts there “…are forever, or at least as long as DailyKos remains in existence.” This is because, unlike social networking sites, comments in blogs (or, more specifically, political community-based blogs) are primarily public speech, although public speech with a digital “memory.” It’s a kind of Habermasian public space, with a automatic, permanent record.

There are some obvious questions: How long should our identities linger in cyberspace? Who controls our identities, and who *should*? What does privacy even mean these days?

No obvious answers…

It reads like a pre-i-bubble-burst marketing sheet:

In October, the online retailer Amazon.com will unveil the Kindle, an electronic book reader that has been the subject of industry speculation for a year, according to several people who have tried the device and are familiar with Amazon’s plans.

…Several people who have seen the Kindle say this is where the device’s central innovation lies — in its ability to download books and periodicals, and browse the Web, without connecting to a computer…The device also has a keyboard, so its users can take notes when reading or navigate the Web to look something up. A scroll wheel and a progress indicator next to the main screen, will help users navigate Web pages and texts on the device.

As the Times article points out, the new e-book offering from Amazon may end up like the host of dot-com failures that came before them. For while the pitch is persuasive — “Digital readers are not a replacement for a print book; they are a replacement for a stack of print books” — yeah, yeah…we’ve heard it all before.

People like books. People like the tactile quality, dog-earing the pages, marking up the sides. People like a book’s transportability, so you can read them on a beach, or on the roof deck. Or, yes, crass as it is, on the toilet. Books on a bookshelf, are, in a way, art; they look cool. They’re certainly also an expression of who we are, and what’s in our brains.

And if you lose it, oh well, it’s a book. $14.95, not the $400 to $500 Amazon plans on charging for their new Kindle.

Now, if the thing allows me to vote on American Idol…they may have something!

Wired today reports on the difficulties businesses have selling privacy services:

“Ask people if they care about the environment they’ll say yes, but they’re not willing to give up their SUVs…Ask if they care about privacy, they’ll say yes, absolutely, but I will not take down my MySpace page with my 400 friends on it because that’s how I socialize. They’re very unaware that these pages get indexed, archived, and become part of their public record…I hate to say this, because I am a big fan of privacy…[b]ut I think as a society we are redefining our understanding of what ‘privacy’ means, and unfortunately not for the better.”

Certainly, our culture’s sense of “privacy” has changed, due to the very public nature of the web and its associated media practices. Young people, most clearly, have blurred the lines between what’s private, and what’s public.

But what seems to get conflated, or maybe even misunderstood, in these discussions is the particular kinds of data we have about ourselves, and the degrees of privacy that are needed for each. The kind of MySpace public-ness is, for example, very different then the kind of financial privacy (credit cards, social security numbers, etc.) we would expect to keep protected. Wired cites a study, in fact, that found people unwilling to spend *anything* to keep certain information, such as “their weight or number of sex partners,” private. That’s very different, though, than allowing everyone to know the details of my mortgage application.

So it seems, then, what we formerly called “socially private” information, the kind that’s now posted on a MySpace page or a blog, is something we (increasingly) would actually want to make more public.

But I’m not sure there’s much evidence of a trend that people want to open up financially private data to the world. (There is definitely the possibility that people inadvertantly reveal this information, though…) Companies like Equifax build part of their business on providing consumers with the ability to track their credit reports, and, with concerns today over identity theft, their businesses have created a nearly billion dollar market (not without its problems).

Perhaps privacy is a tough sell because of the air of inevitability around things like identity — our digital selves have outgrown us, spiralling out of control among the links of banks, credit bureaus, telemarketers, magazine publishers, phone companies, retailers, and every other organization we contact in our daily lives.

If there really is no privacy anymore, if we really do need to get over it, then what’s the point of buying a privacy service?