This post is the first of a five part series on ‘using the web for documentaries‘, addressing the following points: the embeddedness of society in the internet, the political in the web, the politics of engines, the politics of tools, and the web as an anticipatory medium.

To start with, let us have a look at this AP’s picture (click for higher resolution). :
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I was invited to give a lecture on the use of the web for documentaries in the framework of Mediamatic’s AnyMedia Documentary workshop, which forms part of the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam’s doclab program. Following you can find my presentation of Saturday 23 November in written form.

Let me present myself first: I am Erik Borra, researcher and lead programmer at Govcom.org – a foundation dedicated to creating and hosting political web tools, and the Digital Methods Initiative – the New Media PhD program of the University of Amsterdam. I have a MSc in Artificial Intelligence and am preparing a MA in New Media Studies.

In my presentation I have addressed five points, which I have written out in five posts: the embeddedness of society in the internet, the political in the web, the politics of engines, the politics of tools, and the web as an anticipatory medium.

Uit de nieuwste WTO.Zip. nr 53
(http://www.globalinfo.nl/article/articleview/582/1/1/)

Een van de toonaangevende progressieve columnisten in de VS, New
York Times’ Paul Krugman, gooide in februari de knuppel in het
hoenderhok door te schrijven hoe er een geoliede conservatieve
smeercampagne gelanceerd was tegen de Amerikaanse coalitie van
ouderenorganisaties AARP. Deze verzet zich namelijk tegen plannen
om het pensioenstelsel drastisch te hervormen en te privatiseren.
Krugman baseerde zich wederom deels op het onthullende nieuwste
boek van Thomas Frank, “What’s The Matter with Kansas” [1]. In dat
boek onderzoekt Frank hoe de bevolking van Kansas de laatste tijd
steevast politici steunt die beleid maken dat vierkant tegen hun
belangen ingaat. PR-operaties en smeercampagnes blijkt een van de
voornaamste geheime wapens van rechts te zijn.
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There has been a lot happening around Seymour Hersh lately. First, he posted his new article in the New Yorker. In it, he says that the DoD now basically has all the power it wants to perform covert ops within Iran, without telling the Congress or the President anything about it. Of course, the DoD has a fierce rebuttal. Ari Berman also had some very interesting insights which basically come down to “Hersh was right, the DoD wrong”.

On his appearance yesterday on the Daily Show (watch from here), Hersh states that the things that happened in Iraq are happening now in Iran, namely WMD, failed diplomacy by the Europeans, Security Council resolutions, etc etc. Though he says they have learned not to go in with ground forces and do nation building. Rather they will try to topple the regime using covert ops and air superiority. Watch Iran in 2005!

Hersh also appears on Democracy Now! Also see the previous post we had about Hersh.

Depending on who you listen to, Iraq is either a complete disaster or on the brink of a democratic revolution. An overview of some different viewpoints:

Negative:

Seymour Hersh is an American investigative journalist and author. His work first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting. In May 2004, Hersh published a series of articles describing and showing with photos the torture by US military police of prisoners in the Iraqi prison of Abu Ghraib. His take on the current situation in Iraq is that it is a complete disaster. He’s given a couple of speeches that can be viewed online.

Positive:

Iraq the Model is a weblog run by young physicians who see a cross-section of Iraqi patients daily and have witnessed, Ali says, a steep improvement in medical services since Saddam was overthrown. It is this year’s Best Middle East or Africa Blog. One example:

I still hope to visit America some day, but I would love this to happen normally, and not through exceptional procedures and I would be so happy to meet all my American friends and to say thank you to the American people.

There’s also an audio interview with them online. You need to advance to the fourth clip to hear the interview with them.

Ross Rader writes a passionate response to the ITU “Beyond Internet Governance” paper (DOC / HTML). This is the struggle/debate that we face today and good for Ross for articulating the position many people have but are either not in a position to say or are not informed enough to say. I would be very interested to hear the ITU’s response to Ross. The Internet Governance section @ CircleID has good stuff in general.

Ars Technica:

Microsoft will have to begin offering versions of Windows without Windows Media Player built-in, according to a ruling handed down today by the President of the European Union Court of First Instance. The order to carry out the removal the media player as well as license communications protocols to competitors was part of the original finding that Microsoft had violated European antitrust law by abusing its monopoly position to squeeze out rival audio and video makers, and prevent competition in the low-end server market. In addition to the sanctions, the US company was fined €500 million.

In 2004, we had Jon Stewart on Crossfire. In 1986? There was Frank Zappa…
As Zappa once said, “There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we’d all love one another.” (I don’t know of any song that could ever inspire me to love John Lofton, though… compared to him, Tucker Carlson is simply delightful!)

In 1986 Frank Zappa was scheduled to speak about censorship. He’s so funny, eloquent, and intelligent as a speaker that his many “words” made a major impression on me that day. In this interview conducted on March 16, 1986, Frank Zappa talked further about his appearance before the US Congress and his involvement in the fight against censorship.

With the White House, the Senate and the Congress firmly in the hands of the Conservatives, at least we still have the Supreme Court to provide some checks and balances, right? Well, no. Here are ten things President Bush doesn’t want you to know about Scalia and Thomas. One example:

THOMAS FAVORS STATE-SPONSORED RELIGION: Thomas has “advanced the position” that constitutionally mandated church/state separation applies “to the federal government, but not to individual states – a position that would allow Virginia, for example, to declare a state religion.” He would allow individual states to “adopt particular religions and use tax money to proselytize for them.”

To add to that, according to BusinessWeek:

In his second term, Bush could have the chance to replace as many as four of the nine justices on the nation’s highest bench, including the ailing Chief Justice, William H. Rehnquist.

great!

it’s about time we come with a free software variant!!! We are working on it …

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washingtonpost.com
‘Google With Judgment’

By David Ignatius

Tuesday, October 5, 2004; Page A25

Imagine for a moment that you could study the ebb and flow of public discussion about American politics as if it were a computer graphic. What would this database of “aggregated thought” tell you about the presidential campaign debates?

It happens that a former Republican campaign strategist named Charles M. McLean has created just such a database. His consulting company, Denver Research Group Inc., monitors more than 7,000 sources on a constant, real-time basis — giving him a window on what he estimates is about 80 percent of all original political content around the world. Using a combination of computer algorithms and human analysis, he sifts this mass of information to discern the “tonalities” that shape global events. This approach has identified key political trends one to two weeks before those changes appear in traditional poll numbers, he says.

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