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The Tank + Neutrality + Tonight
A reminder for New Yorkers that tonight we're having a salon on network neutrality at the Tank in Tribeca. Doors open at 6.
L is for LCD
 Wow, the world really has gone a bit Second Life mad, hasn't it? Though I suppose the temptation of virtual lesbians was just too great to resist -- behold "the L Word -- Second Life." But what better place than the Planet (where Bette, Alice, and the ladies chill, L.A.-style) for sexually-curious girlfriends and wives to take Arianna Huffington's advice to use the metaverse "to explore different possibilities...fulfill other some other fantasy"?
MyDD: conservative strawmen, congressional blog reading, Hurricane Katrina, and the new Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming
This weekend on MyDD: Anatomy
of a Strawman? tracks a conservative proto-meme backwards as it
traveled from the National Review blog The Corner to a congressman from
Marietta's press release to a throw-away remark by Newt Gingrich on
Fox News. The Blog
Habits of Capitol Hill touches on a new report concerning what congressional
staffers are reading online and why they're reading it. Remembering
the Storm takes on former FEMA Director Michael Brown's ruminations
on the politicization of Hurricane Katrina, and Pelosi's
Committee Coup assesses machinations in the House of Representatives
as the new Speaker forms a new committee to lead the charge on global
warming.
Stiff and Uncomfortable
It's probably a bit late in life for me to learn this lesson, but it
turns out that sometimes a reporter will take what you say and warp
it to fit some particular storyline or agenda. Here's what I'm talking
about.
A few weeks ago, I spent several minutes talking with a reporter working
on a BusinessWeek.com
story on John Edwards' use of new technologies. This was just a
few days after Edwards had "pre-announced" his candidacy announcement
in a web video circulated via email and YouTube. Shot in the backyard
of a home in New Orleans' Ninth Ward, the video showed Edwards dressed
in a casual button-down and not afraid to mutter an "uhh"
here and there. This was back before Obama or Clinton had announced
their intentions, and I told this reporter that in the nascent field
of candidates, Edwards indeed seemed to have the best feel for how to
work in this new medium of short-form web video. What's more, I said,
after a couple somewhat stilted clips, he seemed to have learned to
use his performance skills to good effect.
In the course of that conversation, we drifted into talking about what
Mark Warner had wanted to do with new technologies, had he gone through
with a presidential run. I said that part of the Warner approach to
new media was the thinking that, even if Warner didn't turn out to be
the most charismatic candidate in the Democratic field in terms of podcasting
or video blogging or the like, he had a remarkable ability to talk substance
in a way we thought would be compelling. And in fact, I told this reporter,
I saw that one of Warner's particular strengths was that his background
as a high-tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist set him up to be
extremely strong on the issues at the heart of this new and sometimes
confusing communications landscape -- net neutrality, media reform,
wireless spectrum reform, and the like.
At then at some point, and I think it was during some casual chit-chat,
for whatever reason I mentioned a week I spent volunteering on behalf
of Howard Dean's campaign during the 2004 Iowa caucuses. Yep, I was
an orange-hatted "Perfect Stormer," knocking on doors like
hundreds of other folks who took a week from their lives to support
Dean.
I see now that all this may have been a bit dense and nuanced. But
I was trying to help this reporter develop a more-informed focus and
better context for his story on a topic I have a good deal of interest
in. Yet all that became this:
Some strategists say Edwards is simply more
at ease with new technology than other heavyweights. "He gets it
in a way no other candidate has yet," says Nancy Scola, a former
Howard Dean campaign aide.
She contrasts Edwards' approach to that of former Virginia Governor
Mark Warner, who also employed video blogging and other online tools
as he weighed a bid last year. But Warner came off as stiff and uncomfortable
online, says Scola, who organized his much-hyped press conference
in online virtual world Second Life.
Sigh. I might not be the brightest light in the shed, but would I really
say that about a guy that I dropped my new life in New York just to
try to get elected? A guy I commuted hundreds of miles each week between
Brooklyn and Virginia for half a year to work for? Here's
Mark Warner's video on net neutrality that I sent to anyone who
would watch and posted wherever half-appropriate. Here's
his speech on "Why I'm a Democrat" that I was actively
working to have added to the homepage of his website just before he
decided not to run. That's the guy that I supposedly derided as "stiff
and uncomfortable." Again, sigh. I should have taken a
lesson from Mark Cuban and expected this, I guess.
NYC Event: Susan Crawford on Network Neutrality
Here's a chance for New Yorkers to come hash over the ins-and-outs of net neutrality with one of the leading thinkers and writers on telecom policy and the Internet. I've been working with the good folks at Blogging Liberally to arrange a discussion with Susan Crawford, professor at Cardozo Law School on Wednesday, January 31, at the Tank:
A Blogging Liberally Special Event:
Net Neutrality with guest speaker Susan Crawford
In a matter of months, "net neutrality" has gone from obscure telecommunications law provision to one of the hottest topics of debate on Capitol Hill and across the Internet. If you've been wanting to dig deep into neutrality, from its place in the history of the global network to its meaning for the future of communications policy, here's your chance! On January 31, Blogging Liberally will host a discussion on with leading Internet advocate and scholar Susan Crawford (scrawford.blogware.com). Prof. Crawford is an Associate Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School in New York City, where she teaches cyberlaw and communications law. She writes often on communications policy, digital copyright issues and Internet governance, and she is the founder of the annual OneWebDay celebration.
Wednesday, Jan 31st - 7pm
The Tank - 279 Church Street
btw Franklin & White, 2 blocks below Canal
A,C,E,J,M,N,Q,R,W,Z,6 to Canal; 1 to Franklin
thetanknyc.org
Doors at 6pm; come have a drink beforehand!
Hosted by Blogging Liberally
(This event is open to the public.)
If you're in the NY area, please consider coming out. Some good background reading is Prof. Crawford's FAQs on neutrality, wherein she calls pro-neutrality efforts "a right-to-life movement for new technology."
MyDD: Freedom of Information, Somalia, Whither Obama, and Meet Tim Karr
You've both been waiting so patiently
for my weekly recap of what went on at MyDD this weekend.
I will keep you waiting no more.
First up was The
More Troops, the Less We Know, a short post on the state of information
freedom. Back in 2005, Russ Kick, proprietor of a website called the Memory
Hole submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Defense Department
to get photographs of the remains of U.S. soldiers coming home through Dover
Air Force Base. DOD first denied the request, then relented on appeal; the resulting
images are some of the few we have of the human cost of the Iraq War. As the
U.S. prepares to send more American servicemembers into battle, we consider
the Bush Administration habit of restricting the American people's access to
information on the deeds done in their name.
What's the
Heck is Going on in Somalia? The Pentagon indicated last week that
U.S. troops were sent into Somalia to assess the results of al-Qaeda targeted
airstrikes, the first time that American forces had entered the country since
1993. Yet press reports seem to say that a handful of American "advisors"
marched into the capital city of Mogadishu with Ethiopian soldiers way back
at the end of December. Just what is going down in the Horn of Africa? The tiny
nation of Djibouti, hosts to U.S. "anti-terrorism" efforts in the
region, say they just don't know either.
 While
on the treadmill at the gym on Sunday morning, I watched Senator Obama on Face
the Nation and said to myself "hmm, wonder if that man right there
is gonna run for President." America
Won't Wait Forever, Mr. Obama was a light-hearted poll to find
out whether MyDDers thought the senator from Illinois was is in or out. You're
not going to want to miss the comments on that one. (Update -- Obama announced
today that he has filed with the FEC to form a presidential exploratory committee.
I'm thinking of titling my next MyDD post, "Mr. Obama, I Need a New Car.")
TIm Karr is both a heck of a nice guy and the Campaign Director of Free Press,
a media reform group. Meet
Tim Karr of Free Press is the first in what I'm hoping might become
a regular feature, wherein I conduct informal interviews with progressive-leaning
folks via instant messenger, and then post the chats with light editing. I happen
to think it's important for people working together in the same political space
to get to know one another as well as possible. (Hey, if you're interesting
and progressive and believe in your heart that other left-leaning folks should
learn more about you, perhaps you should be the subject of the next Scola Quickie
Interview®.)
The Arrival of OpenID
What's OpenID? Glad you asked. The long and
the short of it is that it's a single sign-on system for websites across the
Internet. With your identity validated by a single source, you can roam far
and wide logging in with just your ID and no password. It's one of those groundbreaking
Internet-age innovations that you have to experience before you can truly understand
the power of it, like Amazon One-Click or Ajax. But I'll just say that I think
it might soon be big. In about an hour tonight, I was able to configure nancyscola.com
as a personal identity provider that
validates that I indeed am who I say I am. Then with a
simple Movable Type plugin, I enabled comments here on the site to accept
OpenID in addition to the usual name/email/URL sign-on option. There are still
a number of bugs, though, like the plugin refuses to use nickname (mine's "Nancy
Scola") instead of OpenID (mine's "nancyscola.com") as the author
name on comments. Most frustrating! But I'm working on it.
Avatar Politics: the Social Applications of Second Life
 George
Washington University's Institute
for Politics, Democracy, & the Internet has a new paper
out on the online virtual world called Second Life. Titled Avatar
Politics: the Social Applications of Second Life, it's
an insightful look at how the so-called "metaverse"
might be used in the future to organize around shared interests
and goals. Okay, so I wrote it. Thus "insightful"
might be less than completely objective. But without question,
there's some interesting bits on the digital life of singer-songwriter
Suzanne ("Luka") Vega and how one goes about buying
a virtual yak. All this and more in Avatar Politics.
Redesign '07
The new year called for a new look for nancyscola.com, and so here we are. The site's been cleaned up and streamlined quite a bit. If you're so inclined, let me know what you think in the comments. Speaking of comments, they've been rebuilt to work more reliably (cross your fingers) than they have in the past.
Somali Strikes: Lamu
Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, the reported target of the U.S.
airstrikes in Somalia and the alleged planner of the bombings of the
U.S. embassies in Nairobi and the Tanzanian capital of Dar es Salaam in
1998, seems to have been recently teaching either on or near Lamu, an island
quite close to the southern Somali border. Though a speck of an island,
Lamu has been of interest in recent years as a gateway between Somali and
Kenya. Then there's the frequent traffic between the island and the Middle
East. (That flow of life from Lamu to the Persian Gulf has been going on
for centuries now. As I remember it, the heating and cooling of the Himalayas
created great winds that pushed and pulled boats between the two places.)
I mention Lamu because the island was the setting for my master's thesis
on how life on the 19th century Swahili coast was shaped by East African
slavery. The idea of that paper was that while "slave" was a more
mutable role on the Swahili coast than it was in the American South and
the Caribbean, the 'slave state' was so enmeshed in the religous and cultural
life of Lamu that the social role of former slaves and their descendants
carried on with force long after the end of recognized slavery. I don't have much more
to add to the story at this point, but mentioning Lamu at least gives me
a chance to post a photo of me on the island with an ass that I bought there:
Weekends at MyDD
Under discussion this weekend: the House of Representatives' first steps, the term "catfight," and the military ban on gay soliders, sailors, and the like.
Weekends at MyDD
You know, I'm learning that you just never know what sort of post is going to spark people's interest. One on John Edwards being more a movement leader than traditional candidate sparked 170 comments and counting. A second on the hanging death of Saddam Hussein, just eight.
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