MITPressLog

John Palfrey on Cyberbullying

John Palfrey, Harvard Law School professor, is one of the coauthors of Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering. That book was the first to take a sustained, country-by-country look at the practice of internet censorship around the world, as well as the tools used to implement it.

Recently, though, John took aim at another First Amendment issue that's problematizing online worlds: cyberbullying. He chaired the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, a group bringing together industry representatives, academics, and child protection advocates to look into the bullying of young people by their peers online - a problem that virtually all studies show is on the rise.

Cyberbullying, Palfrey notes, poses a particular dilemma from the standpoint of freedom of speech - namely:

[It] is also a problem in the sense that it is very hard to come up with a solution that is likely to help protect our children from one another online. The behavior that one would like to curtail — kids saying harmful things to one another — is part of typical adolescent behavior to some extent. In many cases, what concerns us is behavior that we want to stop, but not to criminalize; the image of filling our prisons with teenagers who have been teasing one another online is plainly unattractive. And many of the more aggressive responses to online bullying would curtail First Amendment freedoms that minors ought to enjoy as their parents and teachers do. All the same, it’s too great a worry to make throwing up our hands an adequate response.

John wrote up an absorbing summary of the task force's conclusions in a special report for the First Amendment Center, which can serve as an excellent introduction for those just getting to this issue. Read the whole thing here. More ambitious readers can read its entire report here.

Camps

Sacramento. Fresno. Nashville. Olympia. These cities have seen a recent surge in tent cities filled with people who are recently jobless and newly evicted from their homes and apartments. Photographs of these camps are reminiscent of the camps created after Hurricane Katrina, as well as pictures from Kenya, Rowanda, and Sudan, where refugees cluster to avoid violence. What may feel more of a stretch is the similarities these camps share with GTMO, as well as a son or daughter’s band camp.

What could prove to be the most compelling architectural phenomena of the early 21st-Century, camp spaces, have been comprehensively explored by Charlie Hailey. Hailey, a professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Florida, wrote Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space. This book examines camps of all types and asks the fundamental question, “What is a camp?” This book is designed to look like a well-worn guidebook, something essential kept on a car dashboard, faded and a little dusty, the jacket fallen off. Beyond the aesthetics of the book’s design, within these pages one will find a treasure trove of camp types divided by purpose.

Originally designed as temporary shelters, camps are becoming a part of our built environment, far outlasting their original intent and design. Hailey considers the political, economic, and cultural consequences of these architectural anomalies, revealing questions of identity, residency, saftey, and mobility. Camp spaces register the struggles, emergencies, and possibilities of global existence as no other space does.

Hoberman on Frampton

In the Village Voice, Jim Hoberman observes the 25th anniversary of the death of experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton - "one of the most erudite characters to ever pick up a camera." The occasion is being marked at New York's Anthology Film Archives with a week-long screening of Frampton's seven-film cycle Hapax Legomena. Hoberman also mentions On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters, "a sumptuous 300-plus page anthology of essays, statements, and interviews on film, photography, and video."

Hoberman's piece is here. Favorite quote from the filmmaker: "I'm a spectator of mathematics like others are spectators of soccer or pornography."

Award News - Mechanisms wins Finneran Award

Mechanisms by Matthew Kirschenbaum is the winner of this year’s Richard J. Finneran Award given by the Society for Textual Scholarship. This prize is given in recognition of the best edition or book about editorial theory and/or practice published in the English language during the preceding two calendar years.

More information about the prize can be found at:
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/research/projects/sts/html/prizes.php

Read Kirschenbaum’s response to this honor at:
http://mechanisms-book.blogspot.com/2009/03/richard-j-finneran-award.html

Thinking Locally

First lady Michelle Obama is planting a White House vegetable garden to "educate children about healthful, locally grown fruit and vegetables". "Buy local" is becoming the new mantra as small business owners launch a "buy-local" push. There's been a steady rise in farmer's markets.
How might this new interest in supporting our local businesses help to save our economy and our communities?

David Hess is an expert in localism, co-founder of the Local First in Albany, NY, and the author of the new Localist Movements in a Global Economy. This book is the first to address the growing phenomenon of localist movements. He sat down with us to discuss these issues.

According to Professor Hess:

On the one side, we're beginning to learn more and more about the negative effects of big-box stores on communities, and not just obvious issues such as sprawl and air pollution, but other issues such as lower levels of average wages, nonprofit activity, and voter turnout. On the other side, higher levels of independent businesses are associated with higher nonprofit activity, voter turnout, and even health. The studies also show that the money you spend at locally owned, independent stores recirculates in the community more than money spent at chain stores, and in the process the local money generates more jobs.

The entire interview can be found here on the Localist Movements in a Global Economy webpage.

Hanne Darboven (1941-2009)

German artist Hanne Darboven has died, Artforum reports. A pioneer in conceptual art, Darboven's works were often massive in both scale and theoretical reach, none more so than Cultural History 1880-1983. Dan Adler's soon-to-be-published Afterall book considers the aesthetic complexities of this encyclopedic installation.

Here's an excerpt from the book's opening that outlines that complexity and hints at the imposing nature of the work:

Hundreds of identical wooden frames, hung in rows, line the gallery walls: an expansive array of form and content, uniformly presented, that provides no single point of access. Even literal portals - a group of panels featuring black-and-white photographs of doorways, all depicted frontally - appear closed. How do these portal pictures function in terms of the total installation, which comprises 1,590 works on paper and 19 sculptural objects, spread out across several galleries?...Text appears as graffiti on walls or as signage in storefront windows. One establishment features Hebrew lettering; another includes a placard that reads 'Under New Management'; another offers the blunt, discouraging statement 'No Admittance.' Do these phrases and qualities have any importance as means to decode the conceptual underpinnings of Darboven's project?...[The] panels are often sequenced and grouped, then the groups juxtaposed, physically placed alongside each other; they do not often exhibit any obvious visual or thematic correspondence...Idiosyncratic linkages, a few visual patterns and perhaps even narrative cohesiveness are apparent here and there, but the images do not 'admit' any interpretive insights into what sort of cultural history Darboven is providing.

The Dia Center offers an insightful essay by Lynne Cooke, as well as a few images from the exhibit.

The Trouble with Simulation

 Simulations have evolved from models crafted from styrofoam and pipe cleaners (remember those models of the solar system from grade school?) to complex, computer-generated worlds with near life-like accuracy.  Responsible for many of our advances in science, engineering, and design, simulations have definitely changed the way we see the world.  But are there any drawbacks?  Sherry Turkle thinks so.  Her book on the subject, Simulation and Its Discontents, is coming out later this spring.  In the meantime, she sat down with Chronicle of Higher Education reporter, David Shieh, to talk about some of the problems they cause.  Here's a bit of what they talked about, but a lengthier discussion will appear in the CHE's pages in a few weeks.  We'll keep you posted. 

Getting From Pong to Wii

The Boston Globe's Geoff Edgers talked to Racing the Beam coauthor, Nick Montfort about the history and influence of the Atari VCS on the future of video game design.  Here's a taste, but be sure to check out the whole interview.  Not only do they discuss Atari's technological and cultural legacy, but they wax a little nostalgic. Nick even reveals his favorite game.... 

IDEAS: It might be hard for kids raised on Playstation 3 to realize how revolutionary Pong and Combat were. Those games are also connected to what we play today, aren't they?

MONTFORT: Take the Wii, for example. There are things about that system that are quite connected to the experience of Pong. Wii Sports, for instance, is a game like Pong in that it sort of shows off the basic things the system is capable of doing. How the controllers work. How people can play together. There are some differences. You can play Wii Sports with one player. But that game is a type in that it's bundled with the system and [offers the] idea that people are going to play together.

IDEAS: We live now in a world where people often are sitting alone in a room playing something. Very different from the Atari philosophy, which, to me, was about games as a social experience. The games were always better with two players.

MONTFORT: I wouldn't want to argue that the Atari way was better. But it has a different concept of how people will play together. Maybe we forgot some things that were good about play experience. Maybe we want the computer to be a device that is more like a hearth that members of the family come around and use to interact with each other.

And coauthor Ian Bogost was interviewed in last month's MIT Press Podcasts.  Be sure to give that a listen. 

E-Books

We're pleased to announce that E-Books at The MIT Press, our new online store is now live.  Nearly 400 recent MIT Press titles are available for sale on this site,where you can browse and purchase full-text, online access to recent MIT Press titles.  The e-books sold on this site are fully searchable and can be stored on your personal bookshelf.  New titles will be added to this store on a regular basis. 

 We would like to hear from you about what content and features you wish to see here.  Please contact [email protected] with your comments.

Cowhey and Aronson on BoingBoing

Cory Doctorow has a nice post on Transforming Global Information and Communication Markets by Peter Cowhey and Jonathan Aronson on BoingBoing today, calling it "a great scholarly book on telecoms policy, the Internet, and innovation." The book is available both in print and as a free download under a Creative Commons license. Cowhey,as we mentioned last month, was recently tapped by the Obama administration to serve in the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

Read Doctorow's post here.