Tama Leaver dot Net

Links for October 4th 2010 through October 9th 2010:

• Perhaps a revolution is not what we need [Confessions of an Aca/Fan] – Henry Jenkins offers a powerful rebuke of Malcolm Gladwell’s claim that Twitter and other social media aren’t revolutionary: “The Civil Rights Movement certainly tapped into networks of all kinds — from the congregations of churches to the sisterhood of sororities, and deployed a broad range of communications technologies available at the time. Twitter is however simply one of many communications platforms through which we forge politics in the 21st century. There’s a tendency to look at it and try to read its features as totally embodying a new kind of public, but that is profoundly misleading. We do not live on a platform; we live across platforms. We choose the right tools for the right jobs.”
• 5% of babies “have a social media profile” [Next Web] – “As social media becomes an increasingly important part of life, it’s perhaps unsurprising to find out that parents are creating digital presences for their children – sometimes while they’re still in the womb. You may think that it would only be a handful of particularly geeky parents who would bother to set up a Twitter or Facebook account for their unborn child, but a study published today by Internet security firm AVG found that 5% of babies under 2 have social media profiles, while 7% have an email address. The main reason for doing this, it seems, is to share baby scans and and information about the pregnancy with family and friends. Meanwhile, many more babies are “online” in some form or other. 23% of fetuses had images of their antenatal scans uploaded before birth.”
• Libya takes hard line on .ly link shortening domains [BBC News] – The perils of URL shortening: “The Libyan government has removed an adult-friendly link-shortening service from the web, saying that it fell foul of local laws. It could have an impact on similar services registered in Libya. The domain vb.ly was revoked[…] Co-founder of vb.ly Ben Metcalfe warned that “other ly domains are being deregistered and removed without warning”. “The domain was seized by the Libyan domain registry for reasons which seemed to be kept obscure until we escalated the issue,” he wrote. “We eventually discovered that the domain has been seized because the content of our website, in their opinion, fell outside of Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law.” URL shortening is a technique that allows users to significantly condense often long web addresses to more manageable and memorable links. The Libyan crackdown could come as a blow to other url shortening services such as bit.ly, which is particularly popular on Twitter where all messages have to be limited to 140 characters.”
• The Man Who First Said ‘Cyborg,’ 50 Years Later – Alexis Madrigal [The Atlantic] – “We’re gathered here today to celebrate Manfred Clynes. Fifty years ago, he coined the word “cyborg” to describe an emerging hybrid of man’s machines and man himself. The word itself combined cybernetics, the then-emerging discipline of feedback and control, and organism. The word appeared in an article called “Cyborgs and Space,” in the journal Astronautics’ September 1960 issue. Just to be precise, here’s how the word was introduced: “For the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously, we propose the term ‘Cyborg,'” wrote Clynes and his co-author Nathan Kline, both of Rockland State University. From that catchy description, it might not have been immediately apparent that Cyborg was destined to become the label for a profound myth, hope and fear specific to our era.”
• Twitter CEO Evan Williams steps down [Technology | The Guardian] – Evan Williams stands down as CEO, handing Dick Costolo the reigns as Twitter starts thinking about itself as a serious long-term business, not a start-up.
• Cyberbully Is Found Guilty on Multiple Counts in Dead Sea Scrolls Case [The Chronicle of Higher Education] – “A professor’s adult son was convicted in a New York State court of 30 criminal charges on Thursday for using online aliases to try to harass and discredit scholars whom his father opposed in a bitter debate over the Dead Sea Scrolls. The jury found Raphael H. Golb, the 50-year-old son of the prominent religious-studies scholar Norman Golb of the University of Chicago, guilty all but one of the 31 counts against him, according to an Associated Press report. It convicted him of forgery, harassment, and identity theft in connection with a sustained electronic campaign in which he impersonated five people and used about 70 phony e-mail accounts to harass and try to damage the reputations of scholars. Of particular note to academics who were following the case, the jurors rejected a defense lawyer’s argument that the damaging statements that Raphael Golb had made about others under assumed names amounted to parody or irony intended to expose what he saw as scholarly lies…”