World-Information City

 PROGRAM  READ ME  MEDIA FILES  LINK BASE 

 about · pressroom · partners & sponsors · contact 



  WIO > READ ME > DIGITAL ECOLOGY
 CATEGORIES
DIGITAL ECOLOGY

DIGITAL HUMAN RIGHTS

FUTURE HERITAGE

WORLD-INFO FLASH

REPORTS

CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE



WORLD-INFO FLASH




ARCHIVE

List all articles sorted by
Author
Title


  Brazil's Canto Livre Project: The Emergence of Society's Creativity
by Ronaldo Lemos
[Read]
 
  Open Access to Science in the Developing World
by Peter Suber and Subbiah Arunachalam
[Read]
 
  Schools & the 'African Digital Information Commons'
by Chris Armstrong
[Read]
 
  Cybermoholla, New Delhi (ongoing)
by Shveta Sarda
[Read]
 
  The Camera is There, but Where is the Screen?
Or, Why Indian Alternative Film Needs Alternative Models to 'Market' , by Frederick Noronha
[Read]
 
  Trips into the Uncertain
by Corinna Heineke
[Read]
 
  Autolabs, Sao Paulo (2004)
by Ricardo Rosas and Tatiana Wells
[Read]
 
  Analogue to Digital: Re-Living Big Business's Nightmare in New Hydras
by Solomon Benjamin
[Read]
 
  Information Needs Are Legitimate
Interview with Kay Raseroka
Kay Raseroka, President of IFLA (International Association of Library Associations) and Director of Library Services at the University of Botswana on copyright issues in a library context. [Read]
 
  The Problem with WSIS
by Alan Toner
We begin with a tale of two terms: the well aired and well known "Information Society", and its rather furtive and less well known relation, "intellectual property" (IP). [Read]
 
  The Political Economy of Commons
by Yochai Benkler
Yochai Benkler, Professor of Law at Yale Law School on the need to build a core common infrastructure. [Read]
 
  The Injustice of Intellectual Property
by Peter Drahos
Intellectual property rights are growing in strength and spreading. Many people working in Internet-related businesses would be wearily familiar with cease and desist letters from intellectual property owners alleging infringement of a trade mark, patent or copyright. [Read]
 
  Developing Countries and IP Policy
by Carolyn Deere
In the context of a global “information” economy propelled increasingly by knowledge-based industries, the protection of ideas and innovations has become a central priority in the competitive strategies of many powerful economic actors. As global economic disparities widen, the ownership and distribution of these assets has also become a high-stakes issue in international economic negotiations. [Read]
 
  Why You Should Distrust „Trusted Computing“
by Volker Grassmuck
Wouldn‘t it be nice if you were able to trust your computer? If you could be confident that it would do only and exactly what you want it to do? Initiatives for “Trusted” and “Trustworthy Computing” imply that they will turn computers into just that kind of machine. In fact, there are good reasons to distrust them. [Read]
 
  Free Software, Free Hardware, Free Bandwidth
Interview with Eben Moglen
Eben Moglen, Professor of Law at the Columbia University in New York on free software and the law's power(lessness) to change the current systems. [Read]
 
  Why do intellectual property issues matter?
by Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder
One of WSIS's stated goals is to examine ways to "protect the free flow of information and communication." Electronic communication systems made the free flows of information a technical possibility on a global scale for an unprecedented, though still insufficient, number of people. Numerous initiatives work to bridge the 'digital divide', to enlarge the number of people who have access to the means of communication. [Read]
 
  First World IP Regimes Slow China's Modernization
by Jeff Smith
China does not have access to the knowledge it needs in fields that are critical to development. It cannot afford the hundreds of thousands of Western books, journals, databases and other materials - in agriculture, economics, engineering, law, medicine, and other critical fields - wanted by its universities and research centers. [Read]
 
  GNUbalisation. Open Source in India
by Frederick Noronha
Harish Pillay harish@lugs.org.sg works to promote 'Open Source' in Singapore. Former IIT-Madras alumni V Narayanan <narav@cicc.org.sg> is a consultant to Singapore's Centre of the International Cooperation for Computerization, and he too was visiting India recently. His goal was scouting around and building links for the CICC, which is involved in open source developments in the ASEAN (www.asia-oss.org). [Read]
 
  The Absurdity of Software Patents
by Arun Mehta
Software patents have a dubious legal basis, are unworkable, and hamper industrial growth. They started in the US, where you are not allowed to patent the laws of nature, and in two US Supreme Court cases (Gottschalk v. Benson, 1972, and Parker v. Flook, 1978) the Court extended this principle to computer algorithms and software techniques. [Read]
 
  Open access to science and scholarship
by Peter Suber
The scientific journal was invented in 1665. For readers, journals surpassed books for learning quickly about the recent work of others. For authors, journals surpassed books for sharing new work quickly with the wider world and, above all, for establishing priority over other scientists working on the same problem. Because authors were rewarded in these strong, intangible ways, they accepted the fact that journals couldn't afford to pay them. Over time, journal revenue grew but authors continued in the tradition of writing articles for impact, not for money. Books were different because they often paid royalties. For articles, authors were amply paid by advancing knowledge and advancing their careers.
[Read]
 
  Libraries and the Information Commons
New Opportunities to Participate in the Information Society , by Nancy Kranich
Past President of the American Library Association Nancy Kranich on the status quo and future of libraries in participating in the information commons. [Read]
 
  Looking beyond IP: Access and Innovation in Medical Technologies
by James Love
There is an almost unbounded interest in the development of new health care technologies that will prolong life or reduce suffering. The pace and direction of innovation will depend in part on the resources mobilized for research and development (R&D). [Read]
 
  Practicing Anti-Capitalism
An interview with Brian Holmes
After the World-InfoCon conference in Amsterdam Brian Holmes, writer, art critic and translator told World-Information.Org about his collaboration with the French artist group Bureau 'Études in mapping capitalist structures. [Read]
 
  Listening In
An interview with Ryan Schoelerman
Ex-NSA Agent Ryan Schoelerman spoke to World-Information.Org about military data collection, disinformation and Serbo-Croatian language training. [Read]
 
  The Other 98 %
An interview with Arun Metha
Arun Mehta is an Indian media activist and educator, and President of the Society for Telecommunications Empowerment (STEM), which aims at bringing the benefits of modern telecommunications to the poor. In the course of Amsterdam's World-InfoCon he spoke to World-Information.Org about access, open source, and community radio. [Read]
 
  Net Culture, New Media And the Social Body
An interview with Franco Berardi Bifo
Franco Berardi Bifo is an Italian political activist: 1976 he founded "Radio Alice", an alternative media project and 1977 the cultural magazine "A/traverso". His main interests in research are media theories and the relationship between technologies and social movements. He is author of various books, most recently "La fabbrica dell'infelicità" (2001) and spoke to Wolfgang Sützl about his concept of the "cognitariat" [Read]
 
  Information Should be Free
An interview with Eveline Lubbers
Eveline Lubbers is an investigative reporter and specialized activist living in Amsterdam. She co-founded Buro Jansen & Janssen and told World-Information.Org about her view on the role of information in democratic societies. [Read]
 
  Internet: Motor of Development
An interview with Oumou Sy
Oumou Sy is a Senegalese fashion designer and the co-proprietor of Metissacana, the first West African Internet Café. World-Information.Org talked to her about the political and developmental dimension of her work, the relation of fashion and new technologies, and ingenious approaches to local appropriations of the Internet. [Read]
 
  "What matters most is whether or not there is an intelligence debate at all."
An interview with Nicky Hager
It is hard to imagine that the current debates on global spying system Echelon would ever have taken off without the investigative work of New Zealander Nicky Hager. A researcher and writer on military and environmental issues, Hager published his book "Secret Power" in 1996, exposing for the first time the global interception network that now is the subject of parliamentary enquiries in Europe and the US. World-Information.Org researcher Katja Mayer spoke to Nicky Hager about Echelon, the politics of intelligence, and the threat to democratic governance posed by intelligence beyond public accountability. Nicky Hager's most recent book publication (with Bob Burton) is "Secrets and Lies: The Anatomy of an Anti-Environmental PR Campaign" (Common Courage Press). [Read]
 
  "There are tremendous empowerment possibilities, provided that the technology is in the right hands."
An interview with Shahidul Alam
Shahidul Alam is a media activist and journalist from Bangla Desh. He has lead campaigns against the digital divide and against the reconstruction of colonialism in the digital arena. Shahidul Alam also works as a photographer and is director of Drik, a photo agency based in Dhaka. Wolfgang Sützl spoke to him during the World-InfoCon in Brussels, in July 2000.
[Read]
 
  A Global Framework for the Information Society
An interview with Philippe Quéau
Philippe Quéau is Director of UNESCO's Information and Informatics Division and delivered the keynote speech at World-information.org's World-InfoCon at Brussels in July 2000. World-Information.Org´s chief researcher Wolfgang Sützl spoke to him about democratic governance in the information society, the seduction of the market, and the protection of the electronic heritage of the future. [Read]
 
  From INGSOC and NEWSPEAK to AMCAP, AMERIGOOD, and MARKETSPEAK
by Edward S. Herman
"Doublespeak and thought control are far more important in the West than Orwell in his essay on "Politics and the English Language" and in an Introduction to Animal Farm indicated." [Read]
 
  Digital Implants: Pick-me-ups for the Cyber Age
An interview with Kevin Warwick
The professor at the University of Reading (UK), on electronic drugs, the future of communication and the usefulness of implants.
[Read]
 INTRODUCTORY TEXT 
Digital Ecology is about understanding information ecosystems. Information ecosystems are constituted by information flows being processed through various media. Information has become widely digitized and turned into a resource to be exploited, produced, and transformed in a similar way as material resources.

Information technologies as the key means of production of value are playing a major role in shaping the ways of communication as well as all aspects of individual and social life. During the last decades information has become the most important factor for cultural, social and economic development.

Digital ecology aims at understanding the production, distribution, storage, accessibility, ownership, selection and use of information in technologically determined environments.

A key ecological issue concerns the preservation and increase of the use value for humankind at large and the non-commercial properties of information as opposed to the exchange value. This includes the question of cultural diversity and the quality of life in an environment increasingly based on digitized information.

Economic forces and political interventions endanger the information ecosystem of the infosphere. In both cases the chance of pluralism and the variety of cultural expressions offered by information and communication technologies are being lost.

Digital ecology seeks to preserve and increase the cultural diversity and quality of life in the information ecosystem. [Read]









 SITE SEARCH 
 privacy policy