Wednesday, December 14, 2005

Three from BNA News: KAZAKHSTAN UNPLUGS COMEDY SITE Kazakhstan authorities, angered by a British comedian's satirical portrayal of a boorish, sexist and racist Kazakh television reporter, have pulled the plug on his alter ego's Web site. Sacha Baron Cohen plays Borat in his "Da Ali G Show" and last month he used the character's Web site www.borat.kz to respond sarcastically to legal threats from the Central Asian state's Foreign Ministry. [Australia IT] EUROPEAN REPORT FINDS LITTLE IMPACT FROM DATABASE DIRECTIVE The EU DG Internal Market and Services has published an evaluation report on the EU's Database Directive. The report acknowledges that the directive "has had no proven impact on the production of databases" and that the evidence casts doubt on the necessity of the database protection for a thriving database industry. Report at http://tinyurl.com/bx2s4 [EU DG] CT DISMISSES ANTITRUST SUIT AGAINST FREE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION A federal court has dismissed an antitrust suit launched against the Free Software Foundation over its user of the GPL for Linux. The court ruled that the complainant did not allege an antitrust injury. Case name is Wallace v. FSF. Decision at http://www.internetcases.com/library/cases/2005-11 -28_wallace_v_fsf.html 12:16:25 PM    comment []

The new edition of First Monday is out. Among the offerings: Ringtones, or the auditory logic of globalization, by Sumanth Gopinath Abstract: This essay attempts to provide a description of the global ringtone industry, to determine and assess the numerous cultural consequences of the ringtone's appearance and development, and to situate the ringtone within the context of contemporary capitalism. At its broadest, my assertion is that the development of the ringtone is a powerful lens through which we might clearly view some of the dynamics of present day (or "late") capitalist cultural production, including the development of new rentier economies within oligopolistic sectors of production and consumption, and a long-term shift in global productive dominance from North America to the Pacific Rim. The ringtone is also a remarkable cultural phenomenon that is demonstrating a high degree of popularity and is undergoing rapid transformation; therefore, its short, continuing lifetime already needs to be assessed historically. Academic home pages: Reconstruction of the self, by Lesley Thoms and Mike Thelwall Abstract: Previous literature within the postmodern movement typically finds the Internet to be a tool for surveillance and restriction. This is particularly identified in the personal homepages of academics, where the university is considered to marginalise staff through the coercive governing of their identity construction. Using a Foucauldian framework in which to analyse twenty academic homepages, this study looks specifically at identity construction on the Internet via the differences of link inclusion between academics whose homepages have been university-constructed and those whose homepages have been self-constructed, both dependent and independent of the university site. A Foucauldian discourse analysis identifies the marginalisation of academics in all conditions, wherein discursive positions were typically those of disempowerment. A typology of homepages and hence identities of academics is proposed based on the Web sites examined, concluding that whether the homepage is constructed by the academic or by the university, the identities of the individual are ultimately lost to the governmentality of the university. 12:20:42 AM    comment []