Beyond Innovation and Competition: The Need for Qualified Transparency in Internet Intermediaries

Internet service providers and search engines have mapped the web, accelerated e-commerce, and empowered new communities. They also pose new challenges for law. Individuals are rapidly losing the ability to affect their own image on the web - or even to know what data are presented about them. When web users attempt to find information or entertainment, they have little assurance that a carrier or search engine is not biasing the presentation of results in accordance with its own commercial interests. Technology’s impact on privacy and democratic culture needs to be at the center of internet policy-making. Yet before they promulgate substantive rules, key administrators must genuinely understand new developments. While the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission in the U.S. have articulated principles of editorial integrity for search engines and net neutrality for carriers, they have not engaged in the monitoring necessary to enforce these guidelines. This article proposes institutions for “qualified transparency” within each Commission to fill this regulatory gap. Qualified transparency respects legitimate needs for confidentiality while promoting individuals’ and companies\u27 capacity to understand how their reputations - and the online world generally - are shaped by dominant intermediaries

With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture since 1830

Popular culture is a central part of everyday life to many Americans. Personalities such as Elvis Presley, Oprah Winfrey, and Michael Jordan are more recognizable to many people than are most elected officials. With Amusement for All is the first comprehensive history of two centuries of mass entertainment in the United States, covering everything from the penny press to Playboy, the NBA to NASCAR, big band to hip hop, and other topics including film, comics, television, sports, dance, and music. Paying careful attention to matters of race, gender, class, technology, economics, and politics, LeRoy Ashby emphasizes the complex ways in which popular culture simultaneously reflects and transforms American culture, revealing that the world of entertainment constantly evolves as it tries to meet the demands of a diverse audience. Trends in popular entertainment often reveal the tensions between competing ideologies, appetites, and values in American society. For example, in the late nineteenth century, Americans embraced “self-made men” such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie: the celebrities of the day were circus tycoons P.T. Barnum and James A. Bailey, Wild West star “Buffalo Bill” Cody, professional baseball organizer Albert Spalding, and prizefighter John L. Sullivan. At the same time, however, several female performers challenged traditional notions of weak, frail Victorian women. Adah Isaacs Menken astonished crowds by wearing tights that made her appear nude while performing dangerous stunts on horseback, and the shows of the voluptuous burlesque group British Blondes often centered on provocative images of female sexual power and dominance. Ashby describes how history and politics frequently influence mainstream entertainment. When Native Americans, blacks, and other non-whites appeared in the nineteenth-century circuses and Wild West shows, it was often to perpetuate demeaning racial stereotypes—crowds jeered Sitting Bull at Cody’s shows. By the early twentieth century, however, black minstrel acts reveled in racial tensions, reinforcing stereotypes while at the same time satirizing them and mocking racist attitudes before a predominantly white audience. Decades later, Red Foxx and Richard Pryor’s profane comedy routines changed American entertainment. The raw ethnic material of Pryor’s short-lived television show led to a series of African-American sitcoms in the 1980s that presented common American experiences—from family life to college life—with black casts. Mainstream entertainment has often co-opted and sanitized fringe amusements in an ongoing process of redefining the cultural center and its boundaries. Social control and respectability vied with the bold, erotic, sensational, and surprising, as entrepreneurs sought to manipulate the vagaries of the market, control shifting public appetites, and capitalize on campaigns to protect public morals. Rock ‘n Roll was one such fringe culture; in the 1950s, Elvis blurred gender norms with his androgynous style and challenged conventions of public decency with his sexually-charged performances. By the end of the 1960s, Bob Dylan introduced the social consciousness of folk music into the rock scene, and The Beatles embraced hippie counter-culture. Don McLean’s 1971 anthem “American Pie” served as an epitaph for rock’s political core, which had been replaced by the spectacle of hard rock acts such as Kiss and Alice Cooper. While Rock ‘n Roll did not lose its ability to shock, in less than three decades it became part of the established order that it had originally sought to challenge. With Amusement for All provides the context to what Americans have done for fun since 1830, showing the reciprocal nature of the relationships between social, political, economic, and cultural forces and the way in which the entertainment world has reflected, refracted, or reinforced the values those forces represent in America. LeRoy Ashby is Regents Professor and Claudius O. and Mary Johnson Distinguished Professor of History at Washington State University. He is the author of several books, including Fighting the Odds: The Life of Senator Frank Church and Endangered Children: Dependency, Neglect, and Abuse in American History. Combines being a remarkably quixotic endeavor with being something of a monumental achievement of scholarship and pure perseverance. --Belles Lettres -- Belles Lettres When regarding this book\u27s comprehensiveness, the richness of its detail, and the strength of its interpretation of the specifics of popular culture, I stand in awe. What an achievement! Majestic! --Benjamin G. Rader, author of Baseball: A History of America\u27s Game This intelligent, energetic book has the ability to appeal to historians and scholars without distancing the general reader. The easy linear narrative is punctuated by songs, comic anecdotes, and rich descriptions that bring each era to life. --Charleston Post and Courier Ashby has given us a fine new book. They say in baseball, \u27it\u27s hard to tell the players without a scorecard.\u27 With Amusement for All will be the new scorecard for anyone interested in the study of popular culture. The book is both comprehensive and smart, a fine combination of surveying the terrain then saying intelligent things about it. Ashby has rendered an invaluable service. --Elliott Gorn, co-author of A Brief History of American Sports American popular culture isn\u27t a distraction from the serious issues of our time. It is inseparable from them. . . . Researches events ranging from Wild West shows to Janet Jackson\u27s wardrobe malfunctions during the 2004 Super Bowl. --Lewiston Tribune No single author has tackled popular culture with so much breadth and depth and managed to strike a balance between the popular and scholarly approaches. Ashby\u27s absorbing and hugely informative study will appeal to a wide audience. Highly recommended. --Library Journal (starred review) I know of no other book that provides the same kind of documented, engaging, and lively narrative about American popular culture as With Amusement for All. --Michael Allen, author of Rodeo Cowboys in the North American Imagination It is not taken for granted that Super Bowls and reality talent shows are discussed around water coolers everywhere the morning after they occur. What should be more common is the use of such entertainment supernovas by historians interested in understanding what makes American culture tick. Thanks to Ashby\u27s fascinating book, this task has become substantially easier. --Pacific Northwest Quarterly The author skilfully quotes appropriate anecdotes and gives us fine, brief descriptions of some of the personalities of the day. . . . Well and fluently written and pleasant to read, and offers a good summary of a whole lot of material about popular culture. --Early Popular Visual Culture Without question, the author...has researched and written a masterpiece. The book is a tour de force in its field and has made popular culture--once thought to be a frivolous area for academic study--a serious field of inquiry. --USA Today LeRoy Ashby draws on the substantial volume of historical scholarship on American popular culture produced since the 1970s to present a survey of impressive breadth on two centuries of American amusements. --Journal of American History “You’ll enjoy this fascinating and massively researched volume on how Americans have amused themselves and how it changed the world.” –WTBF Radio In With Amusement for All, one will find a wide variety of entertainment venues - radio, television, music, sports, movies and the internet; from P.T. Barnum\u27s bunkum to Sheldon Cooper\u27s hokum , it is all here, presented in an informative, entertaining narrative. -- The Past in Review -- The Past in Reviewhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_american_popular_culture/1017/thumbnail.jp

Cybertheatres: Emergent Networked Performance Practices

This thesis explores the emergent genre of cybertheatres or networked performance, that is, performance that employs the Internet and/or other types of networking technologies (telecommunication, mobile) and attitudes. I argue that networking technologies produce hybrid spacetimes or heterotopias (Foucault), which function as stages for networked performances, a novel and increasingly popular field of practice and research. The aims of this project are to a) articulate networked performance as a distinct genre, which is a hybrid between theatre/performance and networking technologies, b) situate this within a lineage of performance practice, c) identify and analyse its principal ontological and dramaturgical elements and, d) explore appropriate curatorial strategies for its presentation to a spectrum of audiences. To achieve these aims I undertake a critical analysis of cybertheatres, starting from 1967 and focusing on current practices. My analysis unfolds through engagement with discussions along two pivotal conceptual vectors, and through applied exploration of two core elements of practice: The conceptual vectors along which this thesis develops are: 1. Space: I examine the spatial nature of the networks that host cybertheatres, employing British group Blast Theory as my case-study. 2. Presence: I question the validity of the presence vs. absence dichotomy within networked environments. I investigate this through the work of Belgian duo Entropy8Zuper!, relaunched as Tale of Tales. Further on, I undertake a practical exploration relating to the subject of the curation of cybertheatres. I reflect upon and evaluate the three-day event Intimacy: Across Digital and Visceral Pelformance (December 2007), which I initiated, produced, co-directed and cocurated, to propose curatorial strategies that are appropriate to emergent practices in general and cybertheatres in particular. I close by a shift of voice from the author to the collective: I join the collaborative project Deptford. TV as a method of studying artistic, curatorial and social platforms that demonstrate Web 2.0 attitudes, and argue for the genre's particular potential for new forms of social engagement within a computer-mediated culture

"The authority of the steam" : power dynamics of digital production in the Bitcoin blockchain

This thesis offers a critical investigation of the Bitcoin currency and the operation of its technical structure, i.e. blockchain technology. The main objective of the research is to identify and describe the specific power dynamics performed by and through this digital phenomenon. “Power dynamics” are framed in this work largely in terms of authority and sovereignty. To structure an exploration of such dynamics, the narrative is overarched by four different notions of “utopia” —as paradox, ideal, no-place, and imagined governance— that address the following main questions always underpinned by the general inquiry on power: What is the Bitcoin Blockchain? Where is it located? How are power relations performed in it? And how are power relations modified in relation with previous institutional systems? The thesis addresses distinct notions of authority in Bitcoin through the observation of its historical, spatial, and organizational characteristics. It maps the techno-political emergence of the blockchain system, the geographical distribution of Bitcoin’s infrastructural network, and the strategies for governance involved in its development as software. Based on the observation of these settings, this thesis argues that Bitcoin posits a restructuration of power dynamics through the automation of code, in particular, through its process of production. In order to develop this restructuration, the power dynamics of the Bitcoin blockchain are weighted against authority models of the state’s institutions. The thesis builds upon existing political theories of Empire (Hardt and Negri), protocol (Galloway), and the Stack (Bratton) to develop a critical account of Bitcoin’s power dynamics. The work sits in between the disciplines of Media Theory, Software Studies, Political Theory, and Digital Methods, and makes use of qualitative and quantitative methods to empirically support the former argument

News, Citizenship and the Internet: BBC News Online's Reporting of the 2005 UK General Election

This thesis considers the importance to democracy of online spaces where citizens can engage in dialogue on issues of public concern. Specifically, it evaluates the BBC's news and features provision on its website dedicated to the 2005 UK Parliamentary General Election, entitled Election 2005. Particular attention is given to sections such as the Election Monitor, the UK Voters' Panel and Have your say, to which people were encouraged to submit their views and comments for posting. Given the leading status of BBC News Online in the UK (the remit for which is defined, in part, by its Royal Charter obligation to provide a public service), it is vital to examine the Election 2005 website and its role in the democratic process. The principal aim of this thesis is to analyse the ways in which BBC News Online deployed its website to facilitate spaces for citizens to engage in dialogue during the 2005 UK General Election. To achieve this aim, the thesis makes use of web dialogue analysis, which is a method proposed and defined for the purpose of this project. The case study is divided into three chapters: the first dealing with online news in which citizen voices were found to be marginalised; the second concerning different genres of online feature articles, wherein citizen voices was the most prominent source; and the third focussing on sections where people were encouraged to submit comments. Through analysing the nature of source utterances (quotations and paraphrases), and comments submitted to debate sections, the thesis found little dialogue taking place in any of the sections on the BBC's Election 2005 website. It argues this was caused by a) the deliberate intention of BBC staff to discourage dialogue, and instead facilitate a 'global conversation', b) the manual process used to publish comments to the site, and c) people being at the time unaccustomed to participate in any meaningful debate using online forums. In this way, the thesis seeks to contribute to a developing area of scholarship concerned with news media representations of national elections, online journalism and citizenship

Your Post Has Been Removed:Tech Giants and Free Speech

This open access monograph argues established democratic norms for freedom of expression should be implemented on the internet. Moderating policies of tech companies as Facebook, Twitter and Google have resulted in posts being removed on an industrial scale. While this moderation is often encouraged by governments - on the pretext that terrorism, bullying, pornography, “hate speech” and “fake news” will slowly disappear from the internet - it enables tech companies to censure our society. It is the social media companies who define what is blacklisted in their community standards. And given the dominance of social media in our information society, we run the risk of outsourcing the definition of our principles for discussion in the public domain to private companies. Instead of leaving it to social media companies only to take action, the authors argue democratic institutions should take an active role in moderating criminal content on the internet. To make this possible, tech companies should be analyzed whether they are approaching a monopoly. Antitrust legislation should be applied to bring those monopolies within democratic governmental oversight. Despite being in different stages in their lives, Anne Mette is in the startup phase of her research career, while Frederik is one of the most prolific philosophers in Denmark, the authors found each other in their concern about Free Speech on the internet. The book was originally published in Danish as Dit opslag er blevet fjernet - techgiganter & ytringsfrihed. Praise for 'Your Post has been Removed' "From my perspective both as a politician and as private book collector, this is the most important non-fiction book of the 21st Century. It should be disseminated to all European citizens. The learnings of this book and the use we make of them today are crucial for every man, woman and child on earth. Now and in the future.” Jens Rohde, member of the European Parliament for the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe “This timely book compellingly presents an impressive array of information and analysis about the urgent threats the tech giants pose to the robust freedom of speech and access to information that are essential for individual liberty and democratic self-government. It constructively explores potential strategies for restoring individual control over information flows to and about us. Policymakers worldwide should take heed!” Nadine Strossen, Professor, New York Law School. Author, HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorshi

On Counterinsurgency: Firepower, Biopower, and the Collateralization of Milliatry Violence

This dissertation investigates the most recent cycle of North Atlantic expeditionary warfare by addressing the resuscitation of counterinsurgency warfare with a specific focus on the war in Afghanistan from 2006 to 2014. The project interrogates the lasting aesthetic, epistemological, philosophical, and territorial implications of counterinsurgency, which should be understood as part of wider transformations in military affairs in relation to discourses of adaptation, complexity, and systemic design, and to the repertoire of global contingency and stability operations. Afghanistan served as a counterinsurgency laboratory, and the experiments will shape the conduct of future wars, domestic security practices, and the increasingly indistinct boundary between them. Using work from Michel Foucault and liberal war studies, the project undertakes a genealogy of contemporary population-centred counterinsurgency and interrogates how its conduct is constituted by and as a mixture firepower and biopower. Insofar as this mix employs force with different speeds, doses, and intensities, the dissertation argues that counterinsurgency unrestricts and collateralizes violence, which is emblematic of liberal war that kills selectively to secure and make life live in ways amenable to local and global imperatives of liberal rule. Contemporary military counterinsurgents, in conducting operations on the edges of liberal rule's jurisdiction and in recursively influencing the domestic spaces of North Atlantic states, fashion biopoweras custodial power to conduct the conduct of lifeto shape different interventions into the everyday lives of target populations. The 'lesser evil' logic of counterinsurgency is used to frame counterinsurgency as a type of warfare that is comparatively low-intensity and less harmful, and this justification actually lowers the threshold for violence by making increasingly indiscriminate the ways in which its employment damages and envelops populations and communities, thereby allowing counterinsurgents to speculate on the practice of expeditionary warfare and efforts to sustain occupations. Thus, the dissertation argues that counterinsurgency is a communicative process, better understood as mobile military media with an atmospheric-environmental register blending acute and ambient measures that are always-already kinetic. The counterinsurgent gaze enframes a world picture where everything can be a force amplifier and everywhere is a possible theatre of operations