Just saw this video by Douglas Rushkoff on what I would call ‘programming literacy’ and it made me curious about his new book Life Inc. I really like this quote from the last part of this video:
“If we don’t create a society, that at least knows there is a thing called programming, then we will end being not the programmers, but the users and worse: the used”
Naar aanleiding van een filmpje gemaakt door Google waarbij mensen op straat werd gevraagd uit te leggen wat een web browser is, hebben studenten van het Rotterdamse instituut Communicatie, Media en Informatietechnologie (CMI) hetzelfde gedaan in Rotterdam. Intrigerend, soms verbazingwekkend en alom een goed filmpje voor mijzelf en mijn concullega’s om eens te bekijken.
Hilarious spoof found on Yergler.net on the absurdities of labeling friends on social networks. Enjoy after the jump.
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You probably have had the same experience as I had with legally purchased DVD’s. Before you can watch the movie, you’re forced to watch an anti-piracy advertisement propaganda. I never really understood this. Why are you trying to indoctrinate those that actually bought the film legally? It seems to miss the point completely. C’mon I already bought the film, don’t bother me with propaganda otherwise I’ll download the movie, which is usually:
Writing the above makes me wonder why I bother to buy films at all?
Anyway, some people decided to create an answer to the over the top, stupid and annoying anti-piracy propaganda and created a short film (view it above this post in crappy YouTube galore or download it using bittorrent) which ridiculous the rhetoric of ‘downloading equals stealing’ dogma.
In case you wonder why downloading is not the same as stealing: downloading a film or music does not mean that I take away your film or music. The metaphor of physical objects versus digital information does not work. Period. You can make unlimited copies from a digital work without quality degrading between copies. In fact it would be hard to tell which is the copy and which is the original. Perhaps cloning would be a better word to describe this process?
Some food for thought….at least for me 
I just got two spam messages both containing the same message. That’s not unusual, but the message of the emails was. I got curious and took a closer look… (more…)
Documentary about the current state of copyright and culture. Check out this trailer on Blip.tv.
Download the complete film using Bittorrent (direct link to the torrent on The Pirate Bay) and support the authors here.
If you like these kind of documentries / topics and you haven’t seen it already, you should definately also check out ‘Steal this film’, a documentary also about copyright, culture, filesharing and The Pirate Bay in particular.
Nice initiative to gather some data about webworkers (= all the workers doing work directly related to the web, such as design, development, accessability etc) from the people behind A List Apart. I took the survey and it took me less than 10 minutes. It’s a good idea to get more data about who we – webworkers – actually are. So if you’re a webworker take the survey.
Rosalind Gill also did some research on webworkers and recently her work got published by the Institute of Network Cultures.
Her Creative Commons licensed (CC-BY-NC-ND) paper called ‘Technobohemians or the new Cybertariat”(pdf) can be downloaded for free or you can order the dead-tree version from the Institute of Network Cultures.
It’s an easy to read paper of forty plus pages on new media work in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The format is really nice to read as it consists mostly of stories from webworkers in Amsterdam entwined with comments, observations and thoughts of the author. Even if you don’t have the time to read all of it I would strongly recommend reading the summary especially if you are a webworker or if you need to work with a webworker on a regular basis. It contains nice recognizable anecdotes, some surprising data and offers an interesting look into the kitchen of the people creating the web.
Ps: there is also a video (direct link to the 275MB mp4 file) available of Rosalind Gill speaking (transcript) at a Decade of Webdesign conference 2005 on this topic. It takes some time to download and is older than the report itself, but it will give you the information straight from the horse’s mouth.