Support “Take This Book”

Dec 17 2011

Melissa Gira Grant, founder of Glass Houses, has written Take This Book about The People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street and is currently looking for funding to complete the project. Check out the funding page and think about contributing a few dollars to help her reach her goal.

This is one story of the People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street, as told to me by many of the librarians behind it: how the library began, what happened after the November 15 raid on Zuccotti Park, and why they’re rebuilding. It’s a story about books, danger, and freedom.

Take This Book is an extended essay — just over 10,000 words — based on the stories of the librarians and the library’s patrons. (Maybe you were one of them.) It can’t be the whole story, because it’s still happening.

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Number station broadcast 14/11

Nov 18 2011

  • Disruptions: “The 3-D Printing Free-for-All : Downloading — quite often stealing, in the eyes of the law — music, movies, books and photos is easier than bobbing for apples in a bucket without water. It has kept legions of lawyers employed fighting copyright violations without a whole lot to show for their efforts in the past decade. You think that was bad? Just wait until we can copy physical things.”
  • Occupy the Net! Our Internet is a paradise for consumers but a hell for citizens : “When it comes to pseudonyms, Facebook is more egalitarian than the early Soviet Union. You may be rich or famous or persecuted, but unless you use your real name when you register on the site, you’re asking for trouble—and Facebook will torture you with Kafkaesque gusto.”
  • The Social Graph is Neither : “I first came across the phrase social graph in 2007, in an essay by Brad Fitzpatrick, though I’d be curious to know if it goes back further. The idea of representing relationships between people as networks is old, but this was the first time I had thought about treating the connections between all living people as one big object that you could manipulate with a computer.”
  • Toronto Free Library Grand Opening! : “The library at OccupyToronto will be having a grand opening on Saturday November 19, 2011. We encourage everyone to come and visit. We are also looking for donations to expand the library…The library provides free, open and unrestricted access to our collection of books, magazines, newspapers, and other materials that have been donated, collected, gathered and discovered during the occupation.”
  • Do “Liberation Technologies” Change the Balance of Power Between Repressive Regimes and Civil Society? : “Do new information and communication technologies (ICTs) empower repressive regimes at the expense of civil society, or vice versa? For example, does access to the Internet and mobile phones alter the balance of power between repressive regimes and civil society? These questions are especially pertinent today given the role that ICTs played during this year’s uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and beyond.”

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Matthew Battles on Libraries and Occupy

Nov 15 2011

Matthew Battles, author of Library: An Unquiet History,  compares the libraries of the Occupy movement to the reading rooms of the Chartists of 19th-century Britain. A timely discussion given today’s removal of the Occupy Wall Street library. For more see the following;

They Are Coming for the Library
Occupy Wall Street Library Evicted
Occupy Wall Street Library

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Number station broadcast 13/11

Nov 11 2011

  • Stop Thinking Outside the Box : “The exhortation to think outside the box has become ubiquitous in business. So much so that it has become the new box inside of which everyone thinks. It pays lip service to the notion of transformation without really understanding the difference between transformation and change, and often without tolerance for the real thinking that must occur for an idea to be truly outside the existing paradigm.”
  • Archive Ahoy!: A Dive into the World of Game Preservation : “Preserving Virtual Worlds 2 is an ongoing project funded by the IMLS that builds on the work of Preserving Virtual Worlds. Rachel Donahue, doctoral student at the University of Maryland iSchool and research assistant at MITH, recently wrote a post outlining the work of PVW2. As Donahue states, PVW2 focuses on ‘what exactly accessing a videogame meaningfully entails’”.
  • Architecture of Fear : “Architecture of Fear explores how feelings of fear pervade daily life in the contemporary media society. The cause of fear seems interchangeable and constantly fluctuating. Shifting from one thing to the next, often relating to invisible or indirect phenomena’s (terrorism, viral diseases, pollution, financial crisis), anything has the ability to become a potential threat. Rather than an immediate emotional strategy for survival fear is becoming a constant low level feeling in the background that gives rise to a new global infrastructure based on security, prevention and risk-management.”
  • Media, Youth Activism & Participatory Politics: Case Studies in a Digital Age : “The growing use of digital media for social change is nourishing a dialogue about its impact on young people’s involvement in civic and political affairs. The Media Activism Participatory Politics (MAPP) project, an undertaking of the MacArthur Network on Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP), was created to further that conversation by examining youth-led organizations that encourage productive forms of participation in the public sphere.”
  • Getting in on the Act: New Report on Participatory Arts Engagement : “Last month, the Irvine Foundation put out a new report, Getting In On the Act, about participatory arts practice and new frameworks for audience engagement. Authors Alan Brown and Jennifer Novak-Leonard pack a lot into 40 pages–an argument for the rise of active arts engagement, a framework for thinking about ways to actively involve audiences, and lots of case studies.”

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Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors

Nov 10 2011

When I have spoken about augmented reality at conferences, I like to discuss the material infrastructure of the Internet and how the physical nature of the so called “virtual” impacts us socially and culturally.

“Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors” by Ben Mendelsohn is a short documentary that focuses on this materiality by looking at one data center in NYC.

Lower Manhattan’s 60 Hudson Street is one of the world’s most concentrated hubs of Internet connectivity. This short documentary peeks inside, offering a glimpse of the massive material infrastructure that makes the Internet possible.

Featuring interviews with Stephen Graham, Saskia Sassen, Dave Timmes of Telx, Rich Miller of datacenterknowledge.com, Stephen Klenert of Atlantic Metro Communications, and Josh Wallace of the City of Palo Alto Utilities.

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