Here’s a link to Tim Robbins’s speech last week to the National Association of Broadcasters (audio here). Hilarious and daring but perhaps a tad misdirected.
“I’m here to tell you that we don’t need to look at the car crash,” he pleaded. “We don’t need to live off the pain and humiliation of the [...]

While sites like YouTube are making history by catering to the mass craving to create and distribute amateur video, regular old television— a decade into the internet era— is still pretending the web is basically a form of Sunday newspaper: mostly good for advertising and reprinting schedules. Sorry but American Idol voting is the very [...]

Yesterday Sen. Obama knocked down the so-called Potomac Primary— that is, the combined primaries of Virginia, Maryland and Washington DC. Basically, the man lofted a long three-pointer and swished without even so much as a hand in his face. Voting statistics suggest the victory came as a result of Obama’s widest demographic appeal to date. [...]

A the USC 24/7 DIY Summit this weekend, the speakers managed overwhelmingly not to be academic droners. Mike Wesch, one of an increasing number of internet-famous professors (The Machine is Us/ing Us and more recently A Vision of Students Today), presented some of the YouTube ethnographic research he and his students at Kansas State University [...]

Readers in L.A.-Land should check out “24/7: a DIY Video Summit” this weekend (Feb 8th thru 10th) at USC. The Summit will showcase some amazing new digital video work and will include screenings, workshops, formal talks, informal talks, overall general creative engagement and tasty drinks of some sort I’m sure. Notice to fans of smart [...]

Global Voices Online, the international blog site run out of Harvard’s Berkman Center, has posted a special section on events in Pakistan. Global Voices staff bloggers are posting regularly but, as usual, the great thing about the site is the way it rounds up and posts blog material from around the world. The stuff they’re [...]

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), a nonprofit global education project head-birthed by MIT Media Lab Founder Nicholas Negroponte, is set to release its third-generation $100 laptop next month. The computer, called the XO-1, is the centerpiece of the organization’s plan to change the world by getting kids around the world online and computer literate.
Call it [...]

Michael Wesch, the professor behind the video, is a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University. His most famous video, Web 2.0… The Machine Is Us/ing Us, is also on web cultural and the way we (and computers) learn things. The comment thread at YouTube on the video posted above is sort of interesting, featuring a [...]

The NYT reports today on the jihadi version of fansubbing. According to the paper, people like North Carolina 21-year-old Samir Khan cull all variety of al Qaeda-type material—anti-American screeds, terrorist adventure novels, bomb-making videos—translate them into English and repackage them with what the Times presents as a scary kind of new-media savvy. Long diverting rants [...]

NPR’s All Things Considered, not known in youth circles for its edge, has been killing it lately with a series on the treatment of women in the US military, doing personal interviews of post-traumatized veterans.
Roadside bombs? Senseless blood and death and killing? No. the worst thing about serving in the military is being sexually [...]

The New York Times Sunday ran a piece by Pam Belluck reporting that some countries have lowered the voting age to sixteen and asking whether such a move would be a good idea here in the US, as some legislators have proposed. The writer’s approach to the story was essentially to find a few fat [...]

Remember the classic Apple ads about revolution (“Your only limits will be the size of your ideas and the degree of your dedication!”)? It was funny then. It’s just plain sad now, especially after the archetypal corporate deal we’ve just witnessed, where Apple teamed with AT&T in the iPhone project, condemning users to Cingular wireless [...]

A band called Fosforo, a “punk reggae jungle” trio that “code switches between English and Spanish like true Angelenos,” was playing at MacArthur park when the anonymous LAPD troops started kicking ass. What song were they playing? What else, “War” by Bob Marley:
That until there are no longer first class
And second class citizens of [...]

The USC film school, or more formally, the “school of cinematic arts,” which sounds very new-media friendly, has yet to formally respond to the school’s Free Culture student movement, which has been petitioning the administration to let them, um, use the internet (!). The group put up a website (Promoting a campus where ideas are [...]

So some computer geeks have made a campaign headquarters for John Edwards in Second Life, the virtual expanding multi-player transnational web game. And okay, we get Wonkette’s point— that Second Life is different and no substitute for “first life.” But she goes at it hard. Second Life, she says, is an “online role-playing dorkfest” [...]