Friends,
Rather than posting photos here once and a while, I have posted some over at Flickr.
I hope you will take a moment or two, poke around a bit, and perhaps even leave a comment or two. I look forward to seeing them.
Thanks,
Jock

It seems as if much of the discussion online about the Obama MySpace page has gotten mired down in people attacking either Joe Anthony or the Obama campaign, and it is missing something much bigger. The event was but one small example of a clash of cultures, a clash between volunteer driven bottom up […]

One of the papers that I found particularly interesting at the Media in Transition conference, was The You in YouTube: The Emergence of Collective Identity Formation Through Online Video Sharing. It explorer the role of the community in forming the identity of Ysabella Brave.
Ysabella has 22,745 subscribers, over four times the number that Obama […]

Depicting the American way of life
Photographs by Chris Jordan
These are some very remarkable images. See them on the artist’s web site.
There is an interview with the artist by Jorg Colberg in the March/April 2007 issue of Orion Magazine.
Jörg Colberg: Your work strikes me as political, since it addresses our culture of consumerism. I […]

Tom Friedman has a long essay in the April 15th issue of the NY Times Magazine:
The Power of Green
One day Iraq, our post-9/11 trauma and the divisiveness of the Bush years will all be behind us — and America will need, and want, to get its groove back. We will need to find a way […]

When I was a kid, I loved the Godzilla movies. At one point, someone suggested to me that perhaps Godzilla was a metaphor for the United States, and particularly for the nuclear attacks during World War II, and it opened my eyes to a whole new way of thinking about media.
Now, years later, I’m […]

You will want to check this out. Perhaps watch the videos. But
“Be advised these are authentic videos shot in real American prisons and jails. They contain graphic scenes of violence, assaults, nudity and death. Please do not view these materials if you are a minor or easily shocked. We present these materials to […]

Dr. Farooq Hassan, Bar at Law,
Professor of International Law, Harvard University

The military run administration in Islamabad stuck back at the top Pakistani Judge of its apex court. Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry has been suspended by President Pervez Musharraf for “misuse of authority”. The president has asked the Supreme Judicial Council, which oversees the judiciary, to investigate the charges.

The military regime in Pakistan has seldom given any hope to the country’s well wishers abroad and within the country to return to barracks as mandated by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Zafar Ali Shah’s case by 2002. Now well beyond that time frame, its clear that this demolition of the judicial independence of the nation is to ensure that the judges will personally pay who dare to affirm their integrity in this year when the general is evidently hell bent upon staying in power for the third time, irrespective of what the Constitution or the electorate says.

The day that Anna Nicole Smith died, she was the top search item on Technorati. The second most popular search item was Amanda Marcotte. When I saw this, the juxtaposition struck me. Yet with a few days past now, I’m starting to see connections.
On a media education mailing list, people have been […]

PAKISTAN

Dr. Farooq Hassan
International Law Expert - Pakistan

The Women’s Protection Bill (WPB) was enacted on November 15, 2006, shortly after it was introduced before the National Assembly of Pakistan for general debate. Most surprisingly, no debate took place. The leading members of the ruling alliance, including the former president Leghari, even General Musharraf’s ministers, never showed up. The much threatened filibustering by the religious alliance of political parties — known as the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) — never materialized, as they just walked out. The bill barely crossed the necessary threshold barrier by obtaining the minimum number of majority votes.

Read the whole essay here.